Bartley Dobben
Bartley James Dobben is an American man who murdered his two infant sons by placing them in a furnace. He was motivated by his religious delusions and belief that he was saving them from Judgement Day.
Biography edit
Bartley was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1985 and was committed to a mental hospital for two months after an incident in which he drove his family down a series of twisting roads at 80 miles per hour because he believed God wanted him to. He was released from the institution and heavily medicated, but his mental state did not improve; he accused his wife Susan of having an affair with a member of the band Kiss, claimed that laser beams were being pointed into his house to harm his sons Bartley Joel and Peter and believed that his car's number plate was a phone number which he would regularly try and call. He stopped medicating altogether in 1987 after joining a fundamentalist sect known as the Emmanuel Fellowship and began obsessively reading the Bible and anointing his children's rooms with olive oil.
On Thanksgiving Day 1987, Bartley invited Susan, from whom he had become estranged, and their sons to have dinner with him. At around 4:00 pm, he drove with his family to the Cannon-Muskegon foundry in Muskegon, Michigan, where he worked as a ladle operator, ostensibly to collect his Bible from his locker. Upon arriving, he invited Bartley Joel, 2, and Peter, 15 months, inside to see where he worked. Once inside, he placed both children inside the furnace's transfer ladle and briefly played with them like they were in a sand pit before getting out, closing the lid and lighting the burners. The furnace heated up to 1, 300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Celsius) and both children suffocated. Bartley walked up to one of the security guards and told him that he had placed his children in the furnace.
Bartley was charged with murder. He was deemed incompetent to stand trial by psychiatrist Dr. Harley Stock, but was medicated and declared legally sane. He invoked the insanity defence at trial, his lawyers arguing that he was insane at the time and his schizophrenia had caused him to believe that the end of the world was coming and his children would go to Hell if he had not killed them. His co-worker Arthur Szot had spoken with him earlier that day and stated that Bartley had told him Judgement Day was imminent and that "God will kill Jezebel's children" unless he saved them. He had also talked about children being burned in the furnace, although no connection had been made. Other witnesses reported that the Emmanuel Fellowship had inspired Bartley that the souls of his children needed to be cleansed in fire. Bartley was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life without parole. The Michigan Court of Appeal overturned his conviction, but this decision was set aside by the Michigan Supreme Court and Bartley remains incarcerated.
References edit
- Bartley James Dobben, Chilling Crimes
- A Year Later, Woman Has Forgiven Husband In Deaths Of Sons, Associated Press
- Look back: Thanksgiving foundry-ladle murders of two young boys, Michigan Live