Casey Anthony IMs Reveal Woman Pushed to the Edge

Very interesting read...I haven't seen before.

While Florida investigators continue to sift through evidence in the case of a mother charged with the murder of her own daughter, New York’s premiere forensic psychologist says 22-year-old Casey Anthony’s motive may be as close as her own instant messages.
Drawing from more than 30 years experience in forensics and as an expert witness, Dr. Barbara Kirwin, Ph.D said dozens of pages of IM conversations between Anthony and then-boyfriend Tony Rusiano released by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department reveal the Orlando mother needed a little help.

“She was a young woman, not especially accomplished or hard working, who was narcissistic and self absorbed,” Kirwin said, referring to her IMs as “a verbal Rorscach test.”

Often kept at home because of a lack of mobility and lack of care for daughter Caylee, 2, Anthony was “a woman encumbered by a child and in love.”

“She said it a lot in her IMs, almost stoically, that her child came first and her job a close second,” Kirwin said, adding, “but she felt pressure in wanting to have a life and being a young mother.”

However, the bigger picture, Kirwin said, is the socio-political issue of the amount of support and resources available to women, calling it as much an issue for women and feminists as it is crime.

As a “Murdering Madame Bovary,” Anthony struggled to raise her child without the support of Caylee’s father, a common parallel between mothers who have killed their own children, Kirwin said. Similar to Amanda Hamm, of Illinois, and Susan Smith, of South Carolina, both who killed their own children, Anthony had a romantic attachment with a man and “the kid was in the way.”

“Whether that was the motive, if she did indeed kill her child, I don’t know,” Kirwin said.

There is no evidence Anthony suffers from mental illness, Kirwin said, but she may suffer from borderline personality disorder based on evidence of her extreme romantic attachment to Rusciano.

Kirwin, who is currently working on “Beyond Medea, The Untold Truth of Mothers Who Kill Their Children,” teaches forensic science at Adelphi University, in Long Island, NY, and is the author of “The Mad, the Bad and the Innocent, The Criminal Mind on Trial.”

In the United States, 189 woman currently await execution on death row for murdering their own children.

http://im.about.com/od/resources/a/caseyhelp.htm