Femicide is the murder of a woman because of her gender. Matricide, or the killing of one’s own mother, is just one of an array of femicide crimes, which include “honor killings” by partners or family members, or murders of women out of jealousy.
Vendyl Jones, a former Baptist minister, was one of the real-life people upon whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based. Indiana Jones had the same surname as Vendyl, but Steven Spielberg consistently denied the connection. In time, Vendyl became a Noahide, believing that all non-Jews have to observe the seven laws of Noah, and after the Six Day War, he moved his family to Israel.
Before her father died in 2010, Sarah used to help him on archaeological digs. Sarah herself converted to Judaism and lived with her son in the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Levona, south of Ariel. After she sustained a leg injury in 2019, Sarah became more dependent upon him. He apparently abused her, but no complaint was lodged with the authorities.
On the morning of May 27, Joel, 37, smothered his 73-year-old mother and choked her to death, leaving no trace of the way she had been murdered. Declared mentally unstable, Joel was sent to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation.
Israel's matricide problem
The murder of Sarah Richardson is not the only matricide this year so far. Israel has become a violent society, and matricide, considered until recently a rare crime, has become a repetitive problem.
In a 2023 article in Legal Medicine on matricide and psychiatric evaluation, a group of Italian researchers described the phenomenon as “one of the most heinous crimes that an individual could commit since it violates the social principle of respecting and honoring one’s own mother. It is an uncommon crime with a range of 1-4% of all murders.” Unfortunately, in Israel, the crime is not so uncommon.
In 2021, there were only 16 cases defined as femicide that year after a large increase during the lockdown in 2020, but of these, four were murders of mothers by their sons. On November 25, 2021, I wrote an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post warning that “now we are faced with an alarming new problem. This year, one-third of all femicide cases in Israel were matricides, namely, murders of mothers by their own sons. Matricide is familiar to us from the story of Cleopatra, the queen of ancient Egypt, who was murdered by her own son, Ptolemy, but who could have imagined that such a thing could happen in Israel?”
Matricide contravenes the fifth and sixth of the Ten Commandments, which serve as the basis of Judaism: “Honor your father and your mother” and “Do not murder.”
In 2022, in 79% of the recorded cases of femicide, a woman was murdered by someone close to her, like a family member; four of these cases were matricides. This year, out of a total of 24 femicides counted so far in the first seven months of 2025, six, or one-quarter of all cases, were matricides.
The Israel Observatory on Femicide (www.israelfemicide.org), which monitors femicides from the beginning of the year until the end, is documenting an upturn in the number of women who were murdered in Israel in 2025 because of their gender. Of the 24 women murdered to date in 2025, 15 were Jewish women, and nine were from the Israeli Arab sector, including Druze and Bedouin.
In contradistinction to other media reports, despite continuing or increasing violence in the Arab sector, this year there has been a relative decrease in the percentage of Israeli Arab women who are being murdered, although they are still overrepresented in comparison to their numbers in the total population.
There is also a concomitant increase in the number of Jewish women who are being murdered by spouses, family members, or sons. Five of the six matricides in 2025 were Jewish victims, including Sarah Richardson.
How can we account for these matricides? The obvious explanation is that the perpetrator, who is invariably a son, is a psychiatric case, like Joel Richardson. He usually has schizophrenic and psychotic disorders. The murder is particularly brutal and often caused by blunt trauma, sharp force injuries, or asphyxia, rarely, if ever, by gunshot. In many cases, “overkilling,” namely, particularly extreme violence far in excess of what is necessary to accomplish the murder, is also reported.
So, what happens to the perpetrators, like Joel Richardson? The immediate assumption is that he is considered not guilty for reasons of insanity or that he has diminished criminal responsibility and therefore cannot stand trial. In Richardson’s case, he was sent to a mental health facility for evaluation after the suspected murder of his mother. Evidently, surveillance was low, since the murder of his mother had not yet been proven.
And what happened? Within a couple of weeks, he had strangled another patient in the toilets of a closed ward at the psychiatric hospital, again without leaving signs of violence. He is now standing trial for murder after confessing to both killings.
In matricides, the perpetrator is obviously much younger and stronger than the victim. Often, there is a lack of a father figure. In the Richardson case, the father is hovering somewhere in the background, but clearly, the legacy of Vendyl Jones, the charismatic grandfather, was dominant. Social isolation is a key issue, including the need of parents to support mentally ill adult sons.
There appear to be many such cases in Israel, particularly among Jews, in 2025. Matricide, or the murder of one’s mother, can reflect both upon strange familial dynamics and on the failure of society to monitor mentally ill patients and to protect its citizens.
The writer is a senior researcher at the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founder and director of the Israel Observatory on Femicide.