¶ … Lost Boy Roerva

Catherine Roerva was David J. Pelzer's mother. Mother was likely too kind a word for this biological incubator for a human child to whom she referred to as "an It."

Roerva loved her Cub Scouts and demonstrated some nurturant tendencies toward her other children, but visited countless atrocities upon the body of her child named David.

She starved him, stabbed him, smashed him face-first into mirrors, forced him to eat the feces from his sibling's diapers, force fed him ammonia, and burned him on a gas stove.

An alcoholic sadist, Roerva was not impeded - for many years - in her attempts to torment the young boy. She improvised maniacal games for David, defying him to breach even one of the...

Her parents were divorced - outcasts in a religious community in Salt Lake City - and Catherine was often locked in a closet, denied food, and told repeatedly how despicable she was.
In spite of - or perhaps because of - her own experiences of horror as an unloved child, she visited the same evils upon her own son until he was 12 years old when he was taken from her.

Although the last encounter with her son was the final opportunity to make an effort at explanation and amends, she derided David with taunts that the only reason she didn't kill him was because she had no safe way to dispose of his body.

Learned response behavior was evident in…