Rhoda Penmark

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Rhoda Penmark is a fictional character in William March's 1954 novel The Bad Seed and the stage play adapted from it by Maxwell Anderson. She was portrayed by Patty McCormack in the 1956 film adaptation and by Carrie Wells in the 1985 made for TV remake.

Rhoda Penmark is an eight-year-old girl who, in the course of the novel, murders a classmate and a janitor who suspected her. It is also revealed that she murdered an elderly neighbor the year before. Despite coming from a loving home with doting parents, she is a sociopath, devoid of conscience or empathy and willing to do anything, including committing murder, to get what she wants. She is also a precociously talented con artist, using a sweet, innocent facade to mask her true self from adults so they will give in to her. This act doesn't work on other children, who sense who and what she truly is and avoid her.

March's explanation for Rhoda's evil is that it is genetic; her maternal grandmother was a serial killer, who also began killing at a young age (Rhoda's mother, Christine, was adopted at a very young age and so doesn't remember her real parents.) It was at about the time in which the novel was written that scientists began to explore the genetic roots of behavior.

Rhoda drowns a classmate, Claude Daigle, who won a penmanship award she felt she deserved. At first, no one suspects her, but Christine begins to notice that she seems detached and uncaring about the other child's death. Christine, who has always vaguely sensed something abnormal about her child, is troubled, but dismisses any possibility that Rhoda was involved in the boy's death.

The only adults who see through Rhoda are Leroy, the somewhat addled school janitor, and, to a much lesser extent, her teacher Miss Fern, who observes that she is a poor loser and rather selfish. Leroy spies on Rhoda and repeatedly threatens to "tell on her." Rhoda mocks him, saying no one would believe anything he said about her, but begins to make plans to get rid of him. It is around him that Rhoda reveals herself for what she is: remorseless, vindictive, and cruel.

After talking with her adopted father and a neighbor who dabbles in psychiatric theories about personality, Christine recovers a long-repressed memory of her real mother, a serial poisoner who died in the electric chair. This intensifies her fears about Rhoda's behavior, and, when Claude's mother drunkenly accuses Rhoda of stealing the penmanship award, she searches Rhoda's room — and finds the award. She confronts Rhoda, who initially denies having done anything wrong, but confesses after Christine finds the bloodied shoes Rhoda had beaten the other child with before drowning him. Christine is horrified, but Rhoda doesn't seem to understand what the fuss is about; after all, she says, "it was Claude Daigle who drowned, not me."

While Christine grapples with what to do, Rhoda decides to silence Leroy by locking him in a furnace room and setting it on fire. When she learns what her daughter has done, Christine makes a gut-wrenching decision: she must kill Rhoda to keep her from killing again. She puts poison in her daughter's warm milk, hoping she will die without pain, and then puts a gun to her head and commits suicide.

In the novel's closing scene, it is revealed that Rhoda survived when a neighbor heard the shot and took her to the hospital. Nobody is the wiser as to what Rhoda has done, and she is free to kill again.

In the 1956 film adaptation, since the Hayes Code did not allow villains to get away with their crimes, Rhoda is struck and killed by lightning when she goes back to the scene of her crime to retrieve the medal. Christine, meanwhile, survives her suicide attempt and presumably lives happily ever after. The 1985 version used the original ending.

[edit] Trivia

• Rhoda Penmark was animated in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, Can't Buy me Love, when she moves next door and bullies Elmyra into giving her everything she wants, except Elmyra's cat, Furrball.