Rhoda Penmark

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.

Character overview

Rhoda Penmark is an eight-year-old girl who, in the course of the novel, murders a classmate and a janitor who suspects her. It is also revealed that she murdered an elderly neighbor the year before. Despite coming from a loving home, she is a sociopath who is willing to kill 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 she truly is and avoid her.

March writes that Rhoda's evil 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.)

Character history

Rhoda drowns a classmate, Claude Daigle, who won a penmanship award she feels she deserved. At first, no one suspects her, but Christine notices that she seems detached from 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 janitor, and, to a 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 says no one would believe him, but begins to make plans to get rid of him.

Christine tries to relieve her fears by talking abstractly about the murder with her adopted father and Mrs. Breedlove, a neighbor who dabbles in psychiatric theories about personality. Her worries only get worse, however; during the conversation, she recovers a long-repressed memory of her real mother, "The incomparable Bessie Denker", a serial poisoner who died in the electric chair. This intensifies her fears about Rhoda's behavior, and Claude's mother drunkenly arrives at Christine's home stating that there is "something funny about this whole thing" and asks Christine to ask Rhoda about her last few moments with the boy. While Christine is locating Rhoda's necklace which Mrs. Breedlove is having engraved for the child, Christine finds the Penmanship Medal in Rhoda's treasure chest. She confronts Rhoda, who initially denies having done anything wrong, but confesses after Christine finds the bloodied shoes Rhoda had beaten Claude 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 silences 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 gives her a lethal dose of sleeping pills, hoping she will die without pain, and then commits suicide.

Rhoda survives when a neighbor hears the shot and takes her to the hospital. Nobody is the wiser as to what Rhoda has done, and she is free to kill again.

In other media

*Patty McCormack portrayed Rhoda 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 at the end 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.

*Rhoda Penmark was parodied in the animated series "Tiny Toon Adventures", in the episode "Can't Buy Me Love and Monkeys". She moves next door and bullies Elmyra into giving her everything she wants, except Elmyra's cat, Furrball.