Denny O'Neil quote

[Necrosis Boy]

Yeah! That’s why I was invited back to be a guest of honor at San Diego (Comic-Con this year) after only 3 years. Yeah. Anyway … comics were about 25 years old by that point and these guys — the original guys — were really groping. There was nothing for them to imitate except comic strips, which, as Will Eisner has demonstrated again and again, is a different animal than comic books! So I thought we’d just add to that original “Case of the Chemical Syndicate” (from Detective Comics #27) what the world had learned about comic books and I believed that, until I got the job of editing Batman and went back and did the homework. Everything that Neal and I did was implicit in Bill Finger’s (Detective Comics #33) Batman story, the flashback to where Bruce Wayne sees his parents killed. That was there and what we did was gloss and clarify and elaborate on that. origin-in-dc-33

However, the early comic book guys didn’t pay much attention to it. Eleven issues after the debut, they introduced Robin and at that point Batman became a father figure or at least the big brother you wished you had. Later writers added conflict between them. By 1945, Batman was carrying a platinum police badge. The stuff I read, he never showed it. You took his word for it. (Dan laughs) So that made him an establishment figure. So what we did was, on my part, a false memory. It was what I thought I should be remembering! I have to keep emphasizing, without what Bill Finger wrote, I would not have written what I wrote. It’s just that there were no such things as bibles or franchises back then. Those guys were really ad-libbing it.

http://13thdimension.com/batmans-hot-line-denny-oneil-on-moving-to-gotham/

Original Batman was not haunted by the death of his parents.