Children who commit murders or other violent acts that rise to the level of barbarity or atrocity were not entirely unknown before the last two generations of the “new evil.” They were just rare. Jess Pomeroy, for example, born in 1860—the birth year of America's first prominent serial killer, Herman Mudgett—tortured other children and also cats when he was only six years old. Later, at age eleven, he would experience sexual arousal while beating the penises or testicles of young boys. At twelve, he tried to castrate a boy, for which he was sent to a reformatory. Released after a year and a half for “good behavior,” he promptly castrated and killed a boy of four. For this, he was given the death penalty at sixteen, but that was changed to life in prison, where, fifty-six years later, he died in 1932.1 In Argentina in 1896, Cayetano Godino—also known, because of his ears that stuck out, as El Petiso Orejudo (“Flappy-Eared Fatso”)—was born to alcoholic and abusive parents. In childhood, he killed cats and birds, brutally assaulted other children when he was seven, and later killed four children. At sixteen, he lured a boy to a country house, where he hammered him to death before driving a nail through his skull. Arrested and imprisoned for the murder, he spent the next thirty-two years in prison, until, in 1944, he was murdered by other inmates for killing their pet cats.²

In the infamous murder of Chicago's fourteen-year-old Robert Franks, the two killers were just at the cusp of adulthood: Nathan Leopold was nineteen, Richard Loeb eighteen. Highly intelligent young men from wealthy families, they aspired to commit the “perfect crime” as a kind of proof of their superiority. They identified with Nietzsche's notion of the Übermensch who was “above” society's rules and norms. Loeb was the psychopath, who talked his friend into joining him in the scheme. They were quickly apprehended and sentenced to death. The famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow argued eloquently against the death penalty; the two were sent to life in prison. Loeb met death in prison, where he was killed by other inmates. Leopold was rehabilitated and released in 1958, whereupon he became a social worker in Puerto Rico, dying in 1971.3

In the foregoing cases, Justice and the Law were in equilibrium. Given the culture of the times, the sentences were appropriate for the crimes committed. When we move into the new period we have been discussing, this equilibrium is not always so evident. When Michael Hernandez slit the throat of a classmate, Jaime Gough, killing him, in Florida's Dade County in 2004, both boys were fourteen. Hernandez had at first been sentenced to life in prison, but he was given a chance at release under a new Florida law granting “judicial review” after twenty-five years in prison. This followed the US Supreme Court ruling in 2012, banning life terms without the possibility of parole for minors (i.e., those under age eighteen) convicted of murder. The idea was that a life sentence for a minor constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.” Law came close to trumping Justice by not allowing for the possibility that there are murder cases of a cruel and unusual nature that cry out for condign—that is, righteous and equitable—punishment. The judge at the ensuing trial noted that Hernandez's was, indeed, an “uncommon case,” given that the boy was preoccupied with becoming a serial killer and had stabbed Jaime forty times and cut his throat. The judge further noted that, during a jail call with a girlfriend, Hernandez had played a song by the death metal band Cannibal Corpse with grisly lyrics about someone dying from a torn trachea. Remarking, “Basic human decency should make it unbearable for anyone who took an innocent life by this means to enthusiastically listen to such lyrics,” he decided to reinstate the life sentence.⁴

In 2008, a week before his sixteenth birthday, Boy Scout Nicholas Browning of Cockeysville, Maryland, waited until the rest of his family were asleep and—taking one of his father's guns—shot to death his parents and two younger brothers. He then went out and spent two days with friends before returning home to stage the “discovery” of the family's deaths. He had tossed the gun into the bushes near his house, but the weapon was quickly found and readily shown to be the murder instrument used by Browning. His father had been a scoutmaster and a church leader. Browning was aspiring to become an Eagle Scout, the highest rank for a Boy Scout, supposedly living by the oath to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Perhaps we need to add merciful and nonviolent. He had begun to talk to his schoolmates about killing his parents, but no one took him seriously. He disliked his father and called his mother a dumb, ditzy blonde. He also mentioned how rich his father was and how he wanted some of that money. Perhaps this is why he killed even his brothers, since he would now be the sole legatee of his father's will. If he got away with the murder. Again, however, because of his youth, he may be exempt from serving the four life terms of his original sentence; he could be eligible for parole in twenty-three years “for good behavior.”5

Contributing to the greater incidence lately of murder by children are factors mentioned elsewhere in the book: the high frequency of post-1960s divorce; many boys growing up without fathers; the violent video games to which many young persons—boys, especially—are, without exaggeration, addicted; and, in America more than elsewhere, the easy access to guns, even to semiautomatic rifles. There is also the internet. The internet played a role in the courtship of fourteen-year-old Nonie Drummond and Spencer Lee King, seventeen, who carried on hundreds of internet and telephone conversations over a nine-month period back in 2001 and 2002. Drummond boasted to her friends how she and King would be married one day on her grandfather's farm in upstate New York. In talking with King, Drummond had upped her age a bit to seventeen. Finally, King arranged for them to meet at a house Drummond shared with her grandfather in Fabius, a rural village near Syracuse. King became angry that she had lied to him about her age. Telling her he had a “surprise” for her, he guided her to a stool. He then stabbed her repeatedly in the throat with a kitchen knife he had brought along. After killing her, he set the house on fire. After King's arrest and conviction, the judge lowered the sentence from thirty years to twenty-four when King confessed to the murder—with more years off for “good behavior.”⁶ Some might find it hard to grasp fully the dreadfulness of the crime. How might another Romeo have dealt with his telephonic Juliet who was untruthful about her age? He might have said, “Nonie, it really bothers me you didn't tell me you were only fourteen. I think we have to go our separate ways.” Or, “Sweetie, it bothers me a little you weren't up front about your age…but you're so lovely, I'm going to wait till you're eighteen, and then we'll marry.” But slash her throat and burn the house down? A murder of this level of brutality paints a different picture from the kind of impulsive adolescent who commits one spur-of-the-moment act of violence for whom the law—and the community—can afford greater leniency, as in the case of Billy Sinclair. Sinclair was a man who, when he was twenty, fired a pistol over his shoulder as he fled an armed robbery and inadvertently killed the store owner.7 Not at all psychopathic, he became the editor of the prison newspaper, was eventually released, got married, and now works in a law firm dedicated to helping other prisoners.

Quite a different person is Craig Price, known as the Warwick Slasher. Even as a child in Rhode Island, Price showed criminal versatility, the psychopathic trait described by Dr. Robert Hare that, as we discussed earlier, is characterized by indulging in a wide variety of criminal activities. His repertoire included robbery, breaking and entering, drug use, stalking, assault, and burglary. At thirteen, he invaded a neighbor's house and murdered twenty-eight-year-old Rebecca Spencer, stabbing her fifty-eight times. Then, at fifteen in 1989, he broke into another house and killed a thirty-nine-year-old mother and her two daughters, crushing the head of one girl with a kitchen stool. Interrogated by the police, he failed a polygraph, then confessed, with no sign of remorse—another psychopathic trait. According to Rhode Island law, he could only be remanded to a Youth Correction Center till he turned twenty-one. He was then released, which enraged the community and the surviving members of the victims’ families. While at the center, he refused treatment. The outrage led to passage of a bill allowing the attorney general to commit a mentally ill offender to a forensic hospital, if still deemed a threat to the public. While there, he threatened the life of an employee and was then sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In jail, he got into a fight with another inmate and a guard, for which an extra year was added to his sentence. Several more years were added when, on several occasions, he attacked prison guards in the years between 1998 and 2009. He got one thing right when he claimed, “I'm going to make history.”⁸ In 2017, now in his midforties, Price tried to stab to death another inmate. His prison sentence was, mirabile dictu, about to expire—but he was then given another two and a half years for the attack on the cellmate. Because Rhode Island, like many states, does not take into consideration the personality configuration of young defendants as a factor relevant to decisions about release or continued retention, Price's confession while still fifteen, after the murder of the mother and her daughters, meant that the state could not hold him past age twenty-one. Even now, he could be released within the next few years, in 2022—unless he does what he has always done: periodically attack prison guards or other inmates.9 Justice has had a rough time triumphing over Law and has mostly the Rhode Island citizenry to thank.¹⁰ The citizens may not have known the details of Hare's psychopathy checklist, but they know incurable evil when they see it.

Some of the school shooters we described in an earlier chapter were, of course, minors who committed mass murder. As I am writing these lines, there has been another large-scale school shooting: this time in Santa Fe, Texas, not far from Houston. The alleged shooter was Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a seventeen-year-old high school student who, on May 18, 2018, reportedly took his father's Remington 870 shotgun and .38-caliber revolver and shot to death eight students and two teachers. One of the victims was sixteen-year-old Shana Fisher, who had recently rejected his advances, making it clear she would not date him. Fisher was “afraid the creep would kill her” and had told her mother that he was going to do so. He is suspected of making good on his promise, allegedly killing Shana plus nine others and wounding another thirteen. Described as a “weird loner”—as many school shooters have been regarded by schoolmates—a reported quick confession by Pagourtzis obviated the death penalty. Yet, even in Texas, a seventeen-year-old would not likely be given a death sentence or even a life without parole sentence. Perhaps in an imitation of what the Columbine shooters had done, explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, were left around and in the school, supposedly to create further destruction—but they failed to explode, just as those in the Columbine massacre did not detonate.¹¹

The Pagourtzis case raises the same serious questions about the law, as did the Craig Price and other similar cases involving perpetrators under eighteen. The laws were fashioned for the most part in “kinder and gentler” times when children and adolescents rarely committed the kinds of crimes we would call heinous. Unfortunately, in the past two generations, we have seen a disturbing number of such crimes by young boys. (It will rarely be girls.) There are, to be sure, many children and adolescents who, out of impulsivity or desperation, commit a crime but who do not have callous-unemotional or psychopathic traits. Capable of redemption, these are the ones deserving of briefer sentences and the possibility, if upon release, to lead exemplary lives for some number of years, of their records being sealed.

One of the men I interviewed for the Discovery Channel's program Most Evil struck me as deserving of a benevolent treatment of this sort. The devout Mormon Ron Luff, who fell under the spell of the charismatic, psychopathic cult leader Jeff Lundgren we discussed earlier in this book, walked the five members of the Avery family—who had begun to see Lundgren for whom he was—to the barn, where the leader then shot the family to death, one by one. A good person, but brainwashed, as he soon realized, he was sentenced to life in prison. Now in his late fifties, Luff told one of his prison guards, “Shedding that [brainwashed] mindset has afforded me a great sense of freedom, even in the captivity of incarceration…. My hope is that we can grow from this type of tragedy, and learn not only what cultivates such bizarre and self-destructive behavior, but ultimately how best to defuse it.”12 How different from Kirby Anthony. Born out of his mother's “one-night stand” with an unknown man, Kirby was adopted into the Anthony family in Alaska. Besides his potential genetic disadvantages, he was allegedly physically abused by his tyrannical adoptive father. Cruel to cats and dogs, and regularly using cocaine, at fifteen, Kirby committed burglary; at sixteen, he set off a bomb in his school, for which he spent a month in juvenile detention; at seventeen, he committed breaking and entering, for which he was remanded to a reformatory for four months; at age nineteen, he committed armed robbery; and at twenty-two, he raped a twelve-year-old girl and left her for dead. His girlfriend left him because of his abusiveness. He later choked another girlfriend and threatened to kill her if she left him. This soured the relationship, so she fled to the other side of the country. At twenty-three, he murdered an Inuit man, for which he was not arrested; set fire to a shop from which he was fired; and broke into his aunt's house, strangling her and then raping and strangling two female cousins. When he was finally apprehended, examiners noted that he had the one-thousand-yard stare of the cold psychopath. Convicted and sentenced to life in prison, Kirby Anthony continually denied having committed the familicide, according to Burl Barer, author of a book about the case.13 Barer also alluded to Hare's observation that, for a normally socialized person, it is next to impossible to picture the world as the psychopath sees it. Family members, juries, and the people who hear about the psychopath's behavior and crimes all tend to have trouble realizing that the person is all that different from how they see and deal with the world. Juries and sometimes judges get flummoxed and cannot imagine how a human being could have perpetrated such crimes—and sometimes give acquittals, or else, as in the case of Phillip Garrido's first rape conviction, a reduced sentence with “time off for good behavior.” Barer underlined another important fact: having a vicious and abusive father does not, in and of itself, destine one to end up as a psychopath. Genetic underpinnings are too often overlooked. Anthony's stepbrother, the biological son of their father, was beaten as severely as was Anthony but remained a law-abiding citizen. Even a group of brothers by the same father can show remarkable differences. The sadistic murderer Gary Gilmore, whose life Norman Mailer chronicled in his Executioner's Song,¹⁴ was brutalized by his violent father, but so were the other three brothers, including the author Mikal Gilmore, who became a highly responsible and productive man and a commentator on the family tragedy. It seems safe to assume that Gary Gilmore, who began committing robberies and assaults when he was fourteen, had been dealt a poorer genetic hand.

Returning to the custody issue—and the “new” evil—I can find no parallel in the pre-1960s era of a crime so evil that it sits in one's brain, inescapably, like a hot coal, leaving one with no words to match its horror. It happened in mid-May of 2018. When she was seventeen, Virginia-born Amanda Simpson was in frequent internet correspondence with twenty-seven-year-old Justin Painter, finally meeting him after a few years in Dallas, Texas. They were married and had three children. After Painter proved angry, violent, and overly controlling, Simpson decided to divorce him. He had made a suicide threat with a gun at the time, and it wound up in her possession. Later, he demanded she return the firearm, threatening that, if she refused, he would claim she “stole” it. She reluctantly gave it back. Even so, the court, paying no attention to his mental instability, gave him full custody of the children,¹⁵ although both parents would spend time with them.¹⁶

Not long after, Simpson makes another acquaintance through the same internet source—World of Warcraft—named Seth Richardson, whom she had also known in her teens, just as she knew Painter. Simpson and Richardson fall in love in this internet-inspired way, and Richardson travels to Texas to be with her. They spend their first night together. Painter, having gotten wind of the new alliance, comes to the house the next morning and, with the now returned gun, shoots Richardson to death. The bullet also wounds Simpson. He also fatally shoots his three children, who are visiting their mother that day, before taking his own life—but not before telling Simpson that he has killed them all, making sure that she remains alive so that she will suffer all of the rest of her life. Their children were four, six, and eight years old at the time of their deaths.17 What words are there for this new evil? Diabolic cruelty? Malice aforethought? Sadism with extended mental torture? They all fall short. I have recently been called “the Einstein of Evil”—as though I know all about this sort of thing—and take it in stride.¹⁸ Yet, I cannot get the Amanda Painter story out of my mind.