Further Classifications
As well as the ten typologies described in the last chapter, it’s possible to group children who kill by age or by the particular function (such as babysitting) that they were carrying out when the murder occurred. This author also found that some children are encouraged to kill by a family member, usually a violent parent who wants to involve others in his deviancy.
Most of the killers profiled in this book were between ten and seventeen, but occasionally even younger children commit murder. Owing to their own small stature, their victims are invariably even younger – or very old and weak.
In 1968 in Islington a four-year-old boy and a three-year-old boy together battered a seven-month-old baby to death, while in 1978 two Wolverhampton boys aged four and six beat a pensioner who subsequently died. And in 1986 a five-year-old girl took a three week infant from its pram and swung it against the wall, killing it.
That same year, in Miami, a five-year-old boy who had been abused by his parents pushed a three-year-old boy from a balcony. The three-year-old died.
Another three-and-a-half-year-old from a violent American home was cited in a 1962 article in Social Research by Dr Douglas Sargent. The child, Ernest, had been abused by his father. The little boy went on to batter his older brother over the head with a bottle, hit another child with a baseball bat and break a puppy’s leg. Yet when removed from his violent home he was trouble-free.
When Robert Thompson and Jon Venables killed two-year-old James Bulger in 1992, the world press gave the impression that this was an unprecedented event brought on by violent videos and declining moral standards. But as this book has shown, there are a score or more such killings – usually by abused children – in Britain every year.
Over a hundred years ago two little boys committed a murder that has many parallels with the Thompson / Venables case. In 1861, eight-year-old friends James Bradley and Peter Henry Barratt took a two-year-old boy, George, from the wasteground where he was playing. A woman saw him crying and being led by the hand by the bigger of the eight-year-olds. She later saw that they’d stripped him naked – and one of her sons saw the boy break a twig from a tree and aim it at the naked child. The three then disappeared from sight.
Later, the toddler’s body was found in a stream. He’d been hit with a stick on the buttocks, legs and head and subsequently drowned. The children were too upset to explain their motivation, but as so much violence is learned behaviour it’s likely that one or both of them had been beaten in a similar way. They were found guilty of manslaughter and given five years in a reformatory.
The younger the child is, the less likely that they have full understanding of the murderous event. This was the case with two four-year-old boys who were living in a homeless shelter. They bit and battered a baby belonging to one of the other residents and the infant died.
When background details are known in such cases it’s usually said that the child who killed had a ‘very sad life’ or ‘was in care.’ One four-year-old American boy who killed a baby had earlier had his arm broken by his abusive father. Paul Mones, who specialises in defending abused children who kill their parents, has noted that many of these children are abused from birth, being thrown into their cribs from the time they are a few days old. Later x-rays will show the numerous fractures that the child has endured over the years.
Sometimes unnurtured children are left in charge of much younger children and they simply can’t cope. One such case unfolded in 1992 when an eleven-year-old British girl couldn’t get the eighteen-month-old baby she was babysitting to stop crying, a situation that even balanced adults can find exhausting. She hit him against the bars of his cot but this presumably just increased his screams so she placed a hand over his mouth, whereupon he suffocated. She was found guilty of manslaughter.
More is known about an American case, that of eleven-year-old Arva Betts. Arva had been abused all of her life and was suicidal. She was frequently left in sole charge of her half-brother and half-sister, aged two years and fifteen months respectively. Unable to cope, she strangled her half-brother to death and attempted to strangle her half-sister, causing brain damage. In October 1989 she was sentenced to twelve years probation, the judge commenting that she was the third victim in this tragic case.
Occasionally the child who babysits is mentally ill. This was apparently the case with sixteen-year-old Robert Ward, who babysat for his neighbours on Valentine’s Day 1986. He shot both pre-school children dead then fired a shot at his father when the man went to investigate. He was found to be mentally ill and was sent to an Oklahoma mental hospital under the proviso that if his sanity returns he’ll be transferred to an adult prison.
That said, there is sometimes method in a killer’s madness. Gavin de Becker – in his illuminating book about surviving violence The Gift Of Fear – tells of one boy, Michael Perry, who was shoved against a radiator by his mother and was badly burnt in the process. He was also cruelly controlled by his father who got a neighbour to tell him exactly what young Michael did. The father explained his all-knowningness by telling the child ‘when I go to work I leave my eyes at home.’ By adulthood Michael had become insane and stalked various innocent celebrities. But there was an ironic twist to his eventual killing spree – for he shot out the radiator that had burnt him and also shot out his mother and father’s all-seeing eyes.
As the profiles and case studies in this book have shown, children who kill have usually suffered from neglect and/or repeated emotional or physical violence. Sometimes that violence will have been meted out months or even years before the child kills.
In the hours after being physically and verbally humiliated, the traumatised child comforts himself by having a violent revenge fantasy. He or she may also act out the violence by torturing a small animal, the creature of choice most often being a neighbourhood cat. However any live creature can be used to pass the suffering on – Jesse Pomeroy strangled his mother’s canaries, Bruce Lee wrung the necks of numerous pigeons, Rod Ferrell was accused of butchering puppies and Kip Kinkel allegedly bombed farm animals including a cow.
But occasionally we can see a linear approach where the child is beaten and goes on immediately to beat another who may be a stranger. This happened in 1971 when a fourteen-year-old girl was savagely hit by her mother, one of many instances. Within hours the bruised teenager had lured a five-year-old girl to a quiet spot where she beat her to death with a stick and a stone. She was indicted for manslaughter.
Similarly, in a 1996 case in Kansas City, a victim was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The killer was sixteen-year-old Candy McDonald who was desperately unhappy at home and had run away numerous times. When she was fifteen she met a man who was six years older and within months had moved in with him. She started planning their wedding but her parents wouldn’t give their permission and soon the man had started dating someone else.
Candy confronted his new girlfriend and her friend Nikki Majeed in a restaurant car park. There was a fight during which Candy stabbed Nikki once in the neck, severing her jugular. The fourteen-year-old, who had nothing to do with the ménage a trois, bled to death.
Candy fled the scene with her boyfriend then went back looking for the knife. Only then did she realise how seriously she’d cut the other girl. Charged with second degree murder, she was given a ten year sentence and may be paroled in 2004.
Sometimes a woman in an unhappy marriage will tell her child repeatedly that she wishes his father was dead. (Mark Chapman, who, as an adult went on to murder John Lennon, came from this kind of background.) These children are forced to grow up incredibly quickly and take the role of protector. Chapman’s mother made the child pray with her and his hatred for John Lennon partly stemmed from the musician’s lyric ‘Imagine there’s no Heaven.’ He remained a religious zealot after shooting dead the talented singer.
In one such 1988 case, a three-year-old Detroit boy shot his father whilst the man was beating his mother. Witnesses and gunpowder residue linked him to the event. In similar circumstances, eleven-year-old Mary Bailey murdered her abusive stepfather because she knew that when he woke up he’d beat her mother again.
These women, due to their own passive-aggressive natures, make their children pay an appalling price. Even if the child is legally absolved from the crime, they often have recurring nightmares. And those who have been brought up to believe that there is an afterlife also fear being visited by the dead parent’s ghost.
Our society likes to believe that parents are good and children are bad – so many inadequate parents of children who kill are absolved by the media and often by the court system. But in some cases there is no doubt about where the blame should lie, cases where the parent encourages the child to take a life.
One such American case occurred in the seventies, when sadistic father Joe Kallinger began to take one of his children, thirteen-year-old Michael, out with him on robbery and raping sprees. These escalated into murder when Joe, who had been raised by religious adoptive parents, heard God telling him to kill everyone on earth. In July 1974, he persuaded Michael to help him kidnap, gag, rectally torture and cut off the penis of a ten-year-old boy. The emasculated victim died from suffocating on the gag.
Later that same month, Michael and his father lured one of Michael’s older brothers, Joseph junior, to a demolition site where they drowned him for the insurance money. Michael had been so brutalised by his father that he showed no emotion after these deaths. On another occasion Joe demanded that thirteen-year-old Michael rape a woman but it seems that Michael, though willing, was physically unable to complete the act. But the teenager clearly enjoyed taunting such victims, doing to them what his cruel father had done to him.
Six months later, Joe and Michael forced their way into a party and tied up all of the adults, Michael guarding some whilst Joe stripped and terrorised others. Then Joe stabbed a young nurse to death while the teenage Michael watched. The boy also warned his father when he sighted danger, ensuring that they could flee the scene. A few days later both were caught.
The judge noted how much Michael and his siblings had suffered at their brutal father’s hands and said that the boy was salvageable. Michael agreed to plead guilty to the robbery charges and the murder charges were dropped. He was fostered prior to the trial and then sent to prison until the age of twenty-one. He is now free and his violent father is dead, having choked on his own vomit in prison in 1996 at age fifty-nine.
Another American case in which a father persuaded his son to kill occurred in 1990 in Houston, Texas. Sixteen-year-old Delton Dowthitt had visited a bowling alley and bumped into a girl he knew, Gracie Purnhagen and her nine-year-old sister Tiffany. The girls were presumably pleased when he offered them a lift home in his father’s borrowed pickup truck. They had no idea that Delton had only recently been reunited with his father – and that the older man had a history of assaulting girls.
The teenagers Gracie and Delton got into the back of the truck to chat and nine-year-old Tiffany rode up front with Dennis Dowthitt. Before long the forty-eight-year-old man had stopped the vehicle and assaulted the child. The little girl ran from the truck and Dennis turned his attention to Gracie and tried to rape her. But he’d been impotent for years and settled for stripping her and assaulting her anally with a beer bottle instead. He also cut her throat and knifed her in the chest but she wasn’t yet dead.
Dennis now ordered his sixteen-year-old son to kill Tiffany. Delton did so, grabbing a rope, throwing it around the nine-year-old’s neck and pulling it tight. The injured Gracie screamed as she saw her sibling being strangled, at which point the older man returned to her and cut her throat again – this time fatally – then the two killers fled.
We may never know the exact motivation that sixteen-year-old Delton had for killing the nine-year-old. With his hard expression and his tattoos he looked streetwise but he told various people that he committed the murder because he was frightened of his dad. The powerfully built Dennis had been overheard threatening his son – and the older man had a history of sodomising young female relatives with bottles and with broomsticks, so it’s a safe bet that Delton hadn’t had a loving childhood.
When first brought into custody, young Delton seemed willing to take his share of the blame – then he heard that his father was trying to link him to both murders. At this stage Delton told the full story and testified against his father and evidence backed up much of his story. But the teenager presumably tried to reinvent history when telling the court that he’d kissed Tiffany on the head and told her that he was sorry before he strangled her, making himself into a cross between Charles Manson and The Waltons. He was sentenced to forty-five years in prison and his father got the death penalty.
A final category that appears to have been ignored in books about young murderers is children who are innocent. Sometimes they are manipulated by a parent who persuades them to take the blame for the violent death of the other parent. Or they are framed by an antagonistic community or bullied into a false confession by the police.
There may well have been such a miscarriage of justice in West Memphis, America, where three eight-year-old boys were tortured, mutilated and murdered in May 1993. The bodies had been left in the creek so that forensic evidence was washed away by the water and yielded few clues. And some of the injuries could have been caused by so-called legitimate punishment as one of the eight-year-olds had been beaten with a belt by his stepfather an hour or so before he disappeared.
Rumours of these being satanic killings went around the religious small town and caused the police to bring in three teenagers who had an interest in wicca. Eighteen-year-old Damien Echols suffered from depression, seventeen-year-old Jessie Missakelley junior had a low IQ and was susceptible to suggestion and Jason Baldwin, sixteen, spent time with them and seems to have been charged because of – as his defence team put it – guilt by association. A few fibres found on the bodies that were ‘similar to’ clothing that the teenagers wore was the only forensic evidence. Despite this, the three teenagers were found guilty and, in Damien’s case, sentenced to death.
Since then, there has been an ongoing campaign including internet appeals and televised documentaries to ‘Free The West Memphis Three.’ A full account of the case can be found in The Blood Of Innocents, a book written by the investigative team which covered the story from the start.
As previously mentioned, one of the West Memphis Three had a low IQ. The same is true in the following case, that of Stephen Downing, and of many other instances where youths are wrongly convicted by over zealous or corrupt police.
Stephen was a gentle boy who lived with his parents and his sister in Bakewell, Derbyshire. He enjoyed hand-rearing orphaned baby hedgehogs in his garden shed. He was classified as educationally subnormal and could barely read and write.
By September 1973 seventeen-year-old Stephen was employed by the council to work as a groundsman in Bakewell Cemetery. After lunch one day he returned to work and found a half naked and badly battered woman lying face down on the cemetery footpath. He also noticed the weapon, a pick axe handle, lying nearby. Stephen did what any caring passerby would have done – he turned her over and felt for a pulse.
At this stage the victim sat up so the teenager ran to get help. Meanwhile the bloodied woman got to her feet and fell heavily against a gravestone. The police and ambulance arrived forty minutes later and she was rushed to hospital.
The local police asked Stephen to help with their enquiries. The seventeen-year-old – who had the reading age of eleven–was happy to do so. He had no idea that they might suspect him.
But for the next nine hours they questioned him relentlessly. They shook him awake each time he started to doze off and they refused to let him see his parents who turned up at the station several times. He was only given one small sandwich to eat so was very hungry and cold. He also had a spinal problem at the time of the interview so was in pain from sitting on a hard wooden chair for nine hours. The police didn’t offer him a solicitor but suggested that if he signed a confession he might get to go home. Eventually the hungry and bewildered boy signed a confession that was not in his own words and, indeed, contained many words that he didn’t comprehend. He thought at this stage that the woman would regain consciousness and tell the police that he wasn’t to blame. Unfortunately for him, Wendy Sewell died of her massive head injuries without regaining consciousness.
But the youth should have had nothing to fear. After all, his fingerprints weren’t on the murder weapon. The blood on his clothes wasn’t consistent with the blood spatter there would have been if he’d attacked her. And a bloody palm print belonging to another person, plus hair and fibres that didn’t come from Stephen, had been found. The police had got the boy to say in his statement that he’d sexually assaulted her – but despite her partial undress it was later confirmed that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. They’d also got Stephen to say that he’d hit her twice whereas the later autopsy showed that she’d been bludgeoned seven or eight times.
Wendy had allegedly told a friend that she was going to meet one of her lovers in the cemetery that day. An attractive woman, she’d had several boyfriends who lived locally and it was rumoured that at least one of them held high office and had links with the police.
Meanwhile, Stephen went on trial for her murder. Incredibly, the jury weren’t told about his mental handicap or learning difficulties. After a three day trial they took just one hour to find him guilty and he was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, with the judge recommending a minimum sentence of seventeen years. Poor Stephen almost collapsed at the verdict and his family was also in shock.
Prison isn’t easy for most prisoners – but it was an especial hell for this gentle boy from a loving family. In prison he was assaulted by other prisoners, had boiling water thrown on him and was beaten up numerous times. He was also ill-served by the prison authorities on the basis that he was what they call IDOM – in denial of murder. As such, he was wasn’t sent on training courses or given the better prison jobs. Instead he was penalised again and again for asserting his innocence.
His parents and sister also continued to assert his innocence, going to MPs and newspapers and constantly reiterating that the evidence simply didn’t point to Stephen but they often met with hostility or indifference. They watched the years slip by without Stephen being granted parole as he ‘refused to show remorse.’ But how could he show remorse for a terrible murder that he didn’t commit? He even told his parents that he’d rather die in prison than pretend that he’d killed Wendy in order to go free. Because of his continued claim to innocence, his seventeen year tariff passed and the authorities didn’t let him out.
When their son had been in prison for twenty years the Downings were joined in their campaign by Don Hale, a journalist who had become editor of the local paper, the Matlock Mercury. He became convinced that this was a miscarriage of justice and obtained a court order which forced the police to release relevant documents.
For a while after this, Don Hale’s life became almost as frightening as Stephen’s. He had his phone tapped and was followed by the security services. He received death threats and survived three attempts on his life with vehicles been driven straight at him as he walked home at night. It was very clear that someone didn’t want the case reopened and was willing to use violence to keep the caring editor quiet. He also faced hostility from the police who threatened legal action claiming obstruction and defamation – but they backed down when challenged via the courts.
As the authorities became increasingly aware of Don’s campaign, Stephen was transferred to the freezing ‘troublemakers’ wing in Dartmoor Prison – his only troublemaking being to continually protest his innocence.
For the next seven years Don fought to clear Stephen’s name. During these years, various witnesses contacted him and explained why they’d been too afraid to come forward. Others had been given the impression that Stephen was a pervert so thought that it didn’t matter if he was doing time for a murder he didn’t commit. But it turned out that these were rumours put about by people with a vested interest, determined to blacken the innocent teenager’s name.
Stephen Downing had by now become the longest serving prisoner to be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure – and he was being detained on no evidence. But after seven years Don’s crusading paid off and in November 2000 the case was referred back to the court of appeal and by January 2002 his conviction had been quashed.
Don Hale – and Stephen’s parents – had mainly battled alone to end this travesty but the press were out in force when Stephen, now forty-four, was freed. By then he’d spent twenty-seven years in prison. ‘I could have done with the cavalry a few years ago, but nobody wanted to know’ Don Hale said ruefully.
But it should have been obvious from the start that Stephen didn’t fit the profile of a violent killer. He was from a loving home and he cared for animals. He had no history of violence – and we know that children who kill have usually displayed previous episodes of more minor violence towards animals, other children or towards themselves.
This author interviewed Don Hale in April 2002 immediately after publication of his inspiring book on the Stephen Downing case, Town Without Pity. Asked why he’d fought so determinedly for a teenager he didn’t originally know, he said that ‘there were so many anomalies in the original evidence that it soon became obvious that Stephen was innocent.’
The facts do indeed prove that the gentle teenager was innocent – so why were so many people happy to believe in his guilt? ‘He was working class, from the wrong side of the tracks,’ Don says sadly, ‘If something went wrong in the town, the locals would say they were sure it was someone from the council estate. Stephen and his parents lived on that council estate.’
Don also got the impression that Stephen’s comparative solitude was enough to make him appear different – and some people are very threatened by anyone who isn’t like they are. ‘He was a bit of a loner in that he wasn’t involved in lots of clubs and societies. He liked to do mechanical work rather than go to discos with the local lads.’
Did the boy’s age at the time of his imprisonment make Don more sympathetic to his situation? ‘To a certain extent – but it was more about his low IQ. He was considered backward yet the police treated him very badly. He was a very naive boy, the ideal patsy really.’ Don’s own son was seventeen at the time he began researching the case so this made him additionally aware of how terrible it must be for an innocent teenager to lose everything he’d ever known.
So could this happen to another child or has the introduction of PACE in 1986 (a criminal law which ensures that prisoners have access to legal advice) put paid to such high pressure interrogations? ‘Well, it wouldn’t happen in the same way now,’ Don admits, ‘Interviews are taped, monitored, and the prisoner is accompanied but I’m sure there are still cases where the wrong suspects are rounded up and put in the frame for someone else. It’s especially difficult for teenagers who are loners to provide an alibi.’
In Town Without Pity Don describes how he was alternately mocked and ignored by prison wardens on his first visit to Stephen. ‘The wardens don’t like journalists getting involved in a case. Maybe they think that it will raise the prisoner’s hopes of an early release unfairly. But Stephen had already done ten years over his originally suggested time.’
Thankfully Don’s message – that innocent children sometimes go to jail – will reach an even wider audience in due course for he’s been co-writing a screenplay about this gross miscarriage of justice. He’s aware that the situation could have been even more dire for Stephen than it actually was. ‘If the boy had been convicted a few years earlier when we still had the death penalty he could have been hung.’ He would like to see a different judicial set-up that doesn’t send vulnerable seventeen-year-old boys to adult prisons.
After twenty-seven years in such prisons, Stephen is at last free. When he first left jail he found work as a trainee chef, but at the time this author talked to Don Hale he had just changed employment to become a security guard. Meanwhile, Derbyshire Police have announced that they intend to reopen the investigation into Wendy Sewell’s murder, so perhaps at last her killer will be tracked down.