Youthful Sex Killers
The teenage sex killer – like his adult contemporaries – has made a lethal connection between sexual pleasure and fatal levels of violence. He’s often highly sadistic and may enjoy picquerism (cutting and stabbing), inflicting most of the wounds on the pubis or breasts or, in the case of a homosexual killer, on the penis and the scrotum. Lust and rage have become so interlinked in his damaged psyche that he seeks to destroy the parts of the body which arouse him most.
As most of the following case studies show, the teenage lust murderer usually fits into the category of the disorganised killer. That is, the crime is often committed on impulse so he doesn’t bring a weapon with him, instead making use of bindings and implements available at the scene.
Such disorganised killers tend to leave the body at the crime scene. In some cases, this is the teenage lust killers bedroom or workplace, making discovery virtually inevitable. In contrast, an organised killer often takes the body to another place and disposes of it carefully.
Disorganised offenders often turn to religion after the crime, something that the organised offender (who has a higher IQ and is able to maintain relationships) avoids.
The following double murder, which took place in 1944, shows that teenage sex killings are not a new phenomena. The case is also interesting because the fourteen-year-old killer was executed within weeks of being found guilty and was the youngest American electrocuted by the state in the twentieth century.
George Stinney lived in an agricultural region of South Carolina with his family. The fourteen-year-old could neither read nor write and appears to have been of limited intelligence. He was slender and just over five foot tall. George was black but his victims would both be white. (Black males who rape and kill white women are the most likely to be executed by the state.)
On 24th March 1944 he was walking along the railroad track when he saw Betty Binnicker, age eleven, and her eight-year-old friend, Mary Thames, looking for wild flowers. The girls knew George so had no reason to fear him. They were presumably unperturbed when he followed them into the woods.
But George wanted to have sex with eleven-year-old Betty – and determined he’d have to get Mary out of the way. Picking up a heavy metal railroad spike, he battered the younger girl over the head, fracturing her skull in several places. She collapsed on the ground, bleeding profusely. She had only minutes left to live.
George now turned his lust-filled rage on Betty as she turned to flee, battering the railroad spike into her head at least seven times. Two of the blows actually produced holes in her skull, whilst others produced similar fractures to those endured by her younger friend. Betty also collapsed, seriously injured. The baby-faced killer remained unperturbed. It’s unknown if at this stage George sexually assaulted either girl. Sexually-sadistic killers often spontaneously ejaculate during the violence – and after this their lust may be temporarily spent.
George now threw the bodies into a ditch that had filled up with water and went on his way. Residents would later say that his demeanour was entirely normal, so he may have been too dim-witted to understand the enormity of his actions or else may have been a remorseless psychopath. Though the crime has been well documented, this author could find little about the youth’s childhood except that he lived with his parents and sister and that the latter continued to protest his innocence. In a photograph taken in jail he looks considerably younger than his fourteen years.
Early the next day the girls’ submerged bodies were found and autopsied. George had been seen in the area and within an hour had confessed to the crimes. He initially said that the girls had attacked him and that he’d battered them in self-defence but soon changed his story to admit that there was a sexual motive to the assaults.
Less than three months after being found guilty, a weeping George entered the Death Chamber clutching his Bible. There the double killer – now aged fourteen years and five months – died in the electric chair.
Twenty years earlier in Britain, a white teenager called Harold Jones had also killed two white girls – but this case had a very different result.
Harold Jones gained notoriety as a teenage sex killer because he escaped justice only to immediately kill again. He lived in Wales with his father, who was an unemployed miner, and with his mother and younger sister. The family were poor so he had to share his bed with an adult male lodger. Harold himself had a job, working in a grocery store.
With his blonde hair, robust complexion and strong body he looked healthy and his visible hobbies of reading and harmonica-playing were laudable. He was also a hard worker – but dark passions were brewing beneath his pleasant facade. Whenever he went egg-collecting with his young friends, he’d pull the wings off the baby birds.
He may have been suffering from ongoing sexual frustration as presumably it was difficult to masturbate at night when sharing a bed with an adult lodger. But none of the crime writers of the day appear to have considered this.
On 5th February 1921 Harold was working in the shop when an eight-year-old girl called Freda came in to buy grain. The fourteen-year-old said that they kept it in the shed so Freda followed him there – but once he’d closed the door, he pounced.
Little Freda screamed and he grabbed her shawl and stuffed it into her mouth. He tied her arms and legs with string, rendering her helpless. Then he pushed her juvenile underclothes aside.
Only now did Harold realise the difference between fantasy and reality – for raping an eight-year-old child is physically very difficult. He attempted to penetrate her again and again but failed. At some stage he may have digitally entered her as grain from the shed floor was found in her vagina and in her clothes.
Possibly overcome by frustration, he hit her on the head – but the blow didn’t kill her. Exhaustion and shock was the reason that the coroner would give for her untimely death.
That night Harold dumped the body a few yards from the shop then asked his friends to help him lock up the shed. He clearly wanted them to see that the building didn’t contain Freda’s body. He knew that the police would soon be asking questions as he was the last person to see her alive.
And indeed the police soon arrested him – but the nation thought that they were just using the teenager as a scapegoat because they couldn’t find the real murderer. The defence argued that Harold had left the shed door unlocked and that the killer had brought Freda there. In less than two hours the jury returned with a Not Guilty verdict and Harold was free to go home. It was a fateful ruling that would lead to another child’s death.
A fortnight later, Harold started chatting to one of his sister’s friends, an eleven-year-old girl called Florrie. He lured her into his house, knowing that his parents and their lodger were going to be out for several hours. Locking the door, he immediately struck her on the head with a metal boiler lid, knocking her out. Then he tore at her knickers and tried, in vain, to penetrate her. During these attempts he ejaculated on his own clothes.
But Harold’s blood lust wasn’t spent. He fetched a knife and carried the unconscious child to the sink. There he cut her throat and left her there for a quarter of an hour whilst the blood drained from her. When she was dead he wrapped an old shirt around her head to avoid any blood stains smearing the walls or ceiling. Then he tied a rope around her body, went up into the attic and pulled her corpse up after him.
Whilst Harold was washing the blood from his body, Florrie’s mother called to ask where she was. Harold chatted to her quite amicably, saying that she’d been at his house but had left.
Several witnesses had seen Harold talking to Florrie so the following morning the police arrived at the Jones’s house. The child’s corpse was found in the attic and Harold confessed that he’d given in to the urge to kill again.
It’s likely that Harold was a teenage psychopath. He lied easily in court when questioned about Freda’s death – and he was totally calm when talking to people within moments of both murders. Psychopaths don’t learn from experience, which would explain Harold killing an eleven-year-old within a fortnight of being found Not Guilty for the murder of an eight-year-old child.
Harold Jones falls into the disorganised category – his crimes were impulsive and opportunistic and he left the bodies in his workplace and in his home.
He spent more than twenty years in prison then was released to serve in the Second World War. Incredibly, thereafter he returned for a visit to his home town. Again, this is the act of a psychopath, indifferent to the hurt that his presence might cause the victim’s relatives. Locals were amazed to see him drinking in the local pub, a man without a care. He remained in the area for the rest of his life and ultimately died in hospital in his seventies.
Ironically, after Harold’s first murder he could have enjoyed consensual relations with girls. Several had written to him after his trial declaring that they loved him, just as women do with adult male serial killers today. But Harold became aroused through totally controlling a girl – so an active, willing partner simply didn’t have the same appeal.
Relatively little was known about psychopaths in Harold Jones day – so his smiling and unperturbed demeanour after eight-year-old Freda’s death was originally taken as proof of his innocence.
Nowadays we know that psychopaths simply don’t get nervous as they have very low levels of emotional arousal. They don’t learn from experience, which explains how Harold could commit a second sex killing within days of being released from jail after the first. And psychopaths don’t fear punishment, so Harold was equally blasé when the police found Florrie’s blood-drained corpse in his parent’s attic.
Harold Jones’ two sex murders were highly opportunistic. The girls came to him whilst he was alone – and trusted him enough to follow him – so they died. He had the superficial charm that is the hallmark of the psychopath but also had the homicidal psychopath’s obsession with control, need for sensation and lack of shame.
More usually, disturbed teenagers commit lust murders because they don’t believe that they can have a consensual relationship with a girl. They’ll desire a female from afar but know that they lack the social skills to impress her. As a result, more and more anger gets mixed up in the lust. They feel stupid and clumsy when they think of approaching a pretty young female – but they perversely blame her for making them feel bad.
George Stinney probably fits into this category as do several of the other lust murderers whose case studies appear later in this chapter. In other instances, there are multiple motives, with the anger and lust mixed up with the need for excitement and monetary greed.
Adult burglars often go on to commit rape or sex murders and occasionally this is also true of teenage burglars. These are crimes of both wrong-thinking and opportunity. Sometimes the burglar will find women’s lingerie and be aroused by it so he’ll wait until she gets home and will attack. In other instances, he’ll think that the house is empty – then find a woman ill in bed or in the shower. Already sexually excited through the act of entering her home, he moves on to a sexual assault. Kenny Houseknecht fits into this category.
Kenny Houseknecht is a good example of social ineptitude stemming from insufficient nurturing, mixed up with a robbery that went wrong. At age fourteen, Kenny was a six foot tall and heavily built American schoolboy living in New Jersey. He had a history of bedwetting and was very stressed. He turned to a neighbour for parenting but the man instead introduced him to burglary and drugs.
Kenny owed a friend fifty dollars and the friend kept asking for it. Kenny said he’d steal it from a neighbour’s house – the Andersons – as they left lots of money lying around.
On 19th April 1988 he sneaked into the house after the adult Andersons had left. He’d just grabbed a piggy bank when twelve-year-old Kim Anderson confronted him in the hallway. She’d probably just left the shower as she had a towel around her breasts.
He’d later say that she grabbed the knife, but that’s very unlikely. What’s known is that they struggled in the hall then she probably raced into the bedroom to phone for help and was pursued by him. They landed on the bed for there was blood all over the bedspread and on the carpet. He hit her with the telephone, causing heavy bruising but she remained conscious. By now he was on top of her.
As she tried to fight him off, he stabbed her in the hands nineteen times. He received cuts to his own hands during the struggle but continued to stab her, moving his knife to her chest so that the blade punctured her lungs.
By now Kim was unable to fight back, but the fourteen-year-old flipped her over onto her stomach and continued to stab her, reigning blows on her back. He also stabbed her in the head, and the tip of the knife snapped off and remained embedded in her skull.
At some stage during or after the assault, Kenny ejaculated, for a pair of women’s panties with his semen on them were found in Kim’s garden. It’s not unusual for such sex killers to take away a trophy and he may have dropped it in his rush to flee the house.
Kenny then went to school and had the nurse bandage the cuts on his hands. Several people noticed that he was acting jumpy and an acquaintance told the police that Kenny had planned to rob the Andersons’ house that day.
Meanwhile, Kenny went home and wrote a naive letter to Kim’s family, suggesting the killer was someone else who would try to pin it on Kenny. He also drew a naked woman, a large vagina and a couple having anal sex.
Police searched his home and found the incriminatory letter in his bedroom. They duly arrested him. As he was only fourteen, the police asked one of his relatives to sit in on the interview. At this stage he was still technically innocent – yet the first thing the relative did was slap his face.
Social workers at the trial testified to his unnurtured childhood which included abuse and abandonment but psychiatrists said he was sane at the time of the killing. In July 1991 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Sometimes it’s impossible to know if the teenage sex offender is solely attracted to children (that is, a paedophile) or if he only vents his lust on a child because he believes that an adult woman will spurn him. One British killer whose motivation is indeterminate is Tony Craven. He was a very immature seventeen-year-old who only looked thirteen and was mercilessly teased by his more worldly workmates about his virginity.
That said, Tony fits the pattern of a young paedophile. He spurned other young adults in order to spend all of his time with children. And he immersed himself in their games and in their favourite pastime of riding their bikes. Local parents approved of the well mannered and cleancut youth though it’s unclear if he formally babysat for any of their children – 48% of paedophiles find their victims through babysitting work.
By August 1991 Tony Craven was determined to lose his virginity. He lured a seven-year-old girl called Angela Flaherty into the woods near their Huddersfield homes where he persuaded her to take off some of her clothes. When she hesitated he took the rest of her garments off and stared at her immature body. He then raped her and told her not to tell.
But the badly injured little girl couldn’t stop crying and he panicked and semi-strangled her then beat her to death with a rock, causing a brain haemorrhage. Thereafter he tried to ‘help’ the police solve the fatal crime. He was eventually arrested and tried to commit suicide three times before being sentenced to life imprisonment by Leeds Crown Court. He will become eligible for parole in 2009.
Because most teenage sex offenders – and adult sex offenders – who are caught are male, there’s an erroneous belief that women don’t commit sex crimes. In truth, they do but their victims are less likely to report them. Even if they do report them, they are much less likely to be believed.
Johnny Garrett (profiled in chapter thirteen) wasn’t believed when he said that his mother had initiated sex with him – and we can’t know for sure that she did, given that Johnny had increasingly lost touch with reality. But we do know that he’d been forced to have sex with his grandfather and that his grandmother – his mother’s mother – encouraged this. Clearly the older woman had no incest taboos to overcome.
In the book Female Sexual Abuse: The Ultimate Taboo twelve men told of being sexually abused throughout their childhood by women. (The other cases featured are those where girls were sexually abused by women.) The offenders were mothers, stepmothers and aunts – but therapists have also heard of boys being abused by female teachers, babysitters and nuns. The phenomena is more commonplace than lay people imagine – after a television debate about women who abuse, the TV station received over a thousand phone calls in a single day.
Of 127 people who talked to a counsellor about being abused by a woman, 42% had been abused by their mothers. The abuse had often begun before the child was five years old. The mothers were often abuse victims themselves and some were mentally ill.
Johnny Garrett was abused with his grandmother’s aid in the sixties and seventies – but this crime still isn’t believed by many today. Only three percent of convicted sex offenders are female – but some field workers estimate that the true figure may be closer to ten percent. When children grow up and admit they’d been molested by a female relative they are often told by therapists that they must be confused, that the abuse has been committed by a man.
There is also confusion about what these women do to their victims given that they don’t have a penis. In truth, the abuse is varied. Female sex offenders have made their victims perform oral sex on them or have had full intercourse with them. Other offenders abuse more covertly, perhaps rocking themselves against the child’s body until reaching orgasm.
In the next case study, that of Kevin Peanut Hughes, the mother has frequent intercourse in front of her children and often demands that they join her in sexual acts.
Kevin’s life was blighted whilst he was still in the womb, for his schizophrenic mother drank heavily throughout the pregnancy. He came into the world in March 1962 to find a home that was desperately poor and a mother who was increasingly turning to drugs. Kevin, who was black, was never to know his father and all five of his siblings were fathered by different men.
The next few years were a living hell for the child and his brothers and sisters. His mother often left them alone without food or warmth. As a result, Kevin and his siblings often missed school. And when their mother was at home she invariably had an equally disturbed man in tow who would beat her and the children. Often the couple had sex with the six children watching and Kevin’s mother would try to involve them in these sexual acts.
Kevin’s IQ was only in the seventies which is borderline retarded. As a result, he was picked on by his mother’s many lovers. After all, there’s nothing a loser likes more than finding someone more inadequate than himself. He was frequently beaten by these drunken males and also had to watch them raping his mum. At least one of them also sexually assaulted the helpless boy.
By the time Kevin reached his teens, the link between sex and extreme violence had again and again been made clear to him. One of his mother’s lovers even made the point verbally, telling young Kevin that women should always be forced.
In 1976, Kevin, now fourteen, raped an eleven-year-old girl. He threatened her with a knife and was clearly prepared to use it. She identified him and he was put on three years probation. It was too little too late. Perhaps he decided at this stage that he would silence any future victims – or perhaps his own rage was just spiralling. By now his mother had made numerous suicide attempts and Kevin had joined her by taking at least one failed overdose.
He began to believe that he was protected by magical powers. This may have been the earliest signs of schizophrenia as schizophrenics often think that they are protected by a god or that they have an especial affinity with wild beasts such as lions. Obviously this is a fallacy and when they break into the lion enclosure at the zoo they are seriously mauled.
Kevin’s odd fantasies – which would definitely have included sexual fantasies – continued. In March 1979, aged almost seventeen, he lured a nine-year-old girl called Rochelle Graham to an abandoned house. He attempted to rape her but failed so turned her over and sodomised her instead. Then he strangled her and stuffed a burning pillow into her vagina, the flames burning her sexual organs before spreading out to char much of her flesh. Adult rape-murderers such as John Duffy have carried out such post-mortem vaginal fires in order to destroy forensic evidence – but it’s unlikely that Kevin was bright enough to understand the importance of destroying DNA traces, so perhaps this was just another delusional action. He then burnt his nickname, Peanut, into the ceiling above her corpse.
Kevin continued to suffer at home – and to fantasise about making others suffer. By now he was becoming increasingly mentally ill and had terrible mood swings. Like the previously-profiled Johnny Garrett, who came from a very similar background, Kevin was increasingly out of touch with reality.
In January 1980 he grabbed a twelve-year-old girl from behind as she walked down the street and forced her into a vacant house. There he made her strip and forced her to fellate him. His rage still unassuaged, he proceeded to batter her and stamp on her face. Then he strangled her and left her for dead. But the child revived and was able to identify Kevin from his previous police photograph. He was arrested and soon confessed. Moreover, police found the name Peanut burned into the ceiling above his bed.
The prison noted his severe mental illness before the trial and had him admitted to a psychiatric unit. One psychiatrist said that he wasn’t fit to stand trial but two others said that he was, providing he remained on anti-psychotic medication. This was duly provided and at the trial the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine made him so spaced that he sat and wrote nursery rhymes. Incredibly, the jury weren’t told how appalling his childhood had been. (It isn’t an excuse, but it is an explanation.)
Kevin was found guilty and formally sentenced to death on 27th October 1983. For the next few years he worked his way through the appeals process. In 1989 the judgement was upheld and in October 1995 a warrant for his execution was finally filed. The following month, the Philadelphia County Common Pleas Court granted a stay of execution. After that there was a moratorium on the death penalty in Pennsylvania – but on 11th April 2000 Governor Tom Ridge signed a warrant for Kevin Hughes execution by lethal injection, a move that was condemned by Amnesty International. At the time of writing, he remains on Death Row, a forty-year-old man who killed when he was a teenage boy.
Boys who are as multiply-damaged as Kevin Hughes possibly can’t be rehabilitated – the connection they’ve made between extreme violence and sex is foremost in their sexual identities. The earlier the authorities can intervene and help the abused child who abuses, the greater the likelihood of a return to normal life.
If a child’s sexual assaults on other children aren’t taken seriously, he is more likely to reoffend, sometimes with tragic results. Speaking on the programme Manhunt: The Catching Of A Child Killer which looked at the paedophile murders of Robert Black, sexual offences expert Ray Wyre said that teenage sex crimes are often misclassified by the authorities. (Robert Black is one of the case studies in the chapter Children Who Kill Again As Adults.)
One of the most unusual sex murders committed by a child is told in Greggory Morris’s The Kids Next Door, a book about children who kill their parents. It profiles a young man called Garry who was frequently beaten by older bullies at school for being artistic and different. The teenager started to steal and stay out late and his mother would shout at him and encourage his father to do the same.
Garry retreated more and more into a fantasy world fuelled by sniffing large quantities of glue. He also started to masturbate outside the home of a girl he fancied. (Men who grow up to be rapists, child molesters or sex killers are often Peeping Toms from a very early age.) He felt unsure of himself around women but he was desperate to have sex.
Six weeks after his father’s death, Garry had yet another argument with his mother about his glue addiction. Deciding to kill her, he battered her over the head with a metal bar. The assault fractured her skull but she was still breathing so he raced to another room for a knife and slit her throat then had intercourse with the still-warm corpse. He’d later explain that ‘I had Mother’s dead body there. There was nothing left to do but make use of it.’ So, at eighteen years of age, he entered his mother’s corpse and lost his virginity.
A psychiatrist later said it was likely that the boy was a psychopath but that he wasn’t insane. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for this sexual killing.
It’s entirely normal for children to become interested in sex as they mature and most children will play doctor and nurses games as a way of finding out about their own and others’ bodies. But children who are sexually abused will be much more extreme in their search for a sexual outlet, and more likely to use force.
Psychologist Patrick Carnes has written that ‘masturbation is an essential part of being a sexual person.’ He found that many sex addicts come from proscriptive families who often see masturbation as a sin. Ironically, people from such disapproving families are often inappropriately sexually active when they grow up. Carnes tells the story of a Lutheran minister who picked up men in the park for casual sex, despite the fact that he found these encounters humiliating. He was badly beaten up, but continued cruising – and only sought help after having sex with one of his young parishioners who he feared might tell.
Another man, who went on to molest his children’s babysitters, had been sent to confession as a child where his penis was fondled by a paedophile priest. The priest said that Gene wasn’t supposed to touch himself as masturbation was a sin.
Often such abused children carry similar abuses out on their younger brothers and sisters. Serial killer Rose West was sexually abused by her father and went on, in turn, to masturbate one of her younger brothers. One of Robert Thompson’s brothers was investigated for sexual assaults on a younger child. Mary Bell carved letters, post mortem, on one of her little victims – and it’s very likely that she was copying her mother who, as a sado-masochistic prostitute, might have been asked to carry out scarification (cutting for erotic purposes) on the flesh of her male clients.
When normal development takes place, sexual exploration is healthy and simply gives rise to pleasure. But with abused children, masturbation also becomes a form of desperately-needed self-comfort. As a result, this masturbation will be frenziedly carried out as a replacement for parental love and nurturing. As such, it becomes something pathological rather than something good. As so much is wrong with the child’s life, the urge to masturbate can become all encompassing in a futile attempt to put things right. These children can become addicted to sex by the time they are adults, and are unable to cut down on self-pleasuring even when they’ve made their genitals bleed.
Unfortunately most reportage of child sex offenders doesn’t include details of what they’ve endured, only of their crimes. For example, in November 2001, an eleven-year-old boy was tried at Cardiff Crown Court for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl. He was found guilty and placed on the sex offenders register for two and a half years (but found not guilty of unlawful sexual intercourse) with the judge commenting that the boy knew he’d done wrong. It would have been helpful if his background had also been reported so that readers could understand what made a child offend so seriously at such a young age. Similarly, a programme about the crimes of Robert Black – whilst offering first class information about his crimes and their effect on the victim’s parents – said only of his own tragic life that he’d had a troubled history.
Sometimes the person who has been frequently abused gives up on people altogether and turns to animals for sexual experimentation. One woman who’d had a terrible childhood wrote a fan letter to serial killer John Wayne Gacy in which she admitted that she liked to ‘jerk off’ her dog. And a documentary about bestiality included a man who had been so strictly raised by his Christian Fundamentalist parents that he found women terrifying and preferred to have sex with a horse. That said, this man felt romantic love for his horse and would have strongly objected to their ‘relationship’ being labelled as animal abuse.
In fairness, it should also be noted that brutalised children don’t always remain cruel towards animals. Often they are animal lovers who, after removal from their abusive backgrounds, grow to love animals again.
Aware of this, violence expert Gavin de Becker launched and continues to fund a scheme called Patient’s Pets which gives criminals of all ages in secure hospitals access to small animals. He’s seen for himself how some of these violent men from violent homes have broken their hearts over the death of a guinea pig. He writes that ‘many of these men will be locked up for life without a visitor and a mouse or bird might be all they have.’
An article by Peter J Lewis published in the Insider magazine backs this up. It told of how staff at a maximum security centre in Ohio allowed the inmates on one ward to keep pets and ‘within a year suicide attempts were down to zero, and prescribed medication down by a half.’ The pets in prison scheme was so successful during its various American trials that it has now been adopted by South Africa, Australia and Spain.
Sadly, Britain has opted out of the scheme and inmates at Garth Prison in Lancashire have been told that they can no longer breed budgies. As the inmates were giving the surplus baby budgies to senior citizens, everyone has lost out.
The thinking behind this seems to be that we have to be tough on criminals – but some of these adult and young offenders have known nothing but toughness all their lives. Caring for a pet has been shown to reduce prisoner violence. It also reduces the recidivism rate.
Many young offenders have been verbally and physically harangued by their parents then mocked as underachievers by their teachers. The pet they’re given in prison may be their first experience of unconditional love.