Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  Every area of Luke’s life was going wrong. Mary Anne now worried so much about cash that she refused to allow him to leave scraps of food on his plate. Once he threw some leftovers in the bin and she pulled them out and made him eat them. Like many such parents, she seemed unable to put herself in her son’s place, to recognise that he needed love and respect. His life consisted of church with his mother and of being home alone or with her there, nagging at him. He had no friends and no fun and was old before his time.

  A photograph taken of him at age ten shows how unreasonably he was expected to dress. His hair is cut so short that it looks like he has the receding hairline of a fifty-year-old. He’s peering through the previously-described glasses and wearing a white jacket, shirt and tie. The fact that he’s several stones overweight adds to this impression of someone who is prematurely aged – and his tension is evident from the set of his mouth. It’s as if Mary Anne has subconsciously tried to turn him into the husband that she’d permanently lost. In the photograph he has his hand on her shoulder but she’s half turned away from him, her older son on her other side, smiling at something that the camera can’t see.

  Never good enough

  Mary Anne was very interested in Luke’s education but she showed it in an unhelpful way, going to the school if she thought that his grades weren’t good enough. If he got a B, she criticised him for not getting an A. With his IQ of 115, Luke was reasonably bright but was no genius.

  Parents who put academic pressure on their children often find that the child’s grades slip – and Luke was no exception. Learning, which could have been an escape from the physical bullying of his schoolmates, had become a chore.

  Mary Anne would nag Luke about his studies at night and would check his homework before taking him to school in the morning. She also nagged him about his diet, the state of his bedroom and his gardening chores. By now he was silently fighting back, saying that he’d cut the lawn then only cutting a little strip down the centre of the grass. Suburban gardening standards being high, the source of conflicts were endless, a creatively trimmed lawn starting the equivalent of World War Three. Neighbours were used to the shouting, but on at least one occasion they heard terrified screams coming from the house and informed the social services. But Mary Anne opened the door and insisted everything was fine so the authorities went away.

  In fairness, her own life was increasingly under stress. Her part time teaching salary was too small to support herself and her sons so she’d switched to a full-time job as a receptionist. This meant starting work early, so she had to take her sons to school even earlier. This was also difficult for Luke as it meant he was at school – a place he feared and hated – for well over an hour before his first class. To help pass the time, he would sit in the corridor reading a book and eating yet more snacks.

  Low years in high school

  By the time he went to Pearl High School, Luke was almost two stone overweight, desperately shy and very different. Many of the children loved and revered sports but he hated games. Other children found their place in the hierarchy by being cool, but with his round face, short hair and old-fashioned clothes Luke simply didn’t fit the bill. The other teens often tripped him up as he walked along the corridor before start of class – and if he sat down outside the classroom in order to become a smaller target, they’d step on him. They called him Fatso and Snotball and made every day a physical and mental hell.

  The hell would start when his mother took him right up to the school doors and insisted he kiss her on the cheek. The cooler kids would line up to watch and roar with laughter. The misery continued when he went into an extended daydream (something that abused children do to shut out the misery of their lives) and was picked on by the teachers for not paying attention. He tried ignoring them, tried answering back and at one stage even got into a physical fight with one of the name callers. But it made no difference and the cruelty went on. Luke tried to find solace in food but the bullies stamped on his snacks until they were inedible.

  Luke tried playing truant from school but his mum found out and yelled at him then grounded him. Not that the grounding made much difference as Luke had nowhere special to go. Desperate for a peer group – even a long dead one – he started to read the work of existential philosophers, identifying with the works of Nietzsche and Dostoievsky. Doubtless he identified with Dostoievsky’s Underground Man.

  Luke was himself becoming an emotionally underground man. For years he’d tried to win his father’s and his mother’s love and had tried to act happy at school and at Sunday school. But now the years of cruelty were taking their toll. At age fourteen he wrote in his diary that he had been ‘always beaten, always hated.’ He also wrote that his brother sometimes punched him – and everyone could see that he was often pushed and stepped on in school.

  Three’s a crowd

  But when he was fifteen, life briefly improved when a new girl arrived at his school. Christine Menefree was pretty and kind and soon befriended him. She encouraged him to grow his hair longer so that he looked more modern. The teens both loved animals so they had something to talk about.

  Luke asked Christine out and she said yes. To his horror, his mother stipulated she had to drive them to the cinema. She was also waiting for them in her car when they left. On another occasion she insisted on coming with him to Christine’s house and mocked the fact that the young couple sat close to each other. She was still treating him like a child.

  Unfortunately, Luke was becoming as regimented as his mum and demanded that Christine be home at certain times to take his phone calls. Within a few weeks she’d had enough and finished with him.

  Suicidal

  All of Luke’s feelings of love now transmogrified into hatred – and into self-hatred. He told Christine’s friends that he was going to use his father’s old rifle to take his own life. They took the threat seriously and successfully talked him out of it but Luke’s hatred didn’t go away. Instead, he made up enraged posters for his room that said ‘America is dead’ and ‘Fucked Forever.’ It’s unclear what his mother made of these communications during her tidiness inspection sprees.

  A friend at last

  But again Luke’s spirits lifted slightly when he heard of a fantasy role-playing game at school that had openings for new players. Grant Boyette, the leader of the game, was from a deeply religious family so believed in Satan. He told friends he prayed to him for influence. Some of the older boys were also religious and prayed to God. They found Grant’s belief system unacceptable so they drifted away from the group – at which stage Luke was allowed to join in.

  The group was called The Kroth and it involved mock fights to the death between characters representing good and evil. It gave the teens a focus for their meetings and a chance to talk about their various embryonic philosophies. Grant, for some reason known only to himself, admired Hitler and always took the most malignant roles. But Luke found the youth, who was two years older than him, unusual and enigmatic and the two soon became close.

  Luke had been suffering from insomnia and intense loneliness since Christine finished with him so was very glad of Grant’s esoteric company. Grant would come to his house and the teenagers would listen to heavy metal music. They also read voraciously and, like most people who haven’t acquired any power, were particularly interested in a book of spells. He and Grant ostensibly put a spell on someone – and that person’s friend died in a road accident. This was enough to make the impressionable Luke believe that Grant had special powers.

  In this Luke was gullible – but he was bright enough to recognise that he was living in a world which values sporting achievement and fashion sense over creativity and intellect. If he’d bided his time until he became an adult, he could have left home and put his various insights to good use. He might simply have been a late developer – for many children who do badly at school go on to live successful and fulfilling lifes. But, like most children raised in hypercritical and over-protective hou
seholds, Luke didn’t have the confidence to believe that he could live on his own. His home, unpleasant as it was, was the only refuge from the school bullies that he’d ever known.

  A part time job

  By early 1997 the unpleasantness at home had reached a peak and his mother said that she could no longer give him any pocket money. Perhaps she was hoping that he’d no longer buy the music that he loved to play in his bedroom – but Luke proved unexpectedly resourceful and found himself a weekend job at a pizza place. He liked it so much that he thought he might work there full time after he left school and the management encouraged him as he was punctual, hardworking and unfailingly polite.

  The fantasy deepens

  But the weekend job simply wasn’t enough to put the troubled teenager’s world to rights. He still had to go to school five days a week to be spat upon and mocked and hit. He still had to deal with his mother criticising his weight, his grades, his room, his friends, his very being. His new friends noticed that she was always picking on him and they hated the atmosphere in the house. By now Mary Anne had started going out with male friends and couldn’t find time to go shopping so there was sometimes very little food in the house. Bereft of love, Luke found it difficult to sleep at nights. He also suffered from depression and crying jags. He had his friend Grant, of course, but Grant was only his friend as long as Luke didn’t question a word he said.

  In his real life Luke would admit that he felt like ‘a total reject’ but in his daytime fantasies he was an imposing master. In these fantasies he hit back at the people who had hurt him and he watched them cower and fall.

  Animal cruelty

  He decided that he had to harden himself against society so that it couldn’t hurt him any more. He and Grant began to talk of how it would feel to really harm another creature. Sickeningly, they turned their attentions to Sparkle, Luke’s Shih Tzu dog.

  Luke held the animal in place and Grant beat it with a stick, hurting its legs so much that it could barely walk afterwards. A neighbour witnessed the abuse but doesn’t appear to have contacted the authorities. Luke’s older brother later saw that the animal was limping and said that he should take it to the vet for treatment. Knowing that a professional would notice the animal’s bruises, Luke decided to kill the dog instead.

  He and Grant took the animal to the nearest forest and beat her then encased her in several bin bags. Then they put the semi conscious creature into a heavier bag and set the bag on fire. The dog was still alive so Luke added more fuel, at which stage the desperate creature managed to escape from the bag. Luke then broke the animal’s bones with a club and set it on fire yet again. He clubbed the little dog for a final time, taking an almost clinical interest in the fact that it had lost control of its bladder and its bowels. Then he threw the satchel with the dead or dying creature into the lake and both youths laughed.

  Back home, John junior asked where Sparkle was and Luke said that the dog must have run away. He clearly felt no remorse for his incredible cruelty, writing a week later that he and Grant had ‘been beating the bitch awhile… I’ll never forget the howl she made. It sounded almost human.’ It may be pertinent that he referred to the animal by gender rather than by breed.

  Sadly, Luke’s treatment of the dog isn’t unusual for an abused child. Abused children often start off by loving animals but, as the abuse continues, they show violence towards their pets and towards wild creatures. Sometimes this is simply a desire to pass the pain onto something else – but in other instances the target is a more specific one. For example, many female serial killers have admitted torturing their abusive parent’s favourite kitten or dog in childhood as a way of getting revenge.

  Indeed, it’s well documented that three of the warning signs that a child will become violent towards adults are cruelty to animals, fire-raising and bedwetting. Luke had now demonstrated the first two by setting his dog on fire. And this wasn’t his first attempt at fire-starting, for he told a friend that he loved to set fires.

  Mary Anne hardly noticed that the dog had gone. By now she was dating various men so was often preoccupied. Luke and his role-playing friends sat around at his house and talked about killing their various enemies. To their schoolmates – and to Luke’s mother – they were inadequates but in their heads they ruled the world. And rulers can do whatever they like.

  Matricide

  Alternatively over-protective and hypercritical, and raising her son without a father, Mary Anne fit the classic profile of the mother who is killed by her own male offspring. Clearly unaware of the danger she was facing, she kept telling Luke that he’d never amount to anything. He also got the impression that she blamed him for his father leaving and for the fact that her older son kept out of her way. For years Luke had tried to either please her or avoid her but now he’d run out of feelings and just didn’t care about seeking her approval any more.

  He may have told some of his role-playing group that he wanted his mother dead – but the game was about killing off people in fantasy land so it’s unclear how seriously they took him. But Luke was in deadly earnest and the fifty-year-old was about to die.

  On 1st October 1997 he set his alarm for 5am, got up and fetched a knife from the kitchen drawer. Noticing his baseball bat in a corner, he grabbed that too.

  Sixteen-year-old Luke had planned to kill his mother whilst she slept, but to his shock he found her dressed and preparing to go jogging. He chased her into her bedroom where she tried to hold the door shut – but he had years of rage on his side and forced his way in. He then slammed the bat against the furniture, terrorising her further. For perhaps the first time ever he had control of what he did.

  What followed would be an act of overkill, the actions of someone who really hates their victim. Luke brought the bat down on his mother’s face, breaking her jaw. Then he forced a pillow over her face with one hand and stabbed at her body seven times with his other arm. He also slashed at her a further eleven times so that blood spattered the bed, walls and carpet, one of the knife wounds entering her brain. Some of the slash wounds were to her hands as she tried to defend herself – and Luke was stabbing so hard that the knife sometimes slipped and cut his own palms. Apparently thinking rationally, he went into the kitchen after the killing and bandaged his own wounds.

  He then wrote a letter somewhat like a Last Will And Testament, leaving his few possessions to his role-playing friends. He did so because he knew that he was about to massacre his school colleagues and believed that he would be shot dead by the police. He wrote very honestly of what had happened to him saying ‘Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will, the ratings wouldn’t be high enough if you didn’t, and it wouldn’t make good gossip for all the old ladies.’ There were several pages to this effect. Ironically, the media would indeed go on to blame the matricide on the fact that Luke played fantasy games and others in the Bible Belt would suggest that ‘the Devil’ had taken over the abused boy’s mind.

  Luke now phoned his friend Grant and spoke in a three-way call to another friend, though we’ll probably never know exactly what all three said. He sounded depressed and slightly tearful – but obviously determined to continue in his murderous plans.

  School slaughterhouse

  Further bloodshed on his mind, Luke took his dead mother’s car and drove erratically to Pearl High School. He parked, entered the building and gave his notebooks to another pupil. Then he walked along the corridor holding his father’s rifle until he found the girl he had dated a few times, Christine. He shot her twice, one bullet entering her shoulder and the other fatally entering her neck. The girl she’d been talking to, Lydia Dew, tried to move and he shot her several times in the torso. Both girls died at the scene. Witnesses said that Luke’s face was blank and that he moved in a slow shuffle. It’s unclear why he shot Lydia because she and her sister had always been kind to him. (Christine had also been kind to him, but ever since she�
��d ended their relationship he’d borne an unfair grudge.)

  Luke continued to fire, hitting one girl in the shoulder and another girl in the stomach. He wounded a male student in the legs and another in the hip. He seemed to know what he was doing during this shooting spree as he apologised to one male he had no quarrel with and who he’d shot by mistake. Other children were also hit in the lower legs and in the upper body before Luke left the school and tried to make his escape. But the car got stuck in mud and he was tackled by an armed teacher and taken into custody. He said to the teacher ‘the world has wronged me’, his tone as deferential towards adults as it had always been.

  Arrest

  Rumours soon went around that Luke had killed the students because one of them – Christine – had finished with him. It was only when the police asked Luke how he’d cut his hands that he told them that he’d stabbed and ‘probably’ killed his mother. The police were surprised by this but they shouldn’t have been – spree killers often kill one or both parents before going on to shoot further victims at their school or place of work.

  Fifteen-year-old Kipland Kinkel, profiled later in this book, killed both his mother and father before massacring fellow school pupils. The exact same pattern can be seen with adult males. For example, Michael Ryan killed his mother before shooting fourteen pedestrians in what became known as the Hungerford Massacre.

  The police raced to Luke’s house and found his mother’s blood-spattered body lying on her bed with a pillow over her head. They noticed that the house was dust-covered and looked unlived in. The only family photograph on display was the one Luke hated in which he looks many years older than he actually was.