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

by Carol Anne Davis

  Having taken the toddler to an isolated location, it’s likely that Robert – who appears to have been sexually abused – examined him intimately then felt deeply ashamed of this act.

  Author David Jackson would later speculate that the boys, forced to grow up too quickly in a violent macho culture, were ‘splitting off their fearful, baby parts and projecting them onto baby James.’ It’s likely that both boys were jealous of their siblings; Jon’s brother and sister were given extra attention because of their developmental problems. And Robert saw Ann, now sober, caring for her new baby in a way that he couldn’t remember being cared for, given that she’d been a battered wife then a single mother with a drink problem during his formative years.

  Public hatred

  The public continued to hate the boys, rather than simply hating their murderous actions. Perhaps reacting to this, the judiciary kept increasing their sentence. The trial judge had originally given both boys an eight year sentence but the then Lord Chief Justice increased this to ten years. Later still, the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, increased this to fifteen years but this last increase was quashed by the English judiciary.

  A second chance

  For the next eight years, Jon and Robert remained in separate secure units for juvenile offenders. After a year in such a facility, Robert was given a few hours of freedom by being taken on a long supervised walk. As he moved into his teens the staff would sometimes take him into town to buy clothes when he’d outgrown his old ones. These outings are formally known as ‘mobility’ and are a way of preparing the child to re-enter the outside world.

  Jon was also taken on supervised outings, sometimes accompanied by his dad. There’s more information available about Robert’s post-trial years because the Despatches team, who produced an investigative report on the boys for Channel Four, were able to talk to a boy who had spent time in the same unit as Robert but they apparently couldn’t find a youth who’d spent time in the unit that housed Jon.

  Psychiatric help

  The boys both had regular sessions with psychiatrists to help them come to terms with what they’d done. Though Jon had admitted to the police that he’d killed James, it was another two years before he was able to admit his guilt again. Robert apparently remained in denial for much longer; it was five years before he took responsibility for his earlier actions and showed remorse. Even then, he was only able to talk about the crime when his psychiatrist promised not to write most of it down.

  The Lord Chief Justice said that the boys had made remarkable progress – and a visitor to the secure unit said that Robert was now an exceptional young man, very thoughtful and caring. He was also an academic success, having gained five GCSE’s and gone on to take A Levels. Jon had also made exceptional progress. His earlier writing had been semi-literate, but he’d now made great strides in English and Maths. A psychiatrist specialising in children said that ‘for the majority who are amenable to treatment, the outcome is good.’

  Emerging adults

  In December 1999, when the boys were seventeen, the European Court of Human Rights decreed that they’d been denied a fair trial, that – as eleven-year-olds – they shouldn’t have been tried in an adult court with a jury. This wasn’t altogether new thinking: at the time of the trial, many European newspapers had expressed shock that young boys were being tried in such a public way.

  The European Court now said that, due to their exceptional youth and distress, the children hadn’t been in a position to instruct their lawyers and mount a fair defence.

  There was also an awareness within the juvenile justice system that if the boys weren’t released at age eighteen they would have to be transferred to adult prisons. There they’d return to a life of intimidation and violence, the life they’d known before.

  Two disturbed little boys had apparently been rehabilitated to become caring teenagers. If they were imprisoned with hardened adults, they’d very likely become hardened again – and would be a danger to the public when eventually released.

  Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, said that ‘because of their behaviour they are entitled to a reduction in the tariff’ and that, subject to a parole board decision, they would be freed early in 2001. They were subsequently released.

  Update

  Sadly, large sectors of the British public remain antagonistic to these boys. The tabloid press has sometimes fuelled this, printing ‘new facts’ about the death that suggested the brutal crime was even more brutal. The Despatches team investigated these allegations and found them to be lies. An interviewee on the television programme The James Bulger Story explained that ‘in tabloid press terms there is no such thing as rehabilitation,’ and that one bad act made you bad forever in tabloid land.

  But occasionally there is a glimmer of understanding, an awareness that you can feel horror and disgust at little James’s death without having to forever hate the ten-year-olds that murdered him. A neighbour, speaking on the Despatches programme, remembered a Robert who was far from the monster the media portrayed him as. She said that she’d like to see him again and added simply ‘I’d talk to Robert, I wouldn’t tell him to go away, cause there’s a reason for everything, isn’t there?’

  And David Smith wrote in his introduction to The Sleep Of Reason that ‘Many people… think kids pretend they’ve been beaten to get off the hook. A good slap never did them any harm. Anyone who has seen or experienced the effects of this kind of abuse, or spent time observing and listening to young offenders, will not be so dismissive.’

  Gitta Sereny wrote honestly of the case saying that ‘Unhappiness in children is never innate, it is created by the adults they ‘belong to’: there are adults in all classes of society who are immature, confused, inadequate or sick, and, under given and unfortunate circumstances, their children will reflect, reproduce and often pay for the miseries of the adults they need and love.’

  8 Can’t Get it Out of My Head

  Roderick Justin Ferrell

  Rod was born on 28th March 1980 to seventeen-year-old Sondra and twenty-year-old Rick Ferrell in Kentucky. Within months the marriage had crumbled and they got divorced. Sondra found it difficult to fit into normal society as her Pentecostal fundamentalist parents hadn’t allowed her to go on dates, visit the cinema or attend dances when she was growing up. She admitted that her childhood had been an emotionally and mentally abusive hell so she wanted little Rod to see her as a friend rather than a cold controlling mum.

  But despite his mother’s good intentions, Rod’s first few years were very uncertain ones. Sondra had felt alienated from the other children at school and had left as soon as possible. Still just a teenager herself, she was ill-equipped to support her infant son. Sometimes she’d find work in a burger joint for a few weeks, leaving Rod with her parents. On other occasions she worked as a dancer or lived off benefits.

  The teenage mother began to smoke cannabis and drink alcohol in order to relax. She started dating. She continued to have difficulties with her parents and her father told her that she wasn’t fit to be a mum.

  Rick, Rod’s dad, initially visited his son but Sondra kept interrupting their games and made the visits unpleasant. As a result, he saw less and less of the little boy. On the upside, Rod and his mum went to the cinema together and shared pizzas and had some fun times. But her boyfriends and various jobs limited the amount of time she spent with her son.

  Puritanical versus hedonistic philosophies

  Meanwhile, Rod was being given very conflicting messages about life. His grandparents said that smoking and drinking were forbidden and that women shouldn’t wear make-up or trousers (because Deuteronomy 22 says that a woman wearing male garments or vice versa is an abomination,) whereas Rod’s mother was making up for her desperately repressed childhood by partying like mad.

  Children need consistency in their lives. If a child runs around singing a song and his mother smiles then he assumes that singing is good, that it brings adult approval. If, the next time he
sings he’s shouted at, he doesn’t know which way to turn. Rod’s grandparents would give him one set of instructions – but when Sondra had an argument with them then she’d tell Rod not to do what they said.

  When Rod was five years old he allegedly came back from a day trip looking very distressed. Sondra questioned him about what had happened and formed the impression that he had been sexually abused in a ceremony run by a religious cult that involved one of her relatives. Rod would continue to mention this alleged incident every so often – and it would be raised again eleven years later at his trial.

  Rod’s grandfather was a travelling salesman so the family moved around a lot. The little boy often had to get used to new neighbours, new schools and new acquaintances. Sometimes his mother was away staying with a boyfriend but at other times she and Rod played Dungeons & Dragons together. Rod also played this role-playing game with his father, Rick. The boy had a talent for it as he was highly imaginative and creative. But Rod’s grandfather declared it was ‘the Devil’s game.’

  These inconsistencies continued over the years. Rod’s grandparents kept telling him to pray and to read the Bible whilst his mother taught him how to cast spells and read the Tarot cards. His school noticed that he’d become increasingly troubled, increasingly strange.

  The lost boy

  By the time he entered his teens, Rod was hurting himself physically as a way of coping with all the hurt he had inside. A friend saw him batter himself against a fence. He also had shallow cuts on his arms which he made with a knife or a razor. He was clearly deeply depressed and often talked about suicide.

  When he was fifteen, Sondra married again. She moved away to Michigan with her new husband, meaning for Rod to join them later when he left school. But someone gave Rod the impression that his mother didn’t want him back. When Sondra heard this she was horrified and travelled to Murray to fetch him. So Rod changed house and school again.

  By now he was sleeping all day and truanting from school so he was expelled for bad attendance and poor attitude. Now he had even less structure to his life.

  Rod started to experiment with drugs. He also smoked cigarettes and lived off junk food. He often looked anaemic and ill.

  A new identity

  Physically, Rod matured quickly, growing to almost six foot tall. He remained reed-thin but grew his hair down to his shoulders and dyed it jet black. With his probing dark eyes, porcelain complexion and narrow nose he appealed to girls who were looking for someone different, someone who seemed superficially strong. Deep down, of course, Rod had little self-esteem or hope for the future. All he could do was invent a persona that would draw other lost young people to him, that would give him a transitory power.

  The so-called cult

  The group of people who Rod now spent his time with would later be described as a terrifying vampiric cult – but they were hardly that. They were a loose knit group of around thirty, of which only five would go on the run.

  Rod’s main man was Scott Anderson whom he’d known since second grade. Scott had been taken away from his unhappy home and had settled down with foster parents but was now back with his biological parents again. He was thin, wore thick glasses, lacked confidence and was desperate to lose his virginity. He saw Rod, who’d had several lovers, as a heroic figure and tended to follow him around.

  Charity Kessee, Rod’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend – who he called Che or Shea – was the second member of the group. She loved Rod’s dark romantic side but feared his violence. (He’d break furniture when he got really angry.) They’d been together for almost a year. She lived with her father in Murray but kept in touch with her mother who lived in South Dakota. She often felt lonely when her father was at work.

  Charity told Rod again and again that she loved him but he clearly doubted that he was lovable and kept setting her little tests. She noticed that he’d provoke fights in order to get a reaction, something that was hard for the teenager to understand. But it’s common for dysfunctional people to provoke fights as a means of avoiding true intimacy. Such damaged people desperately want to be loved but at the same time they can’t allow others to get close. The drama of passionate arguments offers a kind of love – or the closest thing to love that most of them have ever known.

  The third teenager who Rod hung around with was fifteen-year-old Heather Wendorf, a platonic friend. Heather’s older sister had started dating so Heather was somewhat lonely. An artistic girl, she felt different to the more conventional students at school.

  Heather’s father was a self-made man who’d been able to give his two daughters and his common-law wife Ruth a good standard of living. They lived in a beautiful house that had many amenities.

  Limited information has been released about Heather’s home life so it’s hard to know exactly where her unhappiness stemmed from – but she’d started to cut her arms to release her emotional pain, something that both her older sister and her mother knew about. She also suffered from insomnia and migraines and thought about death frequently.

  People who knew her at school said that she was intelligent but troubled. She had always been a quiet girl but became even quieter after she got to know Rod. She started to dye her hair purple and sometimes wore a dog collar around her neck – but Heather wasn’t living a wild child life. Her parents liked her to stay home with them at night and watch TV. Luckily she was close to her seventeen-year-old sister, but her sister was currently the source of family rows as she was staying out late with her new beau.

  Heather wrote to Scott that she had ‘vengeance, hate, destruction’ in her as well as the side of herself that she showed at school, a largely passive side. Heather told Rod all about her unhappiness and Rod strongly empathised.

  The fourth member of the cult was nineteen-year-old Dana Cooper, a friend of Charity’s who Rod had met a fortnight before. Dana had her own flat and Rod and his mates started to hang out there. Dana was overweight and lacking in confidence so was grateful for these instant new friends.

  The teenagers dressed like vampires and often met up at the cemetery. They hung out in a small crumbling outhouse in the woods that they called the Vampyre Hotel. They’d take turns at lightly cutting their arms and licking their own or their friends warm blood.

  The press would later refer to this as drinking blood, as if the supposed vampires were opening their veins widely, but the wounds the teens inflicted were just thin razor cuts. One of Heather’s boyfriends was so disgusted by this blood-licking act that he finished with her, though he was aware that she was being influenced by Rod.

  Rod said that he’d been reincarnated many times and had lived for hundreds of years, inhabiting the best districts of Paris. It wasn’t clear why he’d chosen to relocate to rural Kentucky for his current life.

  Soliciting rape and sodomy

  Rod’s homelife continued to have its difficulties. His mother – by now an attractive thirty-five-year-old – often flirted with his friends. They liked his house as they could just hang out and be themselves with Sondra. But Rod was clearly embarrassed by his mother’s behaviour and was always looking for different places to stay. On another occasion a friend saw Rod and his mother arguing and Sondra trashed her son’s room and dragged him out of it by his hair.

  The tension exacerbated when Sondra developed a crush on one of Rod’s fourteen-year-old friends. She wrote the child a letter saying that she dreamed about being ‘French kissed and fucked’ by him. She wrote a second letter that was equally graphic and suggested the boy move in. Sondra knew that the boy’s brother was active in another vampire cult and hoped that this fourteen-year-old would initiate her so that she could become a vampire who supposedly had eternal life.

  Rod was incensed by all of this – after all, early adulthood is partly about forging your own identify and separating from your parents. How could he revel in his vampiric differences if his mother was a vampire too? Rod told friends that he wanted to kill his mother and his grandfather, who he described as a
sick bastard. But his rage was becoming increasingly free-floating, for he also offered to kill the parents of two of his friends.

  At this stage the mother of the fourteen-year-old boy who Sondra desired saw the sexually explicit letters. She went to the police and on 12th November 1996 Sondra was charged with ‘soliciting rape and sodomy’ from a minor. She would subsequently spend six months in jail.

  Rod also had his run-ins with the police as they suspected that – acting with another teenager – he’d mutilated two puppies from the local animal shelter. And one of his friends said that Rod had fatally swung a kitten against a tree.

  By now the sixteen-year-old was experimenting with so many drugs that his girlfriend Charity felt frightened. Rod looked stoned and threatened to kill numerous people – yet he thought he was being singled out by the locals simply because his long hair and black clothes made him look different.

  All five of the teens felt alienated from their peers and were looking for a new start. They talked more and more about running away. On 25th November 1996 they each packed some clothes and set off on their great adventure in Scott’s old Buick. Rod was pleased when Charity told him that she was expecting their child. (She’d been deliberately trying to get pregnant in the hope that he’d settle down with her and not look at any other women.) But he knew that Charity’s dad wouldn’t be so pleased.

  They could hear that the engine was soon going to pack up so they looked around for another vehicle. Rod knew that Heather’s parents were wealthy and that they had a sports utility jeep. He’d previously heard Heather say that she’d only be allowed to leave home when her parents were dead – and she’d been overheard telling someone else that she wished they’d both disappear. It suited Rod’s purpose to remember these words now as he had so much hate in his heart.