These school killers meet most of the requirements for spree killers as laid down by author Pan Pantziarka in his book on the subject, Lone Wolf. That is, the male plans the violence in advance, kills semi-randomly, is controlled during the killing, tries to take out as many people as possible and makes little attempt to escape.
Pantziarka also notes that adult spree killers tend to have a dominant father who crushes the son’s emergent identity. Kip Kinkel perfectly fits this profile. Luke Woodward doesn’t as his father was absent – but Pantziarka notes that another strong-willed male often takes the father’s place. This holds true for Luke who idolised his satanic-games-playing mentor, Grant Boyette. And Grant himself said that he was like a father to Luke.
The mentally ill (pathological) killer
A tiny percentage of children will, through some chemical imbalance or brain tumour, become mentally ill – and this illness can cause them to kill themselves or others. These are the No Known Fault diseases.
But many children become mentally ill (or at least have their mental health brought into question) because of their abusive backgrounds. Their parents have such strange childrearing methods and such mercurial temperaments that the child can do nothing right. Johnny Garrett and Peter Dinsdale aka Bruce Lee, both profiled, fit into this unfortunate category.
Most of us would find it hard to survive life with one violent parent but poor Johnny Garrett had four such brutal stepfathers – and psychologist Dorothy Lewis noted that it was after abuse from his third father-figure that Johnny’s mind snapped irreparably.
One particularly senseless murder by mentally subnormal boys occurred in Britain in February 1947. Ten boys (all aged fifteen and sixteen) from an approved school decided to kill the headmaster, steal his car and drive away. To this end, they stole three rifles. They were busily loading them when they were apprehended by one of their teachers and promptly shot him in the groin. As he lay on the ground, badly injured, one of the boys reloaded and shot him in the chest. He died within half an hour.
All ten of the boys were quickly traced and stood trial at Stafford Assizes where their headmaster admitted that eight out of the ten had a mental handicap. They were sent to various borstals and prisons. Meanwhile there was an enquiry into the running of the approved school which resulted in it being closed.
The gang-based killer
Again, children who join violent gangs tend to be children from violent homes. Sometimes the gang acts as an alternative parent, giving them a skewed respect and stature. For the first time, they have a sense of belonging – and, in order to keep their status in the group, they will maim, rape and kill. Such gangs invariably have a leader. They also tend to have at least one member who is reluctant to carry out the murder, and who is likely to confess to the police.
The most widely reported teen gang rape-murders have been American ones, but in December 2001 a gang of thirteen and fourteen-year-old boys carried out a gang rape in the leafy town of Guildford, England. The five youths separated a fifteen-year-old from her friend and dragged her to a car park where they repeatedly raped her, thankfully stopping short – or being stopped short – of murder. They were apprehended and released on police bail.
Such rapes give the group a purpose – after all, they are often comprised of very inarticulate youths who have no employment or hobbies to talk about. J W Messerschmidt’s book Masculinities And Crime suggests that such acts ‘help maintain and reinforce an alliance among the boys by humiliating and devaluing women, thereby strengthening the myth of masculine power.’
Whether the victim lives or dies is often incidental in such group rapes. One London gang repeatedly raped a tourist then asked her if she could swim. She lied and said no, at which point they threw her into the freezing dark water. She was able to swim to safety and survived.
But a thirteen-year-old boy from Swansea wasn’t so lucky. He was found unconscious in a car park in January 2002 and later died of his injuries. Six children (four boys and two girls) aged between twelve and sixteen were charged with grievous bodily harm. The six children were bailed to appear later at Swansea Juvenile Court. Meanwhile a seventh child – an eleven-year-old girl – was also investigated for the murder but released without charge.
The incidental killer
These are children who perhaps plan to rob or play a prank on a victim but end up killing him or her. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables may fall into this category. That is, they said they planned to take a child and ‘get him lost’ – though it’s more likely that they first planned to examine him sexually. They didn’t initially intend to kill him, believing childishly that if they threw one piece of brick he’d be quiet and they could leave – but ‘he wouldn’t stay down’ and they hit him again and again. They had both been on the receiving end of repeated cruelty and this made it comparatively easy for them to carry out violence.
Recently there has been an alarming increase in children mugging other children for their mobile phones. A home office study released in 2002 showed that most of the muggers were male and aged fourteen to seventeen whilst most of the victims were aged eleven to fifteen. The muggers picked on a child who was younger than themselves, sometimes just snatching the phone but at other times punching and kicking the owner. In the worst reported case – that of attempted murder – a young man shot a nineteen-year-old woman in the head in broad daylight simply to steal her phone. It’s a safe bet that these young muggers have been hit throughout their childhoods as children who haven’t been hit by their parents usually don’t behave in such an unprovoked violent way.
The hate killer
The victim of such a murder may be from a different religious group, colour or sexual orientation to the child who murders him. Again, though, we invariably find that the killer has suffered during his or her childhood and is passing that hatred on.
Sometimes the actual target (eg homosexual men) is the same target of the violent parents. In other instances, the parents hit and humiliate the child who then goes looking for a safe target to harm, perhaps setting fire to a sleeping tramp or kicking a homeless woman to death. These children are often so young that their names and details are withheld from the press.
But in one Russian case the children were named. Ten-year-old Volodya, thirteen-year-old Vitya and fourteen-year-old Andrie (all with the surname Yakovlev) were Moscow-based brothers living with their mentally ill mother. They survived in total squalor. In 1994 they admitted to battering several down-and-outs to death, though only the fourteen-year-old was brought to trial. Such children are often so traumatised by their unhappy upbringing that violence is their primary voice.
This author taught adult basic education on a voluntary basis and can remember speaking to the tutor of a youth discussion group. (Attendance at the group was obligatory as it replaced a school academic module that these young men didn’t have the IQ for.) The tutor said that the youths mainly sat in sullen silence but on the few occasions she could persuade them to speak they started every bigoted sentence with ‘My dad says…’ She was baffled that they didn’t have their own voice.
But violent and immature parents simply don’t give their children conversational or action-based options. Instead, every independently-voiced thought or act of their children is battered down. Eventually these children end up virtual automatons, extolling the racist or sexual bigotry that they’ve heard all their lives.
The self-killer
Psychologists say that everyone who attempts suicide has at one stage wanted to kill someone else – and suicidal children are no exception. Adverse circumstances (parental abuse, school bullying or intense academic pressure) lead to low self-esteem. If the hatred turns completely inward the child will only destroy his or herself rather than the annihilating external source of their misery. Sometimes the pathologist will put this down to accidental death in order to spare the parents additional pain. If the hate is both inward and outward directed then these children are more likely to become spree
killers, murdering their parents or the school bullies before turning the gun on themselves.
One particularly unusual suicide took place in January 2002 when a fifteen-year-old schoolboy deliberately flew a light aircraft into a Florida skyscraper. The boy was half Arabic and had sympathies with Osama Bin Laden who masterminded the destruction of the World Trade Centre.
Once again, though, the unhappy childhood comes first and the rationale for violence comes second for the teenager was from a broken home. He had rejected his father’s Arabic name and used his mother’s surname but remained deeply troubled. He was described as a loner who was very shy.
The infant killer
Children who give birth are often terrified of what their parents will say. These youngsters usually suffocate their newborn baby as it utters its first cry. Often they are so in denial about the impending birth that they are in a public place (such as a school toilet or the restroom in a department store) when they go into labour and commit the infanticide.
One Canadian sixteen-year-old hid her pregnancy until the birth then stabbed the newborn baby to death. Clearly too confused to dispose of the evidence properly, she merely concealed the little corpse in the garage of her family home. When the body was eventually discovered she told police that she was terrified of her parent’s reaction. Sadly, these girls find censure from their parents more frightening than committing murder. Spending nine months in denial at such a young age must put them under a phenomenal strain.
Some of these girls fear intense disapproval rather than physical assault, but in other instances their mothers have warned them that ‘if you ever get pregnant your father will kill you.’ If there has been previous violence shown to her, the girl takes this threat literally.
The cult killer
Children who kill as part of a cult have usually suffered highly abusive backgrounds. Being part of an alternative group – be it based on vampirism, satanism or some other religious belief system – gives them a sense of identity. It’s also a very visible way of rejecting an outwardly more conventional society which has failed them utterly. The so-called vampire killer Rod Ferrell, profiled earlier, fits into this category.
Seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold, who killed thirteen people and wounded numerous others at Columbine High School before turning the gun on himself, even sent an email explaining his motivation. It read in part ‘do not try to blame it on the clothes I wear, the music I listen to… Parents and teachers, you fucked up… I did not choose this life but I have indeed chosen to exit it.’ Ironically, before the note was made public, the media had blamed heavy metal music and violent films.
The sex killer
These are often anger-retaliation rape-murders where the lust is fuelled by rage. This is sex as a weapon. Again, the killers – like Kenny Houseknecht who stabbed a near-naked girl over ninety times then ejaculated on a pair of her panties – have invariably been abused themselves. For fuller details of the Kenny Houseknecht case and this typology, please see the Youthful Sex Killers chapter later in this book.
15 Cry Me a River
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.
Exceptionally young killers
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.
Babies who babysit
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.
Children who kill strangers
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.
Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers Page 18