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

by Carol Anne Davis

  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.

  Child as a weapon

  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.

  Parentally-encouraged killers

  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.

  Children who are wrongly convicted

  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.

  The West Memphis Three

  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 f
ound 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 Leslie Downing

  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.

  Hale, the conquering hero

  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.’