Thankfully Don’s message – that innocent children sometimes go to jail – will reach an even wider audience in due course for he’s been co-writing a screenplay about this gross miscarriage of justice. He’s aware that the situation could have been even more dire for Stephen than it actually was. ‘If the boy had been convicted a few years earlier when we still had the death penalty he could have been hung.’ He would like to see a different judicial set-up that doesn’t send vulnerable seventeen-year-old boys to adult prisons.
After twenty-seven years in such prisons, Stephen is at last free. When he first left jail he found work as a trainee chef, but at the time this author talked to Don Hale he had just changed employment to become a security guard. Meanwhile, Derbyshire Police have announced that they intend to reopen the investigation into Wendy Sewell’s murder, so perhaps at last her killer will be tracked down.
16 Heard it Through the Grapevine
Children Who Kill Their Friends
There have been instances of children killing their friends in America because of the ready availability of guns. The argument that would once have been ended by juvenile shouts or blows turns into a fatal episode when one child shoots the other dead.
That said, many psychologists have pointed out that children who have never been hit by their parents don’t have this level of anger. Speaking at the Children Are Unbeatable seminar in January 2002, bestselling author Dorothy Rowe said that people who have never been hurt and humiliated by their parents have the capacity to talk things through without violence, to reach a compromise.
Sometimes the juvenile’s rage has been simmering under the surface for months, as in the following case of teen killers Karen Severson and Laura Doyle who murdered Missy Avila, their seventeen-year-old friend.
Karen Francis Severson and Laura Ann Doyle
Karen was born on 17th October 1967 to a single mother who immediately gave her up for adoption. Three days later her new parents, Loyal and Paula Severson, took her to their Californian home. She was a lonely child who made up stories about having lots of brothers and sisters. She overate and was clearly lacking in confidence.
When Karen was eight she befriended one of her schoolmates, Michelle Avila, who was always known as Missy. Karen started to spend most of her time at Missy’s house and started to call Missy’s mother ‘mom.’ For the next few years – up until weeks before she killed her – the girls appeared to remain best friends.
But the differences between them became more obvious as they matured into teenagers. Missy was less than five foot tall with pretty features, a little waist and long silken hair. The boys at school loved her. In contrast, Karen was plain and still overweight. And Missy was a first class scholar whilst Karen struggled to pass her exams. Missy also had an incredibly close relationship with her mother Irene and could tell her anything.
Karen watched for day after day as her best friend was admired and asked out by various boys. When someone at last asked her, Karen, out she was ecstatic. She soon slept with him and became pregnant at age fourteen.
She gave birth to a baby at age fifteen but couldn’t cope. She often fled to Missy’s house, leaving the baby with her adoptive parents. But being at Missy’s house just made her more envious – Missy could have fun with boys and had a freedom that Karen now lacked.
Karen had gained over three stone during her pregnancy so was mocked even more than before by the local youths. She started to smoke marijuana and drink alcohol. Meanwhile, Missy’s parents had separated and Missy was very upset and even more reliant on her best friend. So when Karen enrolled in a less academic school, Missy joined her there.
But Karen became increasingly jealous of her friend. She started to set various schoolmates against each other, telling each of them that it was Missy who had started the ugly rumours. As a result, four of the girls jumped on Missy, causing facial bruising. They implicated Karen but Missy refused to believe that her best friend would set her up.
Soon afterwards Karen could see that sixteen-year-old Missy had fallen in love. She herself started dating a boy who had a crush on Missy. Karen was so terrified of losing him that she warned Missy to stay away.
Suddenly bereft of Karen’s friendship, Missy made friends with another pupil called Laura Doyle, a girl who – along with Karen Severson – would plot her death.
Laura had been born on 1st May 1967 to a couple who had problems with alcohol. They argued constantly, oblivious to the effects it was having on their little red-haired child.
Laura matured into a thin, anaemic-looking teenager. All the problems she’d had at home had made her awkward so her mother decided to send her on a modelling course. But being surrounded by natural beauties made the insecure child feel even worse about herself and she became increasingly withdrawn. Luckily she was allowed to leave the course prematurely because her family ran out of cash.
Laura was very glad to have Missy as a friend. She started spending lots of time at her house and also started to call Missy’s mother ‘mom’. She found a warmth in the Avila household that she’d never known in her own unhappy home.
When Laura was sixteen she started dating a boy who she liked a lot. She was terrified that he’d go off with someone else so clung to him tightly. But he said that she was too possessive and finished with her. He also started spending more time with Missy, who’d dated him in the past.
Laura now felt angry towards Missy for this supposed betrayal. Karen also became enraged when she saw her own boyfriend holding Missy close. Karen was pregnant for the second time and longed to get married. She was unjustifiably afraid that Missy would get in the way.
On 1st October 1985 Laura drove Missy up the local mountain road to a wooded area. Karen Severson and another girl (whose identity is secret so she’ll be called Annette throughout this case study) followed close behind in Karen’s car. When the cars stopped, Laura and Karen grabbed Missy, hauled her into the woods and shouted at her. They said that she’d ‘fucked’ their boyfriends and that she’d have to pay. In turn, Missy wept and looked to Annette for help, but Annette looked away.
When they’d run out of insults they proceeded to beat her. The seventeen-year-old tried to deflect the blows and received abrasions to her arms and hands. Other blows caused bruises to her chest and face.
Laura pulled Missy’s hair then Karen produced her penknife and cut shards of it off. Next, they dragged her into the stream in a standing position. A frightened Annette now ran back to the car. But Karen and Laura continued the assault, forcing their former friend into the shallow water whilst she pleaded and screamed. One girl grabbed Missy’s feet to stop her from kicking whilst the other twisted her arm behind her back. Then they held her face in the stream until she stopped writhing and was presumably dead. Even now the girls weren’t happy with their handiwork so they pushed, pulled and rolled a huge log from further upstream until it covered Missy’s small body, pinning her down.
Laura then phoned Missy’s house and said that Missy had gone off with some boys in a car and was she back yet? She and Karen would stick to that story for many months whilst Annette kept quiet and tried to put the death from her mind.
Karen and her little daughter went back to Missy’s house after the funeral and stayed for hours. They came back the next day and the next. Within a fortnight they’d moved in and Karen was helping with the housework and emotionally supporting the bereaved mother. It comforted Irene to have her daughter’s best friend there.
She noticed that Laura wasn’t coming around any more, then heard that the girl had left school and found a job in a bakery. And Laura sent a condolence card which said that Irene had been like a mother to her and that she still felt Missy’s presence all around.
But there were increasing clues that Karen wasn’t coping with the pressure of Missy’s death. Her weight soared to over fifteen stone. She started to imagine that she heard and saw Missy’s ghost – or at least she told Irene she did. She kept naming possible culprits and tryi
ng to set traps to catch the boys she said were Missy’s killers. She intermittently spoke to the police and probably acted strangely, but they suspected a man or men in this homicidal death.
When Karen was five months pregnant with her second baby she had an argument with her boyfriend and aborted his child. She began to visit Missy’s headstone most days and speak to it. This became so alarming that Irene asked her to get professional help.
Laura was equally lost. She’d originally avoided alcohol in favour of soft drugs as she didn’t want to emulate the drinking problems she’d witnessed throughout her childhood. But now she increasingly turned to drink. She looked blank when the police asked her questions about the youths that Missy had gone with and it was soon rumoured that she’d turned to cocaine. She lost so much weight that she was in constant ill health and looked skeletal.
It’s unlikely that either girl would ever have confessed but the third girl, Annette, remained troubled by Missy’s death. Three years later she told the full story to the police and Karen and Laura were arrested. In 1990 the case went to court. Both were found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to fifteen years each, to be served in a Californian prison.
Laura’s mother was honest enough to write a letter to the authorities explaining that she hadn’t been strong enough to remove Laura from a very unhappy home situation. She admitted that Laura had suffered greatly as a result.
Why they killed
This case is atypical in that the children who killed got away with the murder for so long – most children are caught within hours or days of the homicide. Having immature and usually traumatised minds, they rarely think beyond getting rid of the abuser (or in this case the love rival) who is ruining their lives.
Karen and Laura succeeded in deflecting attention from themselves because both clearly loved Missy’s mother – and they seemed, until the year of her death, to love Missy. The fact that they were female also stopped the police from looking too closely at them. Indeed, detectives at first thought that Missy’s murder was a sexual assault from an unknown male that had escalated into a homicide.
Yet statistically a female killer or killers was more likely, for the FBI have noted that girls mainly kill acquaintances or friends or their own family. It’s boys who are more likely to kill strangers – and these strangers are usually other boys rather than girls.
The police should have been alerted by the fact that both Laura and Karen were incredibly unhappy teenagers who were desperate for love – and who would do anything to keep that desired love object. (Such as getting pregnant at fourteen as Karen did or virtually stalking an ex-boyfriend as Laura did.) Such fear makes people suspicious to the point of paranoia so they saw Missy, in truth a good friend to them, as a rival who they had to kill. Their hate was such that they mocked her and damaged her face and hair before drowning her and covering her body with the log, as if afraid that she’d rise up to tempt away their supposed chance of happiness. A film loosely based on the crime, A Killer Among Friends, suggested that Karen was the leader and Laura the follower.
In another case where one friend killed another, there wasn’t a prior history of jealousy towards the victim. Instead, the victim was apparently seen as a symbol of authority at a time when the soon-to-be-killer, Jennifer Tombs, was desperate to have fun.
Jennifer Lee Tombs
Jennifer was born in 1981 to a mother who was unable to keep her. At eight months old she was adopted by Pastor Madlyn Tombs, a single woman who ran a Christian church.
Jennifer was a beautiful baby and Pastor Tombs gave her a beautiful home in Denver, but by Jennifer’s early teens there was trouble in this supposed Paradise. Clearly unhappy, the child had begun to steal. In turn, Pastor Tombs began to wear her jewellery at all times to ensure that it didn’t go missing. She also put a lock on her bedroom door.
Pastor Tombs had been raised in a family where she was constantly supervised and she brought her daughter up the exact same way. Perhaps Jennifer felt suffocated and needed more freedom. It’s clear that she suffered from low self-esteem as by fourteen she was having sex and by fifteen she’d had many boyfriends, most of whom treated her very casually.
Jennifer told one of these boyfriends, who was five years older than her, that she was pregnant with his baby. He faded out of her life after that but she phoned him several months later to say that she’d had the child. Again, he didn’t go to see her – but if he had, he’d have found that she’d invented the baby. She was clearly a very troubled girl. She also tracked down details of her birth mother and had the woman’s name tattooed on her arm.
The police often visited the Pastor’s home after one of Jennifer’s minor brushes with the law, but at fifteen her crimes became more serious when she stole a car. She was put on probation and given an electronic tag, which effectively put her under house arrest. Given that she had a poor relationship with her adopted mother – and had even stayed with a friend for several months in order to have more freedom – this possibly wasn’t an appropriate solution.
But in September 1996 Jennifer saw the chance to party when Pastor Tombs said that she was going away on a religious retreat for the weekend. At school, Jennifer invited several friends round promising that she’d cook them a shrimp dinner. Unfortunately Pastor Tombs then added that she was arranging for a live-in babysitter for Jennifer.
The baby-sitter was a twenty-three-year-old woman called Tanya Lavallais who Jennifer thought of as her cousin. In truth, the two families weren’t related but they were both heavily involved with the same church.
Tanya arrived at Jennifer’s house – and shortly afterwards Jennifer’s friends arrived. She sneaked them upstairs into her bedroom, telling them to be quiet until Tanya went out. In reality, Tanya – a responsible young woman – had no intention of going out and was relaxing in the downstairs Recreation Room.
Jennifer now went downstairs taking her ex-boyfriend’s gun with her. Tanya was sitting on the couch with her arms stretched back behind her head. Fifteen-year-old Jennifer shot the innocent young woman six times, the bullets entering her upper arms and her head. She collapsed, bleeding heavily, back on the couch and Jennifer pulled her dead body to the ground.
At some stage Jennifer decided to clean the couch and poured detergent over the blood stain. She emptied the boot of her cousin’s car, probably intending to put her in there. But Tanya weighed a lot more than Jennifer did and she only succeeded in dragging her body a few yards across the room. Jennifer then phoned an ex-boyfriend several times saying that she’d done something bad, that she’d killed a female intruder. She was doubtless hoping that he’d come over and dispose of the body but he was ill and refused to visit her house.
Jennifer must have gotten blood on her clothes for she went and had a bath, leaving her friends playing records and cards. At some stage she appeared wrapped only in a towel and her friends told her to get dressed again. They had no idea that there was a cooling corpse in a downstairs room.
But Tanya’s family were concerned when they paged her and she didn’t answer. They phoned Jennifer’s house and even went round there but Jennifer refused to let them in, just saying that Tanya had gone out to a club.
Jennifer acted entirely normally for the rest of the night. Eventually most of her friends left but she asked one boy to come back later. He did and they had sex in the early hours of the morning. He, too, left and Jennifer and a female friend then retired for the night.
The next morning Jennifer pretended to discover the corpse. Telling her friend that she’d be blamed if the police saw the gun, she disposed of it in a nearby drain. This naturally made the police suspicious – and when they found out that someone had attempted to clean the couch they knew that this was an inside job.
The trial was unsurprisingly brief. Jennifer, by now sixteen, was tried as an adult and found guilty of first degree murder. She was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Her adoptive mother said that the judicial sy
stem wasn’t over and that Jennifer should pray – but the prayers didn’t help and she lost her subsequent appeal.
Adopted child syndrome
Both Karen Severson who helped to murder Missy Avila and Jennifer Tombs who murdered Tanya Lavallais were adopted as very young children. Statisticians have noted that a disproportionate number of serious offenders are adopted or foster children. In some regions 45% of all felonies committed by children are by adoptees. Some adults have made the leap to suggest that these children become violent because the ‘vital mother-baby bond’ is broken. As a result, they’re campaigning to abolish adoption. But the truth is doubtless more complex than that.
For starters, it’s a myth that a biological parent is automatically good to a child. Most of the children in this book suffered hugely at the hands of their biological parents. Some of these children flourished when taken away from their birth parents – most notably the younger children such as Robert Thompson, Jon Venables and Mary Bell. And Dr Dorothy Lewis has noted that young prisoners often change markedly if treated well by prison staff.
Second, sociologists would have to make a study of the adoptive parents before concluding what went wrong in the child’s life. Were the parents who adopted very strict or in some other way restrictive? Or were the adoptive parents older when they adopted and too set in their ways so that they continually criticised and restrained their energetic adopted offspring? Did these parents have fulfilling lives prior to adopting or were they underachievers who put all of their own unfulfilled hopes onto the child?
Every one of the sex killers in the next chapter was raised by his biological parents and in almost every case there is a clear link between the lust murders and early parentally-caused abuse.
Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers Page 20