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

by Carol Anne Davis

  Even at school, Steven couldn’t escape from his mum. She frequently sought out his teachers to check on his academic prowess. (Luke Woodward’s mother did likewise.) She made him study for two hours every night and hired a private tutor for him. Ironically, Steven’s IQ was university-level, but the frequent abuse made it impossible for him to concentrate, like most abused children, he daydreamed all the time as an escape from the horror, frequently going into a fugue state.

  By the time Steven turned twelve he was being bullied at school. He wasn’t allowed to go out with the other children and Ruth didn’t like him having friends home plus he was constantly tuning out of lessons and conversations. He was clearly different – and children often pick on anyone that’s different.

  His father Roger had kept in touch with him by letter and was still paying maintenance. Eventually he asked the deeply unhappy boy to come and live with him and his second wife. Steven did so and the couple found that the thirteen-year-old was still wetting the bed. They gave him love and he got on brilliantly with his stepbrother and started to do well at school.

  The couple also sent him to a psychologist who found that the child was unhappy and nervous and that he had a lot of anger and guilt about his mother. But Steven apparently didn’t talk in detail about the numerous cruelties he’d suffered at his mother’s hands.

  That summer he went back to her for a week long visit. He didn’t return to his father, Roger. Instead, Ruth had a legal letter sent to Roger saying that Steven would be staying with her from now on. But even Ruth recognised that Steven was disturbed and she got him a psychologist. Roger wrote to this woman explaining that Steven had been physically abused by his mother for years and that she was still emotionally and mentally putting him down. But no one acted on this information and the teenager’s misery increased.

  The physical abuse continued until Steven turned fourteen after which his mother continued to disparage him emotionally and flaunt herself before him physically. His friends parents felt so sorry for the teenager that they invited him to stay with them whenever possible and treated him like a second son. But Steven was still desperate to win his mother’s love so would try to please her again and again.

  Ruth clearly didn’t believe that she was worthy of love – and probably set out to destroy it. She’d make the shy American teenager start his chores at 6am and clean the house for hours before starting school. He got home before his mother did but he wasn’t supposed to watch TV. When she got back she’d check the set to make sure that it wasn’t warm.

  Such actions make no sense to rational adults – but they do make sense to very controlling people like Ruth Cratton. It’s a safe bet that she had little or no control afforded to her whilst she was growing up so was determined to control every facet of her life now that she was in charge. And as toxic parents blur the boundaries between themselves and their children, that meant controlling Steven – including what he watched on TV.

  Attempts to escape

  Like many mistreated teenagers, Steven ran away. On his first two attempts by foot he only got twenty miles or so and was returned by the police exhausted and hungry. The third time he stole a car to aid his escape attempt, was caught and spent ten days in juvenile custody. The police didn’t ask the fifteen-year-old why he’d stolen the vehicle, and, like most children damaged by their parents, he didn’t volunteer the information. The police and psychologist saw the groomed, concerned side of Ruth Cratton so didn’t even ask Steven about his relationship with his mother. But Steven’s one friend often heard Ruth calling Steven a bastard and said that she ordered the boy around as if he was a servant and never once said anything positive to him.

  A suicide attempt

  Steven now followed the pattern of most of the abused children in this book – he tried to commit suicide, in his case taking painkillers. But he vomited them up and lived to endure another day. He fantasised again and again about jumping from high buildings or shooting himself dead. He probably also fantasised about killing his mother, a woman who had made his life a living hell.

  Matricide

  Steven turned seventeen – but he remained much younger in his looks and in his attitude. He’d never been allowed to make his own decisions or explore the world. His only escape from hardship was watching TV and he could only do so if he let the TV set cool down before Ruth came home as he was forbidden to watch programmes when she wasn’t there. He always sought out the cartoons, disappearing into their safe, wholly make-believe world.

  Ruth, like most controlling parents, kept telling Steven that he’d be nothing without her, that he couldn’t survive on his own. Steven’s self-esteem was so low that he believed her. He knew she wouldn’t let him go away to college when he was eighteen.

  One night the seventeen-year-old had two beers with his only friend. He came home and apparently found his mother watching television. No one, except Steven who may have blocked it out, knows what happened next. Paul Mones, who represented Steven, believes that Ruth may have slapped the teenager’s face during an argument, something she often did. Maybe further abuses followed. Ruth could be life-threatening – when Steven was fifteen they’d rowed and she had tried to choke him to death.

  Whatever happened, mother and son went to their beds. But Steven got up at 5am, took the family gun and walked up to his sleeping mother. He shot her twice through the head. Years later he’d say that he’d done it to relieve the pressure in his head, to put an end to coming home with fear in his stomach and dread in his heart. (Luke Woodham and Sean Sellers also endured years of misery then rose at dawn and killed their mothers in pre-planned assaults.)

  Seen as suicidal, Steven was briefly sent to a mental hospital where he was seen as ‘guilty but mentally ill.’ He was sentenced to ten years to life yet, despite the hospital’s evaluation, he has received no therapeutic help. He told children’s attorney Paul Mones that, though prison is regimented and limiting, it’s still better than being with his mum.

  Jerry Ball

  Another abused boy who snapped and murdered his family was Jerry Ball of West Virginia. The mild-mannered teenager was frequently beaten by both of his religious parents. He had to wear long sleeved shirts even in the height of summer to hide the bruises on his arms. He took beating after beating without complaint and did everything that he could to please his parents, including becoming a youth leader at the local Baptist church. He showed a real talent for baseball, joined the school band and did well in his studies – and still his alcoholic father and psychotic mother mocked and hurt him. His friends were amazed that he could cope with such frequent emotional humiliation and physical pain.

  One day in January 1983 the sixteen-year-old snapped when his mother started to curse him. He took the baseball bat that he was holding and started to batter her with it. He also rained blows on his equally violent father and eleven-year-old brother. When his six-year-old brother began to scream he beat him too. The battered family members collapsed but kept moaning so he hit them all again.

  Jerry immediately phoned a friend. His mother betrayed signs of life by gurgling during this call so he fetched his father’s rifle and shot her through the head. His friend still didn’t believe that he’d massacred his entire family so he drove to the friend’s house, collected him and drove back to show him the corpses. He felt sorry that he’d killed his little brother as the boy had done him no harm.

  Jerry had so little insight into his life of hell that he said he had no motive for what he’d done. He pleaded guilty to all four murders. Only then did witnesses start to come forward, testifying to the life he’d endured. Psychologists who examined him in hospital said he’d been maltreated since birth and found that he had brain damage caused by his parents hitting him about the head but said that it was the years of abuse – rather than the brain lesions – that had led to him killing everyone in the house. Seen as a high suicide risk, he was sent to a Boston hospital with ongoing mental health difficulties.

  N
o exit

  Children who are abused by their parents simply cannot win. Neighbours often hear screams but hesitate to get involved, because it’s currently legal in most countries for a parent to inflict pain on his or her children. If the child runs away he is demonised by the police and perhaps by the juvenile court system for doing so, is brought back and is punished by the parents again. Even when social services get involved (as they did with the parents or guardians of Jon Venables, Robert Thompson, Peter Dinsdale, Cindy Collier, Shirley Wolf and Wendy Gardner) they often decide that there is no abuse case for the parent to answer or that there has been abuse but that it ‘isn’t bad enough’ to take the child away from the home. These children are failed by their communities, the police and the social services – yet if they finally snap and kill the violent parent, they are criticised by the public and by the courts for not seeking an alternative remedy.

  Historical injustice

  Children’s rights campaigners are often appalled at the way our modern legal system treats abused children who go on to commit murder. But there have always been elements of the judiciary who don’t understand.

  In 1748 William York, aged ten, was living in a workhouse where he had to share a bed with a five-year-old girl. He killed her after she soiled the sheets. William was sentenced to hang as the judge said this would be a deterrent to other boys and girls.

  But the judge’s comments showed a complete misunderstanding of child psychology. Even nurtured children have comparatively poor impulse control – and it’s a safe bet that a little boy raised in the workhouse would have suffered a great deal of violence. He did what many abusive adults do to young children. That is, they make the assumption that the child has chosen to soil the sheets. Studies have shown that such immature, violent parents see a level of bad intent that a baby or toddler simply isn’t capable of. They view the soiled child as bad and lash out. Ironically, such trauma causes the child to wet or soil the bed again that night, leading to further abuse. Abused children like Mary Bell and Steven Cratton, both profiled earlier, are often still wetting the bed in their teens.

  Hanging ten-year-old William would have made absolutely no difference to the thought processes of any other wounded child. Indeed, such children often exist in an almost constant daydream to mentally avoid the reality of their daily existence. They can be indifferent to what’s going on in the outside world. The reigning monarch, George II, may have recognised this. Leastways he pardoned William York.

  The truth

  Society tends to see parents as good and children as potential wild cards – so when Zein-Hassan and Maria Isa called the police and reported that their teenage daughter Palestina (known as Tina) had attacked them with a knife, the authorities believed them. Zein, a Palestinian national living in America, added that he’d grabbed the knife from the sixteen-year-old and killed her in self-defence.

  The police went to the Isa’s home in Louis, Missouri, and found that Tina had been stabbed six times. Zein Isa painted a picture of his daughter as a wilful child who had become Americanised rather than maintaining her parent’s culture. He said that she’d come home from the first day of her after-school job and lunged at him.

  But an examination of the high school student’s body showed that she’d sustained six deep stab wounds. Clearly a man merely trying to defend himself would not have stabbed so often or so viciously. The police started to make further enquiries and found out that Tina had been terrified of her parents – and that she’d told a friend that if she died then they would be most likely to blame.

  The case went to trial with Zein Isa’s defence suggesting that he was a good religious man with a disappointing and thoughtless daughter. Tina’s friends came forward to refute this, explaining that she was an intelligent honours student who also excelled in athletics. She abhorred racism and was dating a black student. Her parents had hated that. They had also hated the fact that she’d taken a part time job after school as they believed she should spend each night and weekend at home.

  The trial might have ended with Tina’s name still being besmirched if it hadn’t been for the FBI coming forward. They’d suspected that Zein Isa was a terrorist so had bugged his apartment and taped everything that went on there. They’d just listened to the latest batch of tapes – and found one that chilled them. The tapes told the true story of what had happened to the beautiful honours student that night.

  Tina comes home from the first shift at her job and her father tells her that this is her last night on earth. She makes a little noise, clearly not comprehending. At this stage Maria Isa screams ‘Listen to your father’ and other commands in her native Brazilian and pins her to the ground. Obviously seeing the knife, Tina begins to plead for her life, promising them that she won’t go to work again – but her father begins to stab her as her mother holds her down.

  Tina keeps screaming and begging him to stop but he shouts ‘Die quickly daughter, die’ and continues to plunge the knife into her. Her mother also shouts at her and keeps her arms down so that she can’t defend herself.

  The tape was so harrowing that the first Brazilian translator was in floods of tears. The court was similarly moved when they heard it. Both Isas were given the death penalty but Zein Isa died of diabetes-related complications in prison before his death sentence could be carried out. Maria Isa appealed against her death sentence and for some reason the judiciary commuted it to life imprisonment.

  But imagine if the scenario had been slightly different. Imagine if the day before her father stabbed her, he’d lashed out at Tina as he had many times before and she’d picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed him. The police, the courts and the media would then have painted her as a heartless psychopath who, for example, wanted to spend more time with her boyfriend so killed a good religious man.

  Sadly, most scenarios aren’t on tape. Sadly, society ignores the fact that most violence starts with the parents. Relatives, neighbours, teachers and social workers turn away from the abused child and minimise the hell he or she is going through. And when he kills as a response to his environment, he’ll find he has even fewer members of the public on his side.

  19 Alone Again, Naturally

  Children Who Kill Again As Adults

  Child killers who are removed from a dysfunctional environment and placed in a loving one can mature into sensitive adults. Mary Bell is an excellent example of this healing process. But children who aren’t given sufficient care – or older teenagers who are too brutalised to respond to treatment – may kill again in adulthood.

  Edmund Emil Kemper

  An example of an abused child who killed and was then returned to his abusive home is Ed Kemper of California, born 18th December 1948. His parents’ marriage was an unstable one and little Ed was emotionally starved and neglected. His father deserted the family when Ed was nine but his life was still made hell by his mother who became an alcoholic after the divorce.

  At ten he showed some sexual interest in one of his older sisters and his mother banished him to the shadowy basement to sleep from then on. Soon, like many abused children, he had turned his rage onto cats and tortured several of them to death. The animals had no chance as by now he was over six foot tall. (His father was six-foot-eight.)

  Ed was so lonely that when he was fourteen he tracked down his father and asked to live with him. But the man had remarried and produced another son and there was no place for Ed in the new family unit. Instead, he was shunted off to his father’s parents’ remote Californian farm. Unfortunately his grandmother had a very similar personality to his domineering mother so his life remained one of being ridiculed and ordered about.

  At age fifteen he snapped and shot his grandmother in the back of the head as she sat at the kitchen table. He also stabbed her three times in the back. When she was dead, he took the gun and hid in the yard, waiting for his grandfather to return from a shopping trip. When he did, Ed also fatally shot him through the head.

  The fifteen-year
-old spent the next few years in a mental hospital where they found that he had a very high IQ. Taken away from a life of verbal cruelty and rejection, he proved to be a gentle giant. In 1969 he turned twenty-one and was released. Incredibly, the release was into his emotionally-destructive mother’s custody. This was despite the objections of two state psychiatrists who knew that she’d ridiculed him constantly.

  Soon life returned to the endless mocking that it had consisted of before – and soon Ed returned to murder as a way of assuaging his rage. This time his first six victims were student hitchhikers who he offered lifts to. He shot them, stabbed them, suffocated them, mutilated their corpses and had necrophiliac sex with various body parts. Some of these 1971 and 1972 murders occurred after vicious quarrels with his mother and were substitutes for the real target of his rage.

  But in the spring of 1973, he at last turned his violence upon the person he really hated. He crept into his mother’s bedroom as she slept and battered her about the head with a hammer. He also cut out her larynx – the voice box that had nagged him so relentlessly – and put it down the waste disposal unit and in a final literal ‘fuck you’ had intercourse with her corpse. He also cut off her head and threw darts at it and went to sleep with the corpse in the house.

  Ed Kemper had also hated his mother’s best friend so when she called around the following day he choked her and cut off her head. He then drove around for three days, briefly free of his demons, before phoning the police and turning himself in. But his childhood horrors returned to haunt him and he twice cut his wrists whilst awaiting trial. Somewhat surprisingly, his life sentence allowed for the possibility of parole, though he has so far been turned down for this numerous times.