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

by Carol Anne Davis

  Since 1987 Ed Kemper has been making tape recordings of books for the blind. He still has a macabre sense of humour, telling a visiting FBI agent that he could break the man’s neck before help could be summoned. It was true, but he made no attempt to carry out any attack.

  He remains intelligent and well spoken. Clearly, if he’d been taken from his mother much earlier he could have offered much to the world. But that very intelligence and smoothness of manner may still conceal a murderous rage towards women – after all, his mild manner was the second last thing that his student victims saw.

  David Wynne Roberts

  In 1969, when David Wynne Roberts was fourteen, he called on one of his mother’s seventy-three-year-old friends in Anglesey, Wales. He knew that she was a wealthy widow and he’d decided to steal her cash. But when she caught him in the act and threatened to tell his mother he followed her into the kitchen, grabbed a knife and stabbed her to death.

  The teenager, a gifted pianist who was on his way to a music lesson, then stole her purse and drove her car out of the garage. He stalled it in her drive so fled on foot. He seemed to feel no remorse for the murder and spent the money on books.

  The fourteen-year-old was found guilty of this killing and spent the next seven years in an institution. When he was released he became a drifter, sometimes picking up men in gay bars and staying with them for as long as he could. He remained volatile and many people were chilled by the rage in his staring eyes.

  When he was twenty-six he spent a few weeks in a Lake District hotel, living with a member of the hotel staff, a male waiter. When the waiter asked him to leave he became increasingly violent. He also made it clear that he resented the sixty-seven-year-old hotel owner’s lifestyle – though it was a lifestyle she’d worked very hard to build.

  Shortly after his gay relationship ended, he returned to the hotel and attacked the owner. He tied her up with various flexes, battered her around the face and kicked her so hard that five of her ribs were broken. He also stabbed her in the neck, strangled her with a scarf and wrapped a plastic bag around her head. He then fled with some of her money and her car. The hardworking entrepreneur’s body was found by her distraught son the following day.

  He was found guilty of murdering the hotelier in December 1986. Aware that he was an ongoing danger to society, the judge gave him life imprisonment. Only then did the jury hear that this was the second time he’d killed an elderly woman who had done him no harm.

  But David Wynne Roberts may eventually be released as the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is expected to rule that the British government should no longer be empowered to demand that killers spend their entire life in prison.

  This author found few examples of children who killed again as adults – but did find case studies where it’s clear that a disturbed child’s attempt to kill wasn’t taken seriously and these children went on to murder as adults. The motive may be similar as in the case of David Wynne Roberts who chose elderly victims, killed them, then stole their possessions. Or it can be entirely different as in the case of Gordon Wardell whose teenage attempted murder was for sexual pleasure and whose second murder, as an adult, was for material gain.

  Gordon David Wardell

  Gordon was an intelligent but troubled youth – and would allege that his unhappiness stemmed from life with a domineering mother. He had fantasies about controlling and about being controlled. By his mid-teens he had developed an obsession with the actor Paul Newman and wanted to emulate the actor’s most macho roles.

  In June 1970, when Gordon was seventeen, he heard that his geology teacher was away on a field trip. He realised that the man’s young wife would be alone with their pre-school children so he phoned her up and pretended he’d found a rare plant of interest to her husband growing in the countryside. He added that he couldn’t convey the plant safely back to his Coventry school as he was on his bicycle. The young woman obligingly agreed to meet him to take a cutting of the plant and drove to the meeting place with her sons, age four and five, in the back of the car.

  But when she and Gordon got to a wooded copse, he produced a knife and held it to her throat. He said that his name was Paul Newman and asked her for cash – then immediately upped the ante by telling her to lie down so that he could bind her hands. It was increasingly apparent that this was a potentially violent sexual attack. Wisely she refused to be tied up, at which he shoved his knee hard into her back. He also tried to force her onto her knees but she again resisted. Then he manhandled her into the passenger seat and took control of her car.

  Moments later he parked and struck her about the head. Then he tore her briefs off. Her oldest child tried to intervene but Gordon struck him too. He drove on then parked again and slashed one of the car’s tire – then leaned in the open door and slashed the woman’s throat and stabbed her twice in the back of the neck. The blood arched out and he stepped back for a second. The badly wounded victim saw her last chance and swiftly locked the door. He lunged at the car but she was able to drive off and soon summoned help from another motorist.

  This was clearly an attempted murder, for only the woman’s desperate escape attempt had prevented her bleeding to death in the vandalised car. As it was, it took nine pints of blood to save her life.

  But for some reason the charge was reduced from attempted murder to grievous bodily harm and Gordon only spent four years in Grendon Underwood prison. He was released at twenty-one.

  Four years later he met Carol, a former Sunday school teacher who now worked in a building society. After a four year courtship they married in church. She was a kind, quiet woman who was well-liked in the community. The marriage looked contented enough to outsiders but Gordon still wanted more. He began to visit prostitutes and urged them to tie him up and to be rough with his penis. (Men with cold or dominant mothers often ask for such treatment from their sex partners as a way of turning an abusive experience into an ultimately orgasmic one.)

  After twelve years of marriage, all still looked well to outsiders but Carol must have been aware that Gordon was under-achieving. He’d drifted from one job to another whilst she’d been promoted to assistant manageress at the building society. And whilst she was cleaning and tidying the house, he was out spending money they could ill afford on bondage prostitutes.

  Gordon needed to feel important and he wanted money. He could rid himself of Carol’s real or imagined disapproval and get himself a good few thousand pounds if he disposed of her and robbed the building society where she worked.

  He proceeded to do just that, chloroforming her after Sunday lunch and probably suffocating her after she lost consciousness. Then he used her keys to enter the building society where he stole fourteen thousand pounds, money which has never been found. He dumped her body in a ditch, went home, struck himself about the face and tied himself up.

  When the robbery was discovered and Carol didn’t arrive for work, police went to the Wardells’ house. They freed Gordon who claimed that a gang had knocked him out and tied him up then abducted Carol. But he showed none of the trauma that someone who’d been tied up for sixteen hours would normally show. Indeed, he hadn’t even urinated once in all that time. And the gang, supposedly professional enough to kidnap a vital staff member, had relied on bindings from the Wardells’ home…

  The police’s suspicions were further aroused when Gordon insisted on giving a press conference in a wheelchair despite the fact that he was medically able to walk. As they continued to question him, more and more of his statements simply didn’t add up. The authorities put him under surveillance and noted that he strolled around in perfect health but began to limp and look anguished when he went to the building society to talk about his wife’s death-in-service pension, money that would now be given to him.

  On 23rd October 1994 he was charged with Carol’s murder and with stealing from the building society. In December he went to trial and was found guilty. A programme about the case that was televised in 2002 suggested
that he is still denying his guilt.

  Another case of a damaged youth who attempted to kill and who wasn’t taken seriously is Robert Black. Robert would ultimately be charged with three child murders but he may well have committed many more.

  Robert Black

  Robert was born in April 1947 to a single mother who lived in Grangemouth, Scotland. She wanted to keep him but her strict parents were horrified by his illegitimacy. They wouldn’t let her live at home whilst she was pregnant so she had to stay with various relatives. Within six months of his birth she reluctantly put him into an orphanage.

  He was soon fostered by a Scottish couple who had draconian views on childcare. His foster mother used to undress him below the waist and beat him with a belt, causing frequent nightmares. He would wet the bed during these night terrors and was beaten for that too. Neighbours saw the little boy covered in bruises, looking unbathed and unkempt.

  It’s likely that he was also sexually abused. By the time he was eight he was pushing objects up his own anus – just as the sodomised child Johnny Garrett, profiled earlier, did. This doesn’t necessarily imply homosexual desire – Robert’s later victims would all be little girls – but is simply a way for an abused child to take control of a formerly hated and forced act.

  Robert continued to have a very troubled life. Beaten at home, he would go on to beat other children in the playground. He loved swimming and would use these outings to the pool to stare at little girls. Years later he would take girls’ swimsuits from the poolside and use them as a masturbatory aid.

  By the time he was eleven both foster parents had died and he was returned to care. At twelve he and two friends took a twelve-year-old girl into a field, pulled down her pants and tried to gang rape her. Robert was moved to a care home that didn’t include girls – but received no therapeutic help.

  At his new residence, one of the staff made the child fellate and masturbate him. Robert was still the underdog, but his fantasies of controlling a child victim intensified.

  At fifteen he left the residential home and rented a room, working as a delivery boy. During his deliveries he made clumsy passes at numerous girls. It’s unclear how old these females were – but the fact that none of them reported him suggests that they were innocently young.

  Within two years the touching wasn’t enough, and the seventeen-year-old persuaded a seven-year-old girl to accompany him into a disused air raid shelter. There he grabbed her and strangled her into unconsciousness. When she was completely passive he pulled her pants down and digitally raped her, breaking her hymen and causing her to bleed. Then he masturbated over her, enjoying the fact that she was unable to resist.

  He left her for dead – but the little girl revived and the teenager ended up in court. There, a psychiatrist said that the event was an isolated incident. Yet Robert Black had already been moved from one care home to another after attempting to rape at age twelve and had inappropriately approached dozens of girls when he was a fifteen-year-old delivery boy. Despite this dangerous history, he was merely put on probation for a year and moved to a new area where he found building work. In truth, a charge of attempted murder would have been more appropriate.

  Again within two years – now age nineteen – his paedophile desires had surfaced and he digitally entered a nine-year-old. He was discovered and hounded out of town – but in his new abode he did the same thing to a seven-year-old. This time he served a year at a borstal where he remained a loner. His life experience had been so loveless that people said they could see the emptiness in his eyes.

  After serving his sentence, he left Scotland and moved to London where he began to collect child pornography. This isn’t a victimless crime as children are forced to strip and pose for such photographs and are often abused whilst the photos are being shot. Robert also hung around playgrounds and beaches, where he took his own photographs of children to use as masturbatory aids.

  Unable to make friends and undoubtedly haunted by his own past, the young man retreated further and further into his fantasy life. He’d been a gifted sportsman but eyesight problems put an end to his hopes for an athletic career. Now he worked in a dead end job and had no one to really confide in and no hobbies – though he played darts in the pub – that truly interested him. Thoughts of stalking and taking and molesting another child increasingly dominated his life.

  Robert Black was thirty-five by the time he committed his first known murder – but police believe he may have murdered earlier and may be responsible for many more murders than the three that he was ultimately charged with. The case is interesting because his adult sex crimes were eerily similar to the sex crimes he’d committed as a child.

  Robert Black was driving near the English village of Coldstream in 1982 when he saw an eleven-year-old girl, Susan Maxwell, walking home from a tennis club. He did what he’d done as a teenager with a victim – took her away from the scene to a place where he could control her, in this instance his van.

  He has never talked about exactly what he did to Susan or exactly how he killed her, but when her decomposed body was found a fortnight later her panties had been removed. He went on to kill five-year-old Caroline Hogg from Portobello in 1983 and when her body was eventually found it was nude.

  Three years passed, then in 1986 he abducted ten-year-old Sarah Harper, molesting her repeatedly then placing her – alive but probably unconscious – into a river. When her corpse was found it had been undressed and then reclothed.

  It’s believed that he gagged and bound each victim and that they were kept alive for some time as he drove around the country, stopping to abuse them whenever the desire overtook him. Repeated sexual assaults were the motive and he didn’t really care whether they lived or died.

  He was caught whilst abducting six-year-old Mandy Wilson after an alert neighbour saw him pull the child into his van. By the time police waved down the vehicle he’d already briefly assaulted her. He was given a life sentence in 1994 that will keep him behind bars until he is at least eighty-two.

  As it’s virtually unknown for a paedophile sex killer to avoid killing for three years, it’s likely that he is responsible for other missing children’s untimely deaths between that of Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper. We know that he tried to abduct Teresa Thornhill but though she looked childish she was actually fifteen and was able to lash out at him and attract attention. His younger victims were not so fortunate and were unable to get away. The authorities want to question him about seventeen other child murders throughout the country. After the case, a police spokesman said that Robert Black had been so abused throughout his childhood that there was no humanity left behind his eyes.

  20 Blame it on the Pony Express

  The Scapegoats

  Numerous case histories show that it’s the violence meted out to children that spurs them on to kill. Paul Mones has said that though the police are good at protecting banks from being robbed, ‘they do an absolutely abysmal job of shielding children from the criminal excesses of their parents.’ Psychologist Dorothy Rowe has also noted that police tend to side with the parent unless the case involves sexual abuse. Yet many adults refuse to recognise the connection between their hitting and ridiculing children and these children going on to hurt them back or harm someone else. Instead, society’s scapegoats include:

  Violent videos

  Millions of children watch television dramas and videos with a partially violent theme – so if they were the sole cause of inciting murder, we’d have a juvenile killing epidemic. Instead, the number of children in Britain who kill each year is in the low double figures. Clearly, there are other factors at work.

  It’s possible that a child who is already disturbed may be more affected by televised violence than a child from a stable home. It’s certainly true that the loved child will have access to a wider range of sensory input. He’s hugged, taken places and read stories – whereas the neglected child is left for hours in front of the TV. Gavin de Becker, a world renow
ned expert in predicting violence, has said that though violent content matters, the main harm comes through what the excess TV-watching replaces. That is, the child is overdosing on celluloid images instead of enjoying interaction with others.

  A fatherless boy who lacks a male figure (such as a kindly uncle) in his life, may look to television to provide him with role models. Unfortunately he’s then faced with numerous violent or verbally aggressive macho men.

  Once again, the negative social factors come first. If conditions are sufficiently bad they can turn the child into a budding psychopath – and as psychopaths always seek out excitement, they’re going to watch the most violent programmes available and will feel no empathy with the victims of such storylines.

  Some psychologists believe that psychopaths (people who only care about themselves and have no conscience) are born rather than made but when fledgling psychopaths were taken from their parents they usually showed improvement, suggesting that the home environment does play a critical part.

  That said, there are instances of children who were so relentlessly abused and neglected by their biological parents during their first few months of life that they were incapable of bonding with caring adoptive parents. And the adult psychopath appears to be untreatable.

  But watching a violent video doesn’t turn a loved child into a psychopath. Violent parents, violent school bullies – or the occasional severe chemical imbalance or brain tumour – does that.