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

by Carol Anne Davis

  Rock music

  Millions of young – and some not so young – people listen to heavy metal rock, and they don’t go on to kill. Yet when a teenager who happens to be a rock fan commits murder, the media often blame the music. They’ll note that the suicidal or murderous victim played the same downbeat lyrics again and again. In reality, the teenager will have become depressed by his immediate environment. Thereafter he seeks out the lyrics which best suit his mood.

  Young men can be rejected by society in many different ways. First, their mothers often stop hugging them when they are around twelve years old so they receive no physical affection. Boys tend not to talk intimately to each other in the way that girls do, so their emotional problems remain unshared. Alienated from their surroundings, they understandably turn to the music of alienation. It makes them feel as if someone understands.

  Many of us listen to such alienated lyrics at some stage in our lives, but it doesn’t turn us into miniature psychos. A happy and loved child or teenager simply doesn’t commit suicide because he plays a few downbeat tunes. The children who take a life have been scarred by their life experiences, not by some angry words on a CD.

  Ironically, when those who scapegoat music find that the lyrics aren’t as bad as they feared, they sometimes say that the troubled teen heard subliminal messages on the record. They’ll play such records backwards and try to find ‘dangerous messages’ in the soundtrack. It’s clear that some people have overactive imaginations and too much time on their hands.

  As Gavin de Becker has written – when discussing a para-suicide victim who blamed his attempt on heavy metal music – ‘once he excluded family life and parenting from the enquiry, he might as well have cited anything… By pointing his finger at a rock band, James washed away all the scrutiny that might reasonably have been focused on himself, his family or even his society.’

  Secularity

  Religious leaders like to suggest that our secular society is to blame for children who kill – but reality doesn’t bear this out. Indeed, most of the children profiled in this book had religious families.

  William Allnutt lived with a deeply devout grandfather. In jail he told his mother that it was a ‘terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living God.’ Wendy Gardner was frequently taken to church by her religious grandmother – and Wendy turned up at her trial wearing a crucifix and clutching rosary beads.

  Luke Woodham’s mother was heavily involved with the local Baptist Church and took Luke to Sunday school every week. Luke continued to attend church into his mid teens. He also had a religious friend who ‘witnessed’ to him (told him that there was a deity) at least twice a week. Kip Kinkel, who would embark on a similar killing spree, had a paternal grandfather who was a minister.

  Mary Bell’s mother, Betty, was so religious that her family expected her to become a nun. At age thirteen she suddenly surrounded her bed with rosaries and crucifixes. Later she and her clients abused Mary in a room that had crucifixes on the wall. Mary herself was always reading the Bible and owned five of them.

  Jesse Pomeroy was sent to Sunday school and Johnny Garrett’s mother was a Jehovah’s witness. Johnny’s experiences at home were so horrendous that he later invented a new Jehovah-less religion for himself. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson went to a Church Of England School – and after battering James to death, Jon told his psychologist that good children went to heaven and that bad children went to hell. Robert’s mother wore denominational jewellery in the form of a five-pointed Orange Lodge star at his trial.

  Cheryl Pierson spent most of her childhood with her religious mother and grew up in a house that had a prayer on the kitchen door and a picture of the Pope on the front door. Cheryl wore a cross to her trial and told people that she believed her mother was in heaven and her father was in hell.

  Sean Pica, who Cheryl hired to kill her father, also came from a religious household. His mother took him to Sunday school every week and also taught a group of children the catechism in her home. And Rob Cuccio, who acted as the go-between, had a mother, father and siblings who were all heavily involved with their local church.

  Rod Ferrell spent much of his life with his grandparents who were Pentecostal fundamentalists. He believed in the existence of a god and in the existence of a devil.

  We know that violence breeds violence yet some religious schools still physically punish children. Patricia Knox, author of Troubled Children, noted that ‘I am surprised and dismayed… that Church schools are amongst those least inclined to abandon corporal punishment.’ She noted that being beaten didn’t just traumatise the injured child, it also caused neurosis in the classmates that had to witness it.

  Paul Mones, writing of how the general public can be alert for signs of child abuse, has written that ‘It is especially important to be aware of these men and women who pride themselves on being stern disciplinarians – parents who boast that they will go to any lengths to install moral, religious or other values in their children.’

  Pornography

  Exposure to adult pornography is often given by anti-porn groups as a cause of sex crime. But many studies refute this – and those that do show a link have often been criticised for their methodologies. Several, such as Tjaden’s Pornography And Sex Education (published in the Journal Of Sex Research in 1988) and Padgett & Brislin-Slutz’s Pornography, Erotica And Attitudes Towards Women (published in the same journal in 1989) have shown that young men benefit from viewing porn as they use it as a sex education aid.

  In 1973, Kant & Goldstein conducted a study which involved three groups of men – occasional users of porn, regular users and men convicted of sexual offences ranging from paedophilia to rape. They found that the sex offenders had seen less porn when growing up than the non-offenders had – and that they continued to see less porn as adults. (Pornography And Sexual Deviance: A Report Of The Legal And Behavioural, University of California Press.)

  It’s certainly true that boys who rape and kill have often been made to feel guilty about their sexuality. Ed Kemper was so cruelly mocked by his alcoholic mother that it distorted his entire view of womanhood. By ten he was cutting the heads off his sister’s dolls – and also burying cats alive. At fifteen he shot his grandfather and grandmother dead then stabbed her corpse repeatedly. Afterwards he told authorities that he wished he’d undressed her to see what she looked like.

  Repressing or mocking a child’s normal sexual development simply doesn’t make that development stop – instead, it’s like holding a beachball firmly under water. When you eventually let go, the beach-ball races to the surface again.

  Authoritarian parents often try to control their teenage children’s sexuality, perhaps believing that this will make the child a ‘better’ person – but sexual dysfunction clinics are filled with flashers, Peeping Toms and obscene phone callers who come from repressive backgrounds like this.

  Sexual therapist Roy Eskapa has written of how one boy was found masturbating into a pair of his female cousin’s panties. Most of us would just have pretended not to notice, but as a punishment his mother made him dress up as a girl and put on makeup. Then she let his cousin treat him in the exact same way – but when the cousin noticed that the boy had an erection she hit it. This aroused him further and he became a transvestite who eventually sought therapy. (Most transvestites are harmless – but it has to be noted that some of society’s most vicious rapists and killers have also been found to cross-dress.)

  Sexual curiosity in young people is a normal part of life yet some parents expect their children to remain asexual until their eighteenth birthday. Some puritans even object to their children being given sex education in school. Ironically, it’s not the young person with a relaxed attitude to sex who becomes the sexual offender – it’s the child who was taught that sexual exploration is dirty and wrong.

  Hyperactivity

  Nowadays when a child is having difficulty concentrating in school, he’s often diagnosed as having Attentio
n Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and given powerful mind-altering drugs. Kip Kinkel was given Ritalin for supposed hyperactivity and Prozac for clinical depression. (For information on the violence these drugs can provoke, please see the chapter on Kip Kinkel.) And Jon Venables was diagnosed as hyperactive though he doesn’t appear to have been prescribed any drugs.

  It’s argued that there’s something wrong with these children’s brains and that they are liable to develop into delinquents – but despite extensive research, no organic disorder has been found.

  Clinical psychologist Dr David Keirsey has worked with delinquent boys and has been a professor of behavioural science. He’s also the best-selling author of the book Please Understand Me. His paper, The Great A.D.D. Hoax, points out that children who were once merely considered to be ‘bundles of energy’ are now negatively labelled as ‘hyperactive.’ And children who were once seen as ‘daydreamers’ are now designated as suffering from ‘attention deficit disorder.’ He’s rightly horrified that these vague diagnoses are allowing medics to ‘invade children’s brains’ with ‘brain disabling drugs.’

  David Keirsey has been working with children since 1950 and has noted that the ones who had difficulty concentrating in class simply weren’t interested in the subject matter. There was nothing wrong with their brain function as they could concentrate perfectly well on subjects that interested them. He found that the boys wrongly diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder were boys who were ‘concrete, impulsive players’. In other words they were very practical in their interests and abilities. (Persistent truant Robert Thompson had very little interest in his schoolwork – but he loved taking electrical gadgets apart to see how they worked. Similarly, Kip Kinkel scored badly in written work but was sufficiently scientifically knowledgeable that by the age of twelve he was able to make bombs.)

  Keirsey points out that school children are told to stay still, keep quiet and get to work – and that the supposed attention deficit disorder child manages to do the first two things but doesn’t do the third as he can’t engage with the material. The problem then is that the curriculum is wrong for that particular child’s mindset. There’s nothing wrong with his mind.

  Vampirism

  An interest in vampirism is often scapegoated when children kill. Rod Ferrell is often given as an example of a vampire cult killer. He battered a friend’s parents to death and was completely remorseless. Watching him stick his tongue out at the camera again and again it’s hard to imagine a more irritating, immature jerk.

  But Ferrell didn’t just form a cult and change from a regular nice guy. Instead, his childhood was so unnurturing that he was desperate to latch on to anything that would give him a sense of identity. A court-appointed official even said that Ferrell’s family was the most dysfunctional he’d ever seen.

  Society often blames such occult practices when children kill – but, in truth, a youth’s interest in vampirism is no more outlandish than his mother’s calls to a psychic hotline. They are all just belief systems that humans have invented to give themselves the illusion of control over their fate.

  Unfortunately studies have shown that many people hold onto their beliefs even when overwhelming evidence contradicts this, so an adult who wanted to blame vampire books for various murders would simply filter out all the studies which link violent children with violent parenting.

  Vampire-lovers can probably be classed as immature – but dressing as a Goth and reading about supposed life after death doesn’t make children turn to murder. It’s usually an abusive background that causes people to kill.

  Single parent families

  Politicians and newspapers which have a political axe to grind always make much of the fact that child killers like Robert Thompson come from single parent families. But when Robert’s parents were together he merely had two violent parents rather than one.

  And many of the children profiled lived with both their parents. Cheryl Pierson’s mother and father stayed together until her mother’s death from kidney disease – and her boyfriend, Rob Cuccio, who helped mastermind James Pierson’s murder was from a stable two parent family. Shirley Wolf’s parents were still together years after she went to prison. And, though Billy Bell was not Mary Bell’s biological father, he lived with Mary and her mother for many years.

  The Bells had a very odd marriage – but Kip Kinkel’s parents were devoted to each other. Kip admitted that he’d killed his mother because he couldn’t bear to see the pain and disappointment on her face when she saw that he’d killed his highly critical dad.

  Children are, of course, affected by their parent’s divorce – but it’s the constant arguing accompanying the split that often does the most damage. Sean Pica’s mother fought constantly with Sean’s dad even after he’d left her and remarried. (Sean’s father wasn’t one of the bad guys. Though he’d found it impossible to stay in the marriage, he returned to it from a sense of duty when his oldest child was very ill.) Mary Anne Woodham screamed at her husband in front of the children then blamed little Luke when her spouse left the family for good.

  Children need to know that they are loved by their parents. They also need a sense of stability. The profiled children with married parents didn’t have this because at least one of the parents was physically, sexually or emotionally abusive. The children with the single mother – such as Cindy Collier – also didn’t feel safe because she introduced numerous violent boyfriends to the home.

  Defective genes

  A percentage of the population believes that some children are simply born uncaring and that as a result they can easily turn into mini-killers. But the facts suggest otherwise.

  William Allnutt missed his mother so much (and became so ill) when he was at boarding school that he was sent home to her. In prison, he was more concerned about her feelings than he was his own. Cheryl Pierson often went to her father’s room to shield her terminally ill mother from his violence and sexual demands. Peter Dinsdale left children’s homes again and again in the hope that this visit with his mother would turn out to be a loving one and little Sean Sellers cried every time his mother went away.

  Even after they’ve murdered, many of these children remain attached to their abusive or inadequate parents. Shirley Wolf lay across her father at visiting times – and was desolate, years later, when he stopped answering her letters from prison. And one of the few times that Rod Ferrell got tearful was in court when his mother cried.

  Sometimes the child is still desperate to believe that at least one parent is good. This tends to mean that the child still believes that she herself is bad and it makes it difficult for her (or him) to move on emotionally. Cindy Collier at first made little progress in prison therapy as she refused to see that her mother had failed her by leaving her with numerous violent boyfriends and by not reacting when Cindy was raped again and again by a relative.

  It’s clear, then, that these children start off feeling love – yet geneticists try to tell us that these juveniles who go on to kill are simply born bad. They blame nature rather than nurturing – or rather the lack of nurturing.

  Whilst it’s true that one child may be born with more timidity or verve than his siblings, we can see again and again that it’s the environment that determines how these qualities are moulded. When young troublemakers are placed in a caring, positive-parenting style environment they improve. Dr Dorothy Lewis, who assesses teenage prisoners on Death Row, has said that even at this stage she sees a softening in some of them, as they’ve been around kind and intelligence adults for the first time in their hate-filled lives.

  That said, it would be wrong to suggest that a few acts of kindness can undo the years of damage and neglect. Sean Sellers killed a shop clerk who’d spent the last hour happily chatting to him. And Cindy Collier and Shirley Wolf murdered a lady who’d let them in to her house for a drink and to use the phone. Luke Woodward shot a girl who had hugged him and other pupils frequently at school. He later apologised to the girl
’s family in court, but obviously this did nothing to take away their pain.

  Society erroneously gives the impression that these children are simply born bad. One book on the subject explains in depth about how often these children are violently parented – but the publishers put the words ‘bad seeds’ on the front cover so the casual observer in a bookstore comes away with the impression that these youngsters sprung malevolent from the womb. Another book gave the impression that these were children from good homes (including some of the children who were profiled here!) who mysteriously went awry due to some inner demon, whereas more research would have shown that these children were relentlessly mocked and struck. The following chapter identifies some of these myth-makers and looks at how insidiously they work.

  21 Riders on the Storm

  The Myth-Makers

  Numerous individuals and groups contribute to the myth that children who kill have chosen to go bad or were born bad. Some will do so out of ignorance, others because it’s easier to blame the child than to change society. This author identified the myth-makers below whilst researching this book:

  The child’s adult relatives

  When a child kills his or her violent parent, the family tends to close ranks. Relatives praise the abusive parent and either deny that abuse took place or strongly minimise it, sometimes because they feel guilty at their own failure to intervene.

  These families tend to have many dysfunctional members who assume that the way they were raised was normal therefore they put all of the pathology onto the juvenile who kills. Psychologist Dorothy Rowe has written that adults can ‘inflict the same pain, humiliation and fear that had been inflicted on them.’