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

by Carol Anne Davis

  Many of these adults were too immature and damaged to raise a child, but they procreated regardless men blamed the child for all their woes.

  One parent (most often the mother) often also looks the other way when their spouse rapes their daughter. This topic was raised in an edition of the Kilroy talk show where the topic was Sexual Abuse Within The Family. One woman explained that when she was six she’d told her mother that her father was interfering with her. Sadly, the mother’s response was never to speak to the child directly again, only talking to her through her sisters. The family chose not to believe that this little girl was being molested – but the authorities eventually let her wear a wire and they were able to hear the abuse for themselves.

  Another situation where adults had failed to protect a child was revealed in an episode of Correspondent which looked at paedophile priests. One boy who had been inappropriately touched by a certain priest knew that the man was coming to his aunt and uncle’s house where he was staying. The boy begged them not to let him be taken anywhere by the priest and the relatives agreed. But as the priest was leaving the house he asked to take the child with him to show him the new church organ. The aunt said ‘Yes, of course, Father’ because she’d been raised to have respect for priests. The child was then taken a way and abused by the man who was unrepentant about the child’s anguish and made it clear to the boy that he’d do this to other boys.

  Again and again there were reports made to the local Bishop about this particular priest but he was just moved from one parish to the next where he continued to rape male children. Some adults in the community simply refused to believe that a priest would do such things – but in reality there are so many clergy abusing children that there have been special sexual offender courses set up to treat them. And if they are married clergy the course leaders can co-counsel their families.

  This particular priest continued to deny any wrongdoing but one boy used a hidden camera to videotape what was happening. Thereafter the priest was finally charged. Whilst on bail this paedophile committed suicide. Sadly, several of the youths he’d spent time alone with also committed suicide.

  It took many years for this man’s paedophiliac activities to officially come to light – yet dozens of his parishioners suspected he was harming the community’s children. Those adults who did react seem only to have informed someone in the church’s hierarchy. It appears that no one went to the police.

  If one of this man’s victims had snapped and killed him, it’s a safe bet that child would have been classified as bad and the priest as good.

  The child’s siblings

  The child who kills often has siblings who turn against them. Cheryl Pierson and Wendy Gardner both had younger sisters who took the side of their dead relatives in court. The prosecution suggested this meant that Cheryl and Wendy were just ‘born bad’ as their siblings said they had no problem with the dead relative. But a closer look at the facts doesn’t bear this out.

  Witnesses had seen Cheryl’s sister being slapped across the face and mocked by her father – and Cheryl’s brother was so tired of being hit and ridiculed that he left home at the earliest opportunity. Neighbours had tried to keep the children away from the man.

  Cheryl’s sister had said that any sexual contact between Cheryl and her dad was Cheryl’s fault as she was ‘always laying all over him.’ The younger child understandably didn’t know that this was learned behaviour, that incest victims are coached into being sexual by their abusers in order to avoid further punishment.

  Wendy Gardner’s sister also said that her guardian had treated them well – but in court, when questioned, she admitted to being beaten with a paddle and a fly swat. Neighbours had heard screams and someone had contacted the social services. Both Wendy’s sister and Cheryl’s sister were now staying with relatives of the deceased, something that must also have helped shape their view of things.

  It’s also evident that a controlling parent or guardian often doesn’t act so controllingly towards a younger child as the younger child has fewer places to go and thus fewer chances to anger the parent. Wendy and Cheryl were both teenagers desperately trying to find love with their new boyfriends, something that neither Wendy’s grandmother (who had called the police and asked them to stop the teenagers caressing each other) or Cheryl’s incredibly jealous father could tolerate.

  The other strong difference between the older sister who snapped and the younger one was that the older girls had started menstruating. Menstruation puts a strain on over eighty percent of even the most balanced women – for a physically and emotionally abused young girl, the additional stress must be nearly intolerable. Stress strongly exacerbates premenstrual syndrome and it’s known that it can also change the length of the cycle. This was likely in Cindy Collier’s case for at one stage she bled for almost three weeks and had agonising cramps.

  Not-so-true crime writers

  Some crime writers – perhaps pandering to public option – further misrepresent the cruelty that these children endured before they fought back and killed. They get round the parental violence by saying that the child was difficult so the parents ‘had to beat’ him or her frequently. They also treat the child’s natural attempt to evade further assaults by running away as another form of pathology.

  Encyclopaedia-style works about children who kill often don’t mention the circumstances leading up to the murders at all, so that the casual reader is left with the impression that these children were simply born bad and chose to be exceptionally violent. The reality is very different.

  People with negative mindsets

  We seem to live in a culture that expects the worst from our children. Parents assume that the terrible two’s (when two-year-olds have endless temper tantrums) are an inevitability. But educationalist Patricia Knox has noted that these frustrated outbursts are often due to an active, inquisitive two-year-old being confined to the house with little to do and no other children to interact with and a parent who is busy with other chores.

  There’s also a common misconception that if you don’t hit a child it will cause chaos. But Claire Rayner said in an episode of the BBC programme Question Time that she had never hit her children as she recognised this to be a form of bullying – yet her children always knew right from wrong and were very well behaved. (This author’s interview with Claire Rayner appears later in this book.) Educational writer and psychologist Penelope Leach said the same thing at a Children Are Unbeatable seminar held in London in January 2002. She was never hit as a child so had never hit her own offspring.

  Psychologist and writer Dorothy Rowe, speaking at the same seminar, said that her friends had brought their children up without hitting them. These children had grown into the most confident, caring and hardworking adults that she knew and had a strong sense of who they were.

  Contrast that with the numerous troubled abusive adults and abused children detailed in this book, and it’s easy to see that violence doesn’t work.

  School teachers can also add to this culture of negativity by suggesting that pupils are becoming more disruptive than in previous years. In truth, children with problems are sometimes expelled nowadays whereas they’d have previously been seen – and hopefully helped – by a child psychologist.

  America is equally guilty of misrepresenting its young as Mike Males, author of Framing Youth pointed out in an informative internet article called Why Demonize A Healthy Teen Culture? He stated that ‘Ignoring clear statistics and research, authorities seem to lie in wait for suburban youth killings, months and thousands of miles apart, to validate a false hypothesis of generational disease, even as they ignore the more compelling evidence of deteriorating adult behaviour.’ He notes that adults killing kids is far more common than kids killing kids. Other American writers have also remarked on this trend, pointing out that four-million American children are seriously hurt by their parents every year.

  Popular television: a licence to hit

  Many TV pro
grammes add to the notion that hitting children is a normal part of life. Characters in soap operas often threaten to clip their children around the ear – in other words, to hit them about the head, something that the medical profession recognises as very dangerous. Violent criminals usually have neurological damage caused by blows to the head. These are known as the ‘soft signs’ of abuse. Even more alarmingly, threatening to clip a child around the ear is designed to raise a laugh in working class comedies.

  In other instances, misinformation about child rearing is given by one character and not corrected by another. For example, a character in an episode of Coronation Street, aired in January 2002, said ‘In my day you picked a baby up once every four hours for feeding and changing and let it cry the rest of the time.’

  The viewer is left with the impression that this behaviour will toughen the baby up – but educational writer Patricia Knox noted in her book Troubled Children that low-weight babies who were subjected to this routine in hospital often failed to bond properly with their mothers. The babies weren’t fed when they cried for food then were woken when they finally fell asleep. They were too small and confused to feed sufficiently in these circumstances so remained hungry and distressed. The vital mother-baby bond didn’t form and these babies had numerous problems as they matured.

  Such lack of bonding – especially if combined with a later lack of care – can even cause serious pathology. Co-ed killer Ted Bundy and child-killer Ian Brady were both left alone for long periods during their first few weeks of life. Bundy’s religious mother was ashamed of his illegitimacy and initially left him at the orphanage. Brady’s mother bravely ignored the stigma of having a baby out of wedlock but had to go out to work in the evenings, leaving him with whoever she could find. Both men matured into dangerous psychopaths who killed many times.

  One of the female serial killers that this author profiled in Women Who Kill – Gwen Graham – had been left to cry by her mother who wrongly believed that cradling a crying baby spoiled it. Gwen soon showed the signs of an unbonded baby, refusing to look at her mother when she entered the room. This lack of bonding was reinforced by physical abuse from both parents and Gwen eventually went on to kill. There’s an unfounded notion that too much love spoils a baby – but it is hate that ruins human beings. A child who feels loved has the confidence to increasingly explore and enjoy his or her world.

  Another opportunity to tell it like it is was lost during an episode of the Richard And Judy show aired in February 2002. A man whose son had just been jailed for torturing pensioners appeared on the programme. Whilst introducing him, the presenters said he believed his son was simply born bad.

  But during the short discussion which followed the father said that he believed in corporal punishment and would hit his children on the backs of their legs. Now, our prisons are full of violent adults who were subjected to corporal punishment as children but neither of the presenters picked up on this fact. Instead, they asked the man if his son had been in any way unusual as a child. The father replied ‘Well, he’d always lie. I’d tell him I’m going to slap you for what you just did but I’ll slap you harder if you lie to me and he always lied.’

  No one pointed out that of course a child will lie to avoid being physically hurt and humiliated. An adult in the same position would do the exact same thing. The man said that he also believed in capital punishment and that his son now deserved to hang. Shortly afterwards the interview ended with one of the presenters murmuring sympathetically ‘I feel sorry for you.’

  Such programmes offer an opportunity to inform the general public. Instead, they simply bolster the status quo. Sadly, our formal educational system can equally fail children in various ways.

  The educational system

  Children who are being poorly parented are understandably unable to concentrate in the classroom so they are labelled as suffering from attention deficit disorder and may be punished with powerful drugs. The influential and rich drugs lobby gives the impression that such tablets are a cure for all ills but in truth, all drugs have side effects.

  An abused child is liable to play truant from school in order to have a few hours refuge from the demands of authoritative adults. Jesse Pomeroy, William Allnutt, Robert Thompson, Rod Ferrell, Wendy Gardner, James Evans and Johnny Garrett fall into this category. Again, these truants are simply penalised and there’s little effort made to understand the reasons for the truancy. Educationalist writer Patricia Knox tells of distressed school-phobic children being told by judges that they’d have to go to jail if they didn’t return to class.

  Anyone who downplays bullying

  A child who is being bullied at home will go to school with violence on his or her mind. Some of these children become bullies – Jesse Pomeroy, Cindy Collier, Jon Venables and Johnny Garrett fit into this category. Others will remain victims – Shirley Wolf was taunted because she smelt bad. Wendy Gardner was called a tart by less promiscuous classmates. And Kip Kinkel was so remorselessly picked upon that he wrote in his diary that he was ready to kill another boy. (This is not to imply that all bullying victims are being brutalised at home. Children who are in any way different can be picked upon with bullies honing in on a victim’s clothing, weight, height, hair colour, intellect and so on.)

  Bullying causes numerous problems for the victim. A victimised child may become school-phobic, develop an eating disorder, have nightmares and start to do badly in their schoolwork. It’s regrettably common – when four thousand children were polled in the mid eighties, 68% of them reported being bullied at some time.

  Bullies also have many problems. Kidscape, the charity which specialises in alleviating bullying, has said that most bullies are ‘afraid, jealous, envious, cruel, angry, insecure and unhappy.’ This may be due to family problems, loneliness or other frustrations. Clearly, there are no winners when bullying occurs.

  Yet many parents and teachers continue to downplay the misery that such behaviour causes, saying that they went through it themselves so today’s children will just have to live with it. But as Michelle Elliot of Kidscape has pointed out, we used to stuff children up chimneys and down mines then we realised that this was wrong and stopped doing it. We can stop school bullying too.

  Some teachers and parents erroneously try to change the personality of the victimised child rather than confront the bully – but children are often bullied for their special qualities. These qualities are the very ones which society will value in later life. Many of today’s most successful adults – including Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise and Ranulph Fiennes – have stated that they were bullied when young.

  A bullied child may only confide in a parent when they’ve run out of coping strategies of their own so it’s unhelpful if the parent simply says ‘just stand up for yourself.’ Kidscape offers various helpful leaflets for both parents and children and further details appear in the Useful Addresses section of this book. Briefly, the child can be helped by being reassured that he or she is loved, supported and not to blame for the bullying. Parents should also praise their child and help them to develop social skills, perhaps by finding a hobby that they really enjoy. The school should play its part in stamping out this misery so Kidscape offers training programmes which help schools implement an anti-bullying policy.

  Bullying can be serious. If a larger adult ran up to you in the street, tore your clothes and yelled offensive comments about your size, you’d have recourse to the police and your victimiser would hopefully be facing an assault charge. Yet if a child is picked on in the exact same way by another child, a large sector of the community will ignore the terrified victim’s plight.

  Newspaper reports

  Certain sectors of the press demonise children who kill. Ten-year-old Robert Thompson was described by one reporter as a hard-staring mini Charles Manson. In reality, he liked to sit on his mother’s knee, still sucked his thumb and had an asthma attack after being sentenced. Eleven-year-old Mary Bell was also made out to be cold and compa
ssionless when in truth she was childishly confused and alternated between asking if she could go home and expecting the state to hang her like they did in cowboy films.

  The press suggests to the public that such children will always be dangerous – yet the early intervention of caring adults suggests otherwise. Mary Bell, who killed two toddlers, hasn’t committed any acts of violence since being removed from her violent and sexually abusive household. It’s over twenty years since she was released from prison. Previous newspaper reports about her beating a goldfish to death turned out to be completely fabricated by parties interested in earning money from the press.

  The tabloids did the same thing when Robert Thompson was due for release, claiming that he’d tried to choke another inmate. It was yet another attempt to blacken the name of a child who has apparently made enormous progress since being removed from his dysfunctional home at age ten. And Wendy Gardner, whose grandmother described her as a whorish wild child, has been described as a model prisoner.

  Criminologists and others who understand media speak can read between the lines – but members of the public who have little knowledge about crime tend to believe what they are reading. Yet many policemen will tell you that if a journalist can’t get them to give genuinely sensational detail they will simply invent sensational quotes.

  Newspapers tend to give stories about children who have killed a ‘child born bad, parents good’ slant. As such, a journalist may write that a family was ‘loving but strict’ for which read ‘cold and demanding.’ For ‘tightknit’ read ‘emotionally suffocating.’ For ‘disciplinarian’ read ‘controlling and cruel.’