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

by Carol Anne Davis

  Gavin de Becker has noted that people who know that a child is being abused don’t usually talk to the press. As a result, journalists end up talking to neighbours who hardly knew the family. That neighbour then innocently says that they seemed like a good family, that there was nothing wrong.

  This author found similar myths about the parenting of female serial killers. They’d endured relentless violence yet certain sectors of the media suggested that their childhoods were normal. And a newspaper initially described Rose West – who ferociously beat and sexually abused her offspring – as a strict but loving mum.

  The legal system

  Most of the children profiled in this book had good legal representation but this isn’t always the case. Dorothy Lewis, who evaluates teenagers on Death Row, has found that lawyers aren’t particularly interested in young clients. They tend to take the case at face value and don’t delve deeply into the child’s background to find out exactly what he or she endured. Dr Lewis writes that ‘many of these families would rather see their children put to death than reveal what had happened behind the closed doors of childhood.’ She also found that ‘many of the adolescents themselves preferred death to exposing their abusive parents.’ There have even been instances of lawyers being belatedly sent information about the child’s numerous hospital visits for suspicious injuries, information that the lawyer didn’t use to force an appeal.

  Clinical psychologist Lenore E Walker has also noted this trend and writes in the Foreword to The Kids Next Door that ‘attorneys make deals that benefit themselves rather than their young clients, that judges play at being mental health professionals, picking and choosing whom to believe without the information needed to make informed judgements, and that doctors untrained in the dynamics of family violence commit gross errors that might be considered malpractice if their clients were not so young and vulnerable and rendered invisible.’

  Such damaged children fare little better when it comes to the jury. Paul Mones has found that ‘the jurors will react first as parents, second as the children they once were, and third as the impartial decision-makers they take an oath to be.’

  Judges often compound the child’s distress by labelling them as bad and evil. Patrick Wilson, a respected schoolteacher and author of a book called Children Who Kill published in 1973 (out of print but available from libraries) wrote ‘If any criminal has an option on our usefully applied pity, it must be the child who kills.’ Yet thirty years later there is still little sympathy or understanding from the judiciary. As former UN Secretary General, Peres de Cuellar said ‘You measure the justice of a society by how it treats its children.’

  22 She’s So Cold

  Telling It Like It Is

  As the profiles in this book delineate, the children who killed were mostly children who’d been almost killed themselves by adults. Often the abusive adult was their primary carer – so they were struck, mocked and neglected by the people they trusted most Dr Roy Eskapa, a sex therapist, has written that ‘Almost every violent prisoner investigated turns out to have been subjected to severe corporal punishment during childhood’ and ‘when children are subjected to corporal punishment, they learn that violence is the norm.’

  And in an American conference about violence in schools, psychologist Frank Zenere said that the factors included ‘child abuse, ineffective parenting, violence in the home, poverty, prejudice, substance abuse and easy access to guns.’

  A recent article on compassion by Julia Goodwin, the editor of a parenting magazine, confirmed that ‘children aren’t born bad – in fact, experts say we’re all born with a tendency to be kind. Witness the toddler who, in an effort to alleviate another child’s distress, will offer up their teddy to be cuddled.’

  Dan Korem has studied children who commit ostensibly random acts of violence. He found that the family profile included divorce, separation, physical abuse, sexual abuse or a severely dysfunctional parent. (Korem and other such experts are briefly overviewed in Jon Bellini’s excellent study of child killer Luke Woodham, Child’s Prey.)

  Not so grand grandparents

  This abuse – be it sexual, emotional or physical – usually goes back several generations for such cruelty is learned behaviour. The hunted becomes the hunter, with a man or woman who has been abused or unnurtured as a child going on to perpetrate very similar abuses on his own offspring. Ironically, when these parents desert the child, it’s often given to grandparents whose patenting methods left their own children with low self-esteem. William Allnutt, Rod Ferrell, Wendy Gardner and Johnny Garrett all fit into this category.

  Older parents, who understandably have lower energy levels, can also pose a problem to their children if they see normal activity as hyperactivity and seek to curtail it, as happened with late baby Kip Kinkel. Older parents (and very young immature ones) can also have unrealistic expectations of what a child can offer them. Luke Woodham’s mother demanded that her sons get A’s at school then come straight home and offer her adult conversation. She even insisted on driving Luke the one mile journey to his school, refused to let him go to school dances and accompanied him on his pitifully few dates. Such parents presumably believed that they wanted children – but they refuse to let them be childlike.

  This author once spoke to a children’s charity worker who said the worst case of abuse she’d seen involved a professional woman who had waited until her late thirties before having her first child. She expected a textbook child and was soon complaining to neighbours that the baby ‘wasn’t playing properly’ with its toys. By the time the child was a toddler she was so disturbed by its normal toddler-like playing that she shut it in a playpen and went out for the day. She did this every day until neighbours complained to the authorities and the horrendously neglected child was taken away.

  Traumatised brains

  Some of these neglected and traumatised children’s brains will develop differently to the brains of children raised in loving families. A Royal Society Of Medicine conference showed images of the brains of Romanian orphans who hadn’t enjoyed normal adult-child play-times or been shown love. The frontal-temporal areas of the children’s brains were noticeably underdeveloped. As this area is responsible for regulating the emotions, these children showed abnormal emotional responses to everyday stimuli.

  Professor Perry of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston commented on such brain abnormality in an article on the subject in the Observer Magazine (20th January 2002) and explained that ‘Adverse experiences influence the mature brain, but in the developing brain they actually play a role in organising the neural system.’ The Professor added that such understimulated children ‘can have profound social problems, but are often very bright.’

  The article also noted that the children who are understimulated by the parent are also often overstimulated by stress. (For example, if the parents are ignoring the child but hitting each other.) The article said that as a result of such ongoing fear, the children often had increased muscle tone, extreme sleep disturbances and abnormal heart regulation. Child psychiatrist Dr Dora Black added that this constant hyper-arousal was so unbearable that many of the sufferers turned to drink or drugs.

  Dr Black said that, though later stimulation can improve the child’s brain, prevention is better than cure and children should be removed from a toxic environment as soon as possible. Professor Perry added ‘In order to solve the problems of violence, we need to change our childrearing practices. If not addressed, maltreatment in early life increases risk for substance abuse, mental health problems, school failure and criminality.’

  Generations of abuse

  Most of the parents in this book will understandably be viewed by the reader as hate figures – but if this author had profiled their childhoods there would be equal sympathy for them. Thomas Pomeroy was battered by his father – and went on to batter his sons Jesse and Charles. James Pierson was slapped across the face so often by his parents that his friends were desperate to get him out o
f the house. When James became a father he would slap his three children across the face and was proud of his youngest daughter because she refused to cry.

  Lou Wolf’s early life was marred by a violent father who sexually abused Lou’s sister, by an alcoholic stepfather and by a priest who took nude pictures of him whilst he was in care. In turn, Lou beat his own children, sexually abused his daughter Shirley and took explicit photos of her when she was small.

  Ann and Robert Thompson senior had endured violent childhoods – and passed this violence on to their children. Johnny Garrett’s mother Charlotte was so multiply-abused that she was in and out of psychiatric care. By marrying one violent man after another, she recreated this sexual, emotional and physically abusive hell for Johnny until his mind fractured and he too ended up mentally ill.

  Betty Bell was frequently spanked by her mother and was terrified of her. By five she had developed eating disorders and her mother would also spank her for not eating. Upset after her father’s death at age fourteen, she started staying out late and her mother gave her further hidings. An uncle also hit her for stealing a purse from another relative. At fifteen she took an overdose of her mother’s tranquillisers and almost died.

  These individuals parented as they were patented and were unable to look clearly at the damage they were doing. As psychologist Dorothy Rowe has written ‘until we meet the important needs we bring into adulthood from childhood we are not ready to take on the responsibilities of bringing up a child.’

  Zero tolerance

  Psychologists such as Alice Miller have been writing for decades about the harm done by such so-called legitimate childhood punishment. Her book Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries has received worldwide recognition. Other psychologists such as Gitta Sereny have made it clear that all children are born good and that ‘the offending child is a symbol of family – and more than that, of societal – breakdown.’

  In 1999 E Thompson overviewed 88 studies which showed that physical punishment led to less compliance in children aged two to six. It caused increased aggression in the child, an aggression which remained when that child grew up. The smacked children had less ability to empathise with others and had more mental health problems than children who weren’t hit. They grew into adults who were more likely to hit their spouse and who had an increased probability of antisocial and criminal behaviour in adulthood.

  Criminologist Lonnie Athens has written about why our value system wrongly believes that hitting is good and not hitting is bad. He says it stems from more warlike times when people believed that they had to toughen children up for when they went into battle. Ironically, corporal punishment in the home today continues to make children more warrior-like so that the violence goes on.

  Games adults play

  It should be clear to the open minded reader by now that adults hitting children is both wrong and damaging. Yet many of the people who champion or tolerate such violence against minors are the first to mock eroticised corporal punishment between consenting adults.

  In reality, they are entirely different. The adult who hits a child does so to cause pain and distress, whereas the dominant adult who hits a willing submissive adult does so to invoke pleasure. The first is an abuse of power whereas the second is a consensual power exchange.

  In his book Radical Desire which looks at fetishism, bondage and domination, author Mark Ramsden explains that ‘like most people with this sexuality, I have experienced much anguish along the way; partly because of the constraints imposed by the Christian religion and partly because of the myths propagated by the therapy industry.’ He adds that ‘Many otherwise liberal people still confuse S/M play with abuse. It is actually a reaction to abuse, an attempt to heal a deep wound.’

  Many frequently-punished children end up with a sado-masochistic adult sexuality. No one knows exactly why this is, but perhaps children try to make sense of corporal punishment from supposedly caring parents by convincing themselves that this is a form of love. After all, they are frequently being told that it’s for their own good. Or maybe the beatings just happen to occur at the same time as the libido is awakening so that sexual stimulus and blows become confused.

  Whatever the reason, the punished child grows into an adult who has erotic fantasies involving discipline. For the first time ever, he or she can take a hated act and turn it into something where the ultimate result – in the form of an orgasm – is good. It’s incredibly ironic that the adults who failed the child when he or she was being beaten now try to punish it again for its adult sexuality, calling it deviant or sick.

  In truth, intelligent adult players in the BDSM (bondage, domination and sado-masochism) scene often go to great lengths to ensure that the only pain they offer is erotic. And anecdotal evidence suggests that these adults view spanking as an erotic act so they don’t hit their kids.

  Consensual sado-masochism is a world away from criminal sadistic acts where one person terrorises the other and causes intense fear and unendurable pain.

  Ironically, many unthinking adults will criticise the man or woman who canes their partner for joint sexual release. Yet these same adults will champion an adult caning a helpless child.

  A voice of reason

  Broadcaster and writer Claire Rayner OBE has fought energetically for an end to such violence towards children. She also has a long term interest in crime and has written many crime novels. This author interviewed her on 24th January 2002 whilst researching Children Who Kill.

  Claire said that she’d first become interested in the subject when she was a child. ‘I saw the way that adults lied and behaved towards children.’ In 1939, at the age of eight, she became a wartime evacuee and had a very unhappy time.

  When she grew up she became a nurse at the Royal Northern Hospital in London then studied midwifery at Guy’s Hospital. She later became a Sister in the Paediatrics Department of the Whittington Hospital. Throughout her nursing career, she was appalled to see some of the nurses smacking sick children and she saw other children brought in with injuries caused by their parents. One night two little girls from different families were brought in dead, both killed by parental punishments that had gone too far.

  Claire started to appear on radio programmes suggesting that parents shouldn’t hit their children but in those days almost everyone regarded her viewpoint as stupid. The general public and the media believed that if children weren’t beaten they would simply go wild.

  But slowly the broadsheets started to come round to her way of thinking bolstered by the number of studies showing that it is children who are hit who have problems, not children from violence-free homes.

  During these years she became well respected for her medical advice and published bestselling books on everything from sex education for children to home nursing. Everyone could see that her advice on a broad range of issues worked – yet many people still ignored her recommendations to stop hitting juveniles.

  Asked why a significant percentage of the public is still in favour of smacking kids, Claire says it’s because it’s what they’re used to so they think it’s normal. So what would she say to those people who suggest that they were hit as children but that it didn’t do them any harm? ‘I’d tell them that you can’t know how much harm has been done to you,’ she says simply, adding that you can often see by such adult’s aggressiveness or depression that they have been damaged by their early experiences.

  In 1996 she was given an OBE for her services to women’s issues and to health issues. In truth, she has done equally valid work to protect children. Yet it’s still an uphill struggle with one child per week in Britain dying at its parent’s hands.

  Claire has never struck her own children, so they in turn have never struck their children. Asked which parenting guide she’d recommend she says The No Smacking Guide To Good Behaviour by Penelope Leach.

  No smacking

  Penelope Leach is a childcare expert and research psychologist, the author of several bes
tselling parenting books and the writer of the aforementioned no smacking leaflet. The leaflet explains that ‘giving up smacking altogether doesn’t mean going soft on discipline’ and ‘children don’t get spoiled because parents are gentle and try to treat them as people.’ The leaflet stresses the importance of praising a child’s good behaviour rather than ignoring the child until it does something bad. (For details of how to obtain this free leaflet please see the Appendix at the end of this book.)

  Penelope spoke at the Children Are Unbeatable conference in January 2002, noting that child-beating was rooted in the historical belief that children were the property of the father and his to do with as he wished. In other words, children were originally domestic slaves.

  She noted that today our government protects a wife from her husband, but not a child from its parent. Our most vulnerable citizens have the least protection under the law.

  She’s found that adults who were hit as children try to hide behind the mantra of protection, namely the belief that ‘it didn’t do me any harm.’ This comes about because children blame themselves for the violence rather than blaming their parents. It is easier – in the short term – to deny the emotional hurt caused by these blows.

  Penelope said that being struck was not a trivial matter and that it affected the hurt children strongly, though not in the way that its parents desired. In other words, a naughty child that was smacked became naughtier. She’d found that the more educated the parent, the less likely he or she was to hit.

  Penelope has found that some parents try to minimise the amount of physical pain they cause their children whereas in the USA and France parents thought they had a moral justification for hurting their young. Indeed, Arizona and Arkansas recently passed laws strengthening the parental right to hit a child.