Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (27 page)

One of the most unusual sex murders committed by a child is told in Greggory Morris’s
The
Kids
Next
Door,
a book about children who kill their parents. It profiles a young man called Garry who was frequently beaten by older bullies at school for being artistic and different. The teenager started to steal and stay out late and his mother would shout at him and encourage his father to do the same.

Garry retreated more and more into a fantasy world fuelled by sniffing large quantities of glue. He also started to masturbate outside the home of a girl he fancied. (Men who grow up to be rapists, child molesters or sex killers are often Peeping Toms from a very early age.) He felt unsure of himself around women but he was desperate to have sex.

Six weeks after his father’s death, Garry had yet another argument with his mother about his glue addiction. Deciding to kill her, he battered her over the head with a metal bar. The assault fractured her skull but she was still breathing so he raced to another room for a knife and slit her throat then had intercourse with
the still-warm corpse. He’d later explain that ‘I had Mother’s dead body there. There was nothing left to do but make use of it.’ So, at eighteen years of age, he entered his mother’s corpse and lost his virginity.

A psychiatrist later said it was likely that the boy was a psychopath but that he wasn’t insane. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for this sexual killing.

It’s entirely normal for children to become interested in sex as they mature and most children will play doctor and nurses games as a way of finding out about their own and others’ bodies. But children who are sexually abused will be much more extreme in their search for a sexual outlet, and more likely to use force.

Psychologist Patrick Carnes has written that ‘masturbation is an essential part of being a sexual person.’ He found that many sex addicts come from proscriptive families who often see masturbation as a sin. Ironically, people from such disapproving families are often inappropriately sexually active when they grow up. Carnes tells the story of a Lutheran minister who picked up men in the park for casual sex, despite the fact that he found these encounters humiliating. He was badly beaten up, but continued cruising – and only sought help after having sex with one of his young parishioners who he feared might tell.

Another man, who went on to molest his children’s
babysitters, had been sent to confession as a child where his penis was fondled by a paedophile priest. The priest said that Gene wasn’t supposed to touch himself as masturbation was a sin.

Often such abused children carry similar abuses out on their younger brothers and sisters. Serial killer Rose West was sexually abused by her father and went on, in turn, to masturbate one of her younger brothers. One of Robert Thompson’s brothers was investigated for sexual assaults on a younger child. Mary Bell carved letters, post mortem, on one of her little victims – and it’s very likely that she was copying her mother who, as a sado-masochistic prostitute, might have been asked to carry out scarification (cutting for erotic purposes) on the flesh of her male clients.

When normal development takes place, sexual exploration is healthy and simply gives rise to pleasure. But with abused children, masturbation also becomes a form of desperately-needed self-comfort. As a result, this masturbation will be frenziedly carried out as a replacement for parental love and nurturing. As such, it becomes something pathological rather than something good. As so much is wrong with the child’s life, the urge to masturbate can become all encompassing in a futile attempt to put things right. These children can become addicted to sex by the time they are adults, and are unable to cut down on self-pleasuring
even when they’ve made their genitals bleed.

Unfortunately most reportage of child sex offenders doesn’t include details of what they’ve endured, only of their crimes. For example, in November 2001, an eleven-year-old boy was tried at Cardiff Crown Court for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl. He was found guilty and placed on the sex offenders register for two and a half years (but found not guilty of unlawful sexual intercourse) with the judge commenting that the boy knew he’d done wrong. It would have been helpful if his background had also been reported so that readers could understand what made a child offend so seriously at such a young age. Similarly, a programme about the crimes of Robert Black – whilst offering first class information about his crimes and their effect on the victim’s parents – said only of his own tragic life that he’d had a troubled history.

Sometimes the person who has been frequently abused gives up on people altogether and turns to animals for sexual experimentation. One woman who’d had a terrible childhood wrote a fan letter to serial killer John Wayne Gacy in which she admitted that she liked to ‘jerk off’ her dog. And a documentary about bestiality included a man who had been so strictly raised by his Christian Fundamentalist parents that he found women terrifying and preferred to have sex
with a horse. That said, this man felt romantic love for his horse and would have strongly objected to their ‘relationship’ being labelled as animal abuse.

In fairness, it should also be noted that brutalised children don’t always remain cruel towards animals. Often they are animal lovers who, after removal from their abusive backgrounds, grow to love animals again.

Aware of this, violence expert Gavin de Becker launched and continues to fund a scheme called Patient’s Pets which gives criminals of all ages in secure hospitals access to small animals. He’s seen for himself how some of these violent men from violent homes have broken their hearts over the death of a guinea pig. He writes that ‘many of these men will be locked up for life without a visitor and a mouse or bird might be all they have.’

An article by Peter J Lewis published in the Insider magazine backs this up. It told of how staff at a maximum security centre in Ohio allowed the inmates on one ward to keep pets and ‘within a year suicide attempts were down to zero, and prescribed medication down by a half.’ The pets in prison scheme was so successful during its various American trials that it has now been adopted by South Africa, Australia and Spain.

Sadly, Britain has opted out of the scheme and inmates at Garth Prison in Lancashire have been told that they can no longer breed budgies. As the inmates were giving the surplus baby budgies to senior citizens, everyone has lost out.

The thinking behind this seems to be that we have to be tough on criminals – but some of these adult and young offenders have known nothing but toughness all their lives. Caring for a pet has been shown to reduce prisoner violence. It also reduces the recidivism rate.

Many young offenders have been verbally and physically harangued by their parents then mocked as underachievers by their teachers. The pet they’re given in prison may be their first experience of unconditional love.

Children who kill are least likely to kill a member of their own family. This is probably because these families are so violent that to risk their retaliation is terrifying. It’s easier to take that childish rage out on a stranger, usually an even smaller child (as Jesse Pomeroy, Robert Thompson, Jon Venables and Mary Bell did) or to choose an elderly weaker victim, the choice of Johnny Garrett, Cindy Collier and Shirley Wolf.

Another reason that children don’t kill their abuser is that most children consider their childhoods to be normal, no matter how dysfunctional. The child has lived with the violent or neglectful parent since birth and has no other yardstick with which to judge his or her background. Plus that child is sometimes being told at school that he or she is a bad child, not that they are the result of inadequate or cruel parenting.

Numerous parents emotionally and physically abuse their children and in the UK one child per week dies at its parent’s hands. The few children who do turn the tables have usually been abused so relentlessly that they can see no other way out. Even so, the child who kills a violent parent invariably blames himself and is filled with remorse.

Abuse that ends in patricide – or, even more rarely, matricide – is not a modern phenomena. Bernard Smith was born in 1923 to a drunken father. The man was incredibly violent, a violence which increased towards Bernard when his mother died. Indeed the beatings were so bad that by the time the helpful child entered his teens the NSPCC had been called in. Neighbours noticed that no matter how hard Bernard tried to please, he was emotionally and physically demeaned by his hate-filled parent. Everyone pitied the youth and feared for his life. In 1937 the fourteen-year-old shot his drunken father dead, at last putting an end to a life of torment. The jury took pity on him and found him not guilty, an unusual decision for the time – and for now.

Sometimes the jury is unsympathetic but there is public sympathy when full details of the child’s life emerge. Richard Jahnke junior snapped after years of extreme physical and emotional abuse from his father – and years of knowing that his father was also abusing his sister. Richard had sought help from various authorities but no one intervened. From the age of two he was severely beaten for such so-called sins as coughing at the table. His father was a former army sergeant who ran the family along military lines.

By 1982 Richard had turned sixteen and his sister was seventeen. With her agreement, he lurked in the family garage waiting for his parents to come home. When they did, he shot his father six times. Four of the bullets entered his chest, killing him instantly.

Adults who don’t understand the nature of child abuse sometimes have no sympathy for the child because the killing wasn’t carried out in the heat of the moment. They suggest that if the killing was really about self-preservation the child would kill whilst being beaten by his mum or dad. But to retaliate against a fist-swinging man or woman is too terrifying for most children. They dread the next beating and kill when the parent isn’t expecting it such as when they are asleep. An adult faced with another abusive adult (as with women who kill their abusive husbands) does the exact same thing.

Richard Jahnke was initially given a long sentence but there was a public outcry when the level of abuse he’d endured became known. He was released at age twenty-one.

Richard Jahnke and his sister had considered killing their mother but didn’t go through with it. Indeed, matricide is one of the rarest crimes committed. When it does happen, it usually follows especially prolonged abuse. Paul Mones, an expert in abused children who kill has noted that ‘sons kill mothers under almost
identical circumstances. The father is physically or emotionally absent, the mother physically abuses the boy as a toddler and up to puberty, when she switches, albeit unconsciously, to a pattern of emotional abuse, the centre-piece of which is complete domination.’ Steven Cratton, who Paul Mones profiles in his ground-breaking book
When
A
Child
Kills,
perfectly fits this category. (Paul made up the name Steven Cratton to avoid revealing this cruelly abused boy’s true identity.)

Steven was born to the mother from hell, a woman who demeaned most adults she came into contact with. Relatives saw her telling Steven to grow up and not be a sissy when he was only one year old. Ruth Cratton also hit Steven for eating too slowly or for falling over. As a result, the toddler would wet the bed and she’d hit him for that too. One relative saw the marks from a wooden spoon imprinted on the child’s buttocks when she went to change him. Others frequently saw the little boy crying and being verbally put down by his mum.

His father, Roger, couldn’t cope with her domineering ways and left when Steven was four. Now the child was entirely at his mother’s mercy. His next few years were so horrendous that he blocked them out and it was neighbours and relatives who later testified to the numerous instances of cruelty they’d seen him endure. People saw him with bruises and with a bleeding nose
but Ruth told them that he fell over a lot. Steven himself, like almost every child who is abused, assumed that every child was treated in this way.

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.