Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (30 page)

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:

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 renowned 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.

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.’

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.’

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.

Nowadays when a child is having difficulty concentrating in school, he’s often diagnosed as having Attention 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.

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.