Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (32 page)

Many TV programmes 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.

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.

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.

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 compassionless 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.’

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.

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.’

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
.)