Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (9 page)

By early 1997 the unpleasantness at home had reached a peak and his mother said that she could no longer give him any pocket money. Perhaps she was hoping that he’d no longer buy the music that he loved to play in his bedroom – but Luke proved unexpectedly resourceful and found himself a weekend job at a pizza place. He liked it so much that he thought he might work there full time after he left school and the management encouraged him as he was punctual, hardworking and unfailingly polite.

But the weekend job simply wasn’t enough to put the troubled teenager’s world to rights. He still had to go to school five days a week to be spat upon and mocked and hit. He still had to deal with his mother criticising his weight, his grades, his room, his friends, his very
being. His new friends noticed that she was always picking on him and they hated the atmosphere in the house. By now Mary Anne had started going out with male friends and couldn’t find time to go shopping so there was sometimes very little food in the house. Bereft of love, Luke found it difficult to sleep at nights. He also suffered from depression and crying jags. He had his friend Grant, of course, but Grant was only his friend as long as Luke didn’t question a word he said.

In his real life Luke would admit that he felt like ‘a total reject’ but in his daytime fantasies he was an imposing master. In these fantasies he hit back at the people who had hurt him and he watched them cower and fall.

He decided that he had to harden himself against
society
so that it couldn’t hurt him any more. He and Grant began to talk of how it would feel to really harm another creature. Sickeningly, they turned their
attentions
to Sparkle, Luke’s Shih Tzu dog.

Luke held the animal in place and Grant beat it with a stick, hurting its legs so much that it could barely walk afterwards. A neighbour witnessed the abuse but doesn’t appear to have contacted the authorities. Luke’s older brother later saw that the animal was limping and said that he should take it to the vet for treatment. Knowing that a professional would notice the animal’s bruises, Luke decided to kill the dog instead.

He and Grant took the animal to the nearest forest and beat her then encased her in several bin bags. Then they put the semi conscious creature into a heavier bag and set the bag on fire. The dog was still alive so Luke added more fuel, at which stage the desperate creature managed to escape from the bag. Luke then broke the animal’s bones with a club and set it on fire yet again. He clubbed the little dog for a final time, taking an almost clinical interest in the fact that it had lost control of its bladder and its bowels. Then he threw the satchel with the dead or dying creature into the lake and both youths laughed.

Back home, John junior asked where Sparkle was and Luke said that the dog must have run away. He clearly felt no remorse for his incredible cruelty,
writing
a week later that he and Grant had ‘been beating the bitch awhile… I’ll never forget the howl she made. It sounded almost human.’ It may be pertinent that he referred to the animal by gender rather than by breed.

Sadly, Luke’s treatment of the dog isn’t unusual for an abused child. Abused children often start off by loving animals but, as the abuse continues, they show violence towards their pets and towards wild creatures. Sometimes this is simply a desire to pass the pain onto something else – but in other instances the target is a more specific one. For example, many female serial killers have admitted torturing their
abusive
parent’s favourite kitten or dog in childhood as a way of getting revenge.

Indeed, it’s well documented that three of the
warning
signs that a child will become violent towards
adults are cruelty to animals, fire-raising and bedwetting. Luke had now demonstrated the first two by setting his dog on fire. And this wasn’t his first attempt at fire-starting, for he told a friend that he loved to set fires.

Mary Anne hardly noticed that the dog had gone. By now she was dating various men so was often
preoccupied
. Luke and his role-playing friends sat around at his house and talked about killing their
various
enemies. To their schoolmates – and to Luke’s mother – they were inadequates but in their heads they ruled the world. And rulers can do whatever they like.

Alternatively over-protective and hypercritical, and raising her son without a father, Mary Anne fit the
classic
profile of the mother who is killed by her own male offspring. Clearly unaware of the danger she was
facing
, she kept telling Luke that he’d never amount to anything. He also got the impression that she blamed him for his father leaving and for the fact that her older son kept out of her way. For years Luke had tried to either please her or avoid her but now he’d run out of feelings and just didn’t care about seeking her approval any more.

He may have told some of his role-playing group that he wanted his mother dead – but the game was about killing off people in fantasy land so it’s unclear
how seriously they took him. But Luke was in deadly earnest and the fifty-year-old was about to die.

On 1st October 1997 he set his alarm for 5am, got up and fetched a knife from the kitchen drawer. Noticing his baseball bat in a corner, he grabbed that too.

Sixteen-year-old Luke had planned to kill his mother whilst she slept, but to his shock he found her dressed and preparing to go jogging. He chased her into her bedroom where she tried to hold the door shut – but he had years of rage on his side and forced his way in. He then slammed the bat against the furniture, terrorising her further. For perhaps the first time ever he had control of what he did.

What followed would be an act of overkill, the actions of someone who really hates their victim. Luke brought the bat down on his mother’s face, breaking her jaw. Then he forced a pillow over her face with one hand and stabbed at her body seven times with his other arm. He also slashed at her a further eleven times so that blood spattered the bed, walls and carpet, one of the knife wounds entering her brain. Some of the slash wounds were to her hands as she tried to defend herself – and Luke was stabbing so hard that the knife sometimes slipped and cut his own palms. Apparently thinking rationally, he went into the kitchen after the killing and bandaged his own wounds.

He then wrote a letter somewhat like a Last Will And Testament, leaving his few possessions to his
role-playing
friends. He did so because he knew that he was about to massacre his school colleagues and believed that he would be shot dead by the police. He
wrote very honestly of what had happened to him saying ‘Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will, the ratings wouldn’t be high enough if you didn’t, and it wouldn’t make good gossip for all the old ladies.’ There were several pages to this effect. Ironically, the media would indeed go on to blame the matricide on the fact that Luke played fantasy games and others in the Bible Belt would suggest that ‘the Devil’ had taken over the abused boy’s mind.

Luke now phoned his friend Grant and spoke in a three-way call to another friend, though we’ll probably never know exactly what all three said. He sounded depressed and slightly tearful – but obviously
determined
to continue in his murderous plans.

Further bloodshed on his mind, Luke took his dead mother’s car and drove erratically to Pearl High School. He parked, entered the building and gave his notebooks to another pupil. Then he walked along the corridor holding his father’s rifle until he found the girl he had dated a few times, Christine. He shot her twice, one bullet entering her shoulder and the other fatally entering her neck. The girl she’d been talking to, Lydia Dew, tried to move and he shot her several times in the torso. Both girls died at the scene. Witnesses said that Luke’s face was blank and that he moved in a slow
shuffle. It’s unclear why he shot Lydia because she and her sister had always been kind to him. (Christine had also been kind to him, but ever since she’d ended their relationship he’d borne an unfair grudge.)

Luke continued to fire, hitting one girl in the
shoulder
and another girl in the stomach. He wounded a male student in the legs and another in the hip. He seemed to know what he was doing during this
shooting
spree as he apologised to one male he had no
quarrel
with and who he’d shot by mistake. Other children were also hit in the lower legs and in the upper body before Luke left the school and tried to make his escape. But the car got stuck in mud and he was
tackled
by an armed teacher and taken into custody. He said to the teacher ‘the world has wronged me’, his tone as deferential towards adults as it had always been.

Rumours soon went around that Luke had killed the students because one of them – Christine – had
finished
with him. It was only when the police asked Luke how he’d cut his hands that he told them that he’d stabbed and ‘probably’ killed his mother. The police were surprised by this but they shouldn’t have been – spree killers often kill one or both parents before going on to shoot further victims at their school or place of work.

Fifteen-year-old Kipland Kinkel, profiled later in
this book, killed both his mother and father before massacring fellow school pupils. The exact same
pattern
can be seen with adult males. For example, Michael Ryan killed his mother before shooting fourteen
pedestrians
in what became known as the Hungerford Massacre.

The police raced to Luke’s house and found his mother’s blood-spattered body lying on her bed with a pillow over her head. They noticed that the house was dust-covered and looked unlived in. The only family photograph on display was the one Luke hated in which he looks many years older than he actually was.

Meanwhile most of Pearl was talking about the cold blooded killer whilst refusing to recognise the abuses that had driven him to commit the killings. The abuses aren’t an excuse, but they are an explanation. One
parent
was more insightful, however, and is quoted in a book about the case –
Child’s
Prey
– as saying ‘he was a student whose intellect was not appreciated, his family life was not going well and he’d reached a breaking point.’ In fact, these are understatements – his
intelligence
was mocked, his unfashionable looks earned him endless kicks and vicious name-calling and he had no family life at all.

For some reason, many people find it hard to empathise with children who suffer in this way. Yet they’d be sympathetic towards an adult. If an adult was physically assaulted just once by another adult and told that they were worthless they’d have victim support and recourse to the law. But when Luke was kicked and spat on endlessly at school it was dismissed
as child’s play. When community members heard his mother screaming at him, they merely kept their own offspring away. Even when he was seen beating his beloved dog, a sure sign that something was seriously wrong, no one intervened.

As usually happens, various special interest groups tried to hijack the case to publicise their own cause. A religious teenager suggested that if there had been school prayers then the murders wouldn’t have
happened
. This was nonsense – a huge percentage of the students had been to the school’s Bible class before class started and Luke had been sent to church at least once a week for his entire life. Belief in a deity is absolutely no protection against being murdered – people have been killed in churches and on their way to church.

Other groups tried to blame the role-playing game, refusing to recognise that it was the personalities of some of the players that was suspect. Some of these youths came to the game with hatred in their hearts – but there were various sociological reasons for that hatred. The media preferred to leave that particular stone unturned.

But Luke wasn’t the only teenager about to end up in the dock. Having listened to various stories about The Kroth, the police now arrested several members of the role-playing game and charged them with
conspiracy
to commit murder. Later all were released without charge, with the exception of Grant Boyette who was eventually charged with conspiring to impede a public official, and given five years probation plus a month in a boot camp.

Luke’s first trial was for matricide and it was held in the first week of June 1998. It held no surprises. After all, Luke had admitted to killing his mother, telling police that he wanted to do it and giving them some examples of his problems at home. He cried when the prosecution said that he was hateful. A psychologist for the defence testified that he had a borderline
personality
disorder. Borderline personalities tend to
suffer
from low self-esteem and act impulsively. The disorder often goes hand in hand with depression so Luke certainly fits the bill. But it was clear that he’d known exactly what he was doing and was not insane.

His second trial later that month was for the school massacre. Again, the guilty verdict was a foregone
conclusion
. There were numerous witnesses to the fact that he’d shot dead two girls and wounded seven other students who’d been unfortunate enough to be in his line office. He cried again and apologised to the sister of Lydia, one of the girls he had killed.

As usual he was alone, for none of his remaining family showed up to support him. (His father had
visited
him once for a few minutes in prison.) Like many abused children he spent most of the day in a fugue state. But he did show rage when being doubted by the prosecution, saying ‘Y’all don’t know what I went through. You’ve never been in my shoes.’

By now his shoes had taken him along the religious path, for a pastor had encouraged him to have a religious conversion and he’d later say ‘God has forgiven me.’

The teenager – by now aged seventeen – was sentenced to the maximum penalty that the state allows, life imprisonment, and will become eligible for parole when he is sixty-five. He is locked up in the notorious Parchman prison in Mississippi where he tries to
survive
by spending as much time as possible on his own, writing poetry He also writes to his new penpals for he gets dozens of letters each week from teenagers who say – alarmingly – that they completely identify with him.