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

by Carol Anne Davis

  During the trial, Betty and Billy Bell went to the tabloids and tried to sell the story of Mary’s life, but the newspapers refused.

  Conspiracy of silence

  Over the years various psychologists and group therapists tried to get Mary to talk about her childhood but she always answered ‘My mum said for me not to say anything to you.’ Betty had originally phoned Mary’s lawyer during the trial saying that Mary must never talk to a psychiatrist. After all, Betty knew that on some level Mary would remember being sexually abused from age four to eight whilst Betty held her down.

  Now that Mary was in a reform school, Betty visited every few weeks to reinforce this warning and after her visits Mary was always unsettled. But visits from Billy always cheered her up.

  Betty continued to have a strange attitude towards her oldest daughter. One day she got the young teenager to pose in her underwear for a series of photos, with Betty’s mother watching. Betty then sold the photos to the press.

  Update

  For the next twelve years Mary lived in various remand homes and adult prisons. At first she remained disturbed and allegedly strangled two hamsters in the first remand home she was sent to (She’d also tried to strangle a kitten one night during her trial). But as the staff of the remand home continued to love and care for her, her behaviour markedly improved. She was considered manipulative as a teenager – but, in fairness, she was still being manipulated by her increasingly alcohol-driven mum.

  Becoming aware that the hatred Betty felt for her wasn’t normal, Mary asked her mother again who her natural father was. ‘Was it your dad?’ she asked as she’d found love poems that Betty had written to him and feared she was the result of an incestuous union. But (according to Mary’s biographer, the respected Gitta Sereny) Betty’s father had died when she was fourteen and she didn’t get pregnant until she was sixteen so the dates don’t add up. Mary also asked a friend of the family but he simply said ‘It’s best that you don’t know.’

  Mary was released from prison in 1980 at the age of twenty-three. She soon found herself a husband and in 1984 she gave birth to a daughter. But after she became ill her spouse became violent and she left the marriage, taking the child with her. For the first few years of her daughter’s life, the authorities watched very carefully, ready to intercede if Mary harmed the baby. But it became clear that she was a good and loving mother and that her daughter felt secure. And Mary herself soon formed another relationship, one which has lasted to the present day.

  Unfortunately, Betty Bell did much to undermine Mary’s newfound security, continuing to sell stories to the tabloids. Betty remarried but eventually her second husband left her, saying that he’d suffered years of misery and couldn’t take any more. Mary asked him who her biological father was but he said it was best not to know. Betty still saw herself as a martyr, saying ‘Jesus was just nailed to the cross but I’m being hammered.’ She continued to emotionally hammer Mary on the few occasions that they spent time together and these emotional cruelties only ceased with Betty’s death in early January 1995.

  Though Mary has never harmed anyone as an adult, she carries a deep sadness within her, a sadness that was apparent to psychologist Gitta Sereny. She suffers from frequent migraines and finds it difficult to concentrate on work or on any kind of project or educational course. And the love she feels for her own daughter has made her fully aware of the pain she caused to the families of her little victims, Martin Brown and Brian Howe.

  She is continually hounded by the tabloids who refuse to believe that a battered child who killed can become a caring adult. As a result she has had to move house several times to protect her family. Yet, as crime writer Brian Masters has stated, her voice is ‘one of maturity and remorse.’

  10 Under Pressure

  Kipland Philip Kinkel

  Kip was born on 30th August 1982 to Bill and Faith Kinkel, both successful schoolteachers. The couple already had a daughter, Kristin, who was almost six, a high achiever like themselves. Bill and Faith were in their early forties by the time they had Kip, but they were physically fit and sure that they could cope.

  The family lived in Springfield, Oregon, in an expensive house at the foot of the Cascade Mountains. The couple taught Spanish and Faith also taught French. They encouraged the children to explore the outdoors on regular camping trips and to participate in various sports.

  In what should have been Kip’s first year at a local school, the family went to Spain. Kip was put into a class of Spanish children with a teacher who only spoke Spanish. He’d just mastered English and now everyone was speaking in a foreign tongue so he felt understandably frustrated and out of his depth. At the school he was also bullied by a bigger boy and generally had a difficult time.

  At the end of the school year, the Kinkels returned to Oregon. By now Kristin was proving herself a natural gymnast who repeatedly earned her parent’s approval – but Kip was comparatively unco-ordinated. Bill himself was a tennis ace with a highly competitive nature who forced his little son to keep playing the game. Kip was small and light, and much preferred picking wild berries or swimming to batting a ball about for hours on the court.

  But Bill continued to coerce his son to play competitive games, determined that the boy would become a sporting hero. As a family friend would later say ‘Bill had his son’s future mapped out.’ Photos taken during this time show the other family members smiling widely during football games whilst Kip stares at the camera looking lost and sad.

  There were similar problems at school. Kip struggled to keep up with the curriculum. He’d work hard in class all day – then come home and be tutored by his parents for hours every night. As the family home was somewhat isolated, he didn’t have schoolfriends over with whom to have fun. (Though he did have a neighbourhood friend called Kasey who noticed that he was very young for his age.) For recreation he cycled through the surrounding woods and did chores for the neighbours, playing with their grandchildren and mowing their lawns.

  Starting over

  Kip tried and tried but he was never going to be a sporting hero or an A-grade student. Thinking that he might be able to compete better with younger students, the Kinkels asked Kip’s school to let him repeat a year. As a result, he lost his few friends and had to make new ones, a momentous task for such an awkward boy.

  Kip continued to have problems in second grade, remaining unco-ordinated and having exceptional difficulty with spelling. His teacher noted that he was a hard worker but an extremely anxious child.

  Under pressure

  Unable to understand what his parents were trying to teach him, Kip’s ability to concentrate on the nightly tutoring sessions decreased. Dog trainers can see the same behaviour in a young dog – if you ask it to do something it doesn’t understand, the dog will ‘go silly’ on you. So Kip started to act out, for example sliding down the laundry chute. Faith and Bill then decided he must be hyperactive and took him to a doctor who duly prescribed the powerful anti-hyperactive drug Ritalin.

  Bill’s father had been a minister and Bill had a strong moral code that he expected his children to live by. He frequently grounded Kip – or forbade him to watch his favourite television programmes – as a punishment for high spirited pranks. The cute little boy with the freckled face and neat haircut began to feel that he could do nothing right.

  A family video taken during Kip’s junior school years shows his sister effortlessly performing cartwheels and handstands out of doors for recreation. Kip tries to emulate her and promptly falls over. Behind the camera, his father says ‘Kip needs more work’ and urges him to try again.

  By the time he was in third grade, his school was giving him extra help with reading and trying to allay his frustration at not being able to master English. It was only with language and motor skills that he had a problem. He had a high IQ and showed promise in science and maths.

  That same year, Bill retired from school-teaching so he now had little to do with other teenagers though
he continued to teach Spanish to adults at night. He was an excellent tutor and his Spanish students liked him. But Kip still couldn’t understand what his parents were trying to teach him, something that was explained the following year when he was diagnosed as having a learning disability, a form of dyslexia.

  Kip began to view himself as stupid so made friends with the less academically able boys on the school bus, boys who were disruptive and violent. He started acting like they did, karate kicking other pupils and calling the girls names.

  Kristin leaves

  Kristin now transferred from the local university to Hawaii Pacific on a cheerleading scholarship. She’d taken Kip’s side in the past, pointing out to her parents that he was high spirited rather than bad. She often had to remind her older parents that Kip was just doing the sort of things their own younger students had done. She’d later admit that ‘each little thing that he would do would be awful’ to them. They were academically and sports-inclined adults in their fifties who didn’t understand their adolescent son at all.

  Bomb-making

  Thirteen-year-old Kip really missed Kristin though they often spoke on the phone. Soon he and his friends were using the school computer to order books about making bombs but the books were intercepted as they were mistakenly sent to the bank on which the cheque was drawn.

  Later Kip researched the subject on the internet and even gave an illustrated talk at school on how to assemble an explosive device. He took his homemade bombs into the woods and allegedly used them to kill cats and squirrels and birds. He also told friends that he’d blown up a cow.

  He believed that his mother considered him a good kid who did some bad things but that this father saw him as a bad kid who did bad things. The father-son relationship was increasingly poor.

  Kip was storing up all his anger, unable to articulate his feelings. He started to go to the local quarry to detonate explosives to get rid of his rage.

  First gun

  Kip had always been interested in guns, but the Kinkels understandably didn’t believe in violent toys so he’d never even had a toy gun. But now he asked for a real gun as a Christmas or birthday gift. Bill Kinkel had inherited a rifle from his own father, and after much soul-searching he gave it to Kip.

  The couple thought that guns had become exciting to the boy because they were forbidden fruit–and that maybe he’d get them out of his system now that he had his own rifle. Trying to find some common ground with the teenager, Bill showed Kip how to shoot cans off a wall. He had no idea that his son also sneaked the gun into the woods to kill wildlife.

  Kip couldn’t create the clever essays and sporting wins that his father desired – but he could become an expert at destruction. He told friends that he was going to join the army when he grew up.

  Police intervention

  When Kip was fourteen, he asked if he could go away with a friend on a snowboarding trip and his parents agreed, presumably glad that he’d found a non-violent interest. But after dark, the two boys sneaked out of their accommodation and threw stones from a road bridge. One stone hit a passing car, frightening and enraging the driver. Kip was arrested and immediately started crying, saying that his friend had thrown that particular rock. The Kinkels had to collect him from the police station and drive him home.

  By now Faith wanted to get her son into therapy but Bill was against this as he wasn’t convinced psychologists truly helped. He may also have wanted to avoid the stigma, as he was a proud man who wasn’t used to being publicly shamed.

  Kip retreated further into a world where he was competent – a world of guns. He learned everything about them through magazines and through surfing the internet. He told friends that he’d like to kill someone to see what it was like and started carrying a knife to school.

  Treatment

  Kip became increasingly distressed, spending hours in his room writing in his diary. He felt that there was nothing good about each day, that he had nothing to look forward to. At last even Bill had to admit that his son needed help.

  The boy wept when he spoke to his psychiatrist, explaining that he couldn’t please his father no matter what he did. The therapist found the boy easy to talk to and asked Bill Kinkel to lighten up on his son.

  The psychiatrist could see the fourteen-year-old was clinically depressed, though talking clearly helped. Halfway through the series of sessions he prescribed Prozac. Kip’s spirits and behaviour further improved.

  He told the therapist that his main passion was explosives and guns – and the therapist said that he had a Glock which he was pleased with. Kip immediately wanted one – and several months later his father would indeed buy a Glock for him.

  After nine sessions the Kinkels and the doctor agreed that Kip was doing so well that he could discontinue therapy. They also took him off Prozac after only three months.

  Kip prepared to start high school. At this stage his father had a word with a teaching friend and they decided that Kip might fit in better if he joined the school’s American Football team. The teenager only weighed eight and a half stone and had no aptitude for or interest in the game but, once again, he did what he could to please his dad.

  Guns and roses

  Kip’s need to be good at something grew. He began to stockpile guns, buying or being given rifles, shotguns, a pistol, a handgun and ammunition. He talked incessantly about them as he moved further into his high school years. The other students began to call him a psycho and twice voted him the boy most likely to start World War Three.

  Then, for a few months, the guns were replaced by roses in Kip Kinkel’s life. For the first time he fell in love and felt wanted. The girl was an extrovert who liked the fact that he was different to the other youths. Kip’s life now had a purpose and he was ecstatic. Photos he had taken with her show him looking animated and proud. At last someone had accepted him for what he was, not what they’d like him to be.

  But young love is a very fragile beast and soon the girl tired of him. Kip wrote in his diary ‘It feels like my heart is breaking’ and added ‘I need help.’ Shortly after the break up, he studied Romeo & Juliet at school and clearly empathised when the young lovers committed suicide.

  Death was increasingly on his mind. He wrote in his diary ‘I don’t know who I am… I try so hard every day.’ He wrote that he wanted to kill a particular boy at school but he hadn’t yet because he hoped that tomorrow would be better. He added ominously ‘as soon as my hope is gone, people die.’

  In May he stayed over at a friend’s house, and a group of them wound hundreds of rolls of toilet paper around a neighbourhood house as a prank. The next day they had to clear it up. Kip was the only boy whose parents grounded him for it.

  Relatively rich children like Kip are seen as lucky by many – but the reality is that when their family scapegoats them no one intervenes. Eventually the child snaps under the pressure and goes mad and at this stage the medical system and the parents conspire to say that the madness was already in the child. If he or she instead – or later – goes bad then the law steps in to find the child’s supposed inherent badness. No one looks for the root cause. Told daily that he was too wild, too moody, too loud, too quiet, too intense or too irresponsible, Kip turned his entire focus on his growing collection of guns.

  Receiving stolen goods

  He now purchased a gun at school – but the gun had been stolen the night before from the parent of another student. The police questioned everyone and Kip nervously admitted that the weapon was hidden in his locker. He was promptly arrested and charged with receiving stolen property and having a firearm in a public place.

  Thurston High School had a sensible zero tolerance approach to weapons in school so immediately suspended him. A teacher who saw him at the point of the arrest said he looked totally miserable, unable to make eye contact and hanging his head. The teacher told Kip that he could expect to be suspended for an entire year – a year that Kip realised he would have to spend alone with his parents and
without his friends.

  Bill went to the police station to collect his fifteen-year-old son and the pair of them went to a burger bar for a meal. Afterwards Bill Kinkel spent the day phoning friends who had counselling experience asking if they could recommend a school for troubled teenagers. He was interested in sending Kip to an army-style boot camp which involved lots of physical activity – but Kip had always hated sports. The deeply depressed boy may have overheard one of these conversations and realised that his father was always going to force this particular square peg into a round hole. His father had also made it clear that his mother would again be disappointed in Kip when she came home.

  Patricide and matricide

  Later that afternoon – 20th May 1998 – the fifteen-year-old fetched his .22 rifle and shot his father through the back of the head. Then he phoned a friend, pacing back and forward whilst speaking. He sounded edgy and depressed but the friend assumed this was because of his school suspension. He had no idea that Kip’s father lay dead. Kip said he had stomach pains and that he was waiting for his mother to come home. He wondered aloud why she was so late.