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

by Carol Anne Davis

  The next six months were increasingly unpleasant at home. Sean brooded in his room and practiced the so-called black arts. He took driving lessons to have more control over his destiny. Meanwhile his mother threw him out of the house so Sean decided to sleep in his van but Paul promptly went to Sean’s work and fetched him back. His mother then threatened to send him to his natural father in California, presumably to separate him from his girlfriend.

  During one of their many arguments, Vonda attacked Sean – but this time he pushed her back, meeting violence with violence. He alternated between just wishing he could leave and wishing that she was dead. He even put rat poison in her coffee but it had no effect.

  Sean had been counting the days until he turned eighteen and could leave home, but now he just could not wait. He was only sixteen – but during those sixteen years he’d had good reason to build up a lot of hate.

  The second and third murders

  On 5th March 1986 he waited until Vonda and Paul went to bed, stripped to his underwear and went through one of his satanic rituals before creeping into their bedroom with Paul’s .44 revolver at his side. He would later say that he felt like he was shooting his way to freedom, knocking down the door of a prison cage.

  He put the gun close to his forty-three-year-old stepfather’s head and fired, killing him instantly. He turned the gun on his thirty-two-year-old mother and shot her too. As she rose, wounded, from the bed he shot her again, watching the blood run down the side of her head. He laughed, just as he had done after killing the shop clerk. Then he showered and staged the scene to make it look like a burglary.

  Afterwards he drove to Richard’s house and they talked about what they’d say to the authorities. Sean contacted them after pretending to discover the bodies the next day.

  Arrest

  The police went to his school and were told about his problems with his parents and his interest in satanism. He was soon arrested. The police also spoke to Richard who agreed to testify against Sean to save himself.

  Neglect not board games

  The media immediately blamed the young killer’s crimes on Dungeons & Dragons. (Many journalists would have run out of things to say years ago if the game had never been invented.) Meanwhile the Christian community decided it was his interest in the occult that was to blame.

  As usual, few people bothered to notice that, by the time he was nine years old, Sean had only spent a total of six months with his parents. Instead, he was passed around like an unwanted parcel – and in the years leading up to his becoming a murderer he’d lived in six different towns. Largely friendless and completely powerless he’d turned to an ostensible source of solace and power, the occult. But it wasn’t any so-called demon that committed these crimes – just a badly neglected teenager with a gun.

  The trial

  Sean’s defence team failed to have him tried as a juvenile so they entered an insanity defence, saying that his interest in satanism constituted madness. The prosecution alleged these were thrill killings. The jury were back with a guilty verdict within three hours.

  At the time of the trial, in October 1986, Oklahoma didn’t allow life sentences without the possibility of parole. Some of the jurors were allegedly worried that if they gave the youth life he’d be paroled in as little as seven years. Whatever their various motivations, they voted for the death penalty and Sean was sent to Oklahoma’s McAlester Prison.

  Update

  For the next thirteen years Sean Sellers remained on Death Row, saying alternately that a demon or drugs had made him kill his parents. He got religion and started to write religious poetry, becoming a pin-up for many born-again Christians. Unsurprisingly, the family of the innocent clerk he’d shot were wishing that he hadn’t been born the first time around.

  Christian visitors flocked to the triple murderer and his new friends included those who performed exorcisms for money. He gave interviews to ministers about the supposed dangers of satanism. He also published a book that blamed the world’s ills on black magic, heavy metal music and drugs.

  Yet he’d made the connection between the violence he’d endured and his own violent murders, writing that ‘Mum… slapped me in the face… mashed my mouth into my teeth… hit me in the head with butcher knife handles, hairbrushes, whatever she had in her hand… I tried to live in my room as much as possible. I hated her as much as I loved her.’

  Sean now decided there was a deity out there who loved him. He appeared on talk TV renouncing the occult and saying that he’d seen the light.

  This usually goes down well with parole boards and those who oppose the death penalty – but it shouldn’t as many children who kill come from religious backgrounds. The same is true of adults who murder. Some of the world’s most sadistic serial killers – including Ted Bundy, Rose West, Dean Corll, Richard Ramirez and Robert Berdella – had deeply religious upbringings. The same is true of necrophile killers like Ed Gein. And the very devout John List murdered his mother, wife and three children when his prayers went unanswered and his family started to move away from the church.

  During his years on Death Row, Sean produced many devout words. He also married a born-again Christian in 1995 who said that when watching him on TV she’d ‘seen Jesus in his eyes.’ (Another woman had said the exact same thing about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, adopting her and proclaiming she was innocent. But the eye-reading proved unreliable as Aileen later confessed.)

  By 1997 Sean’s marriage had been annulled. By early 1999 he’d run out of appeals and on 4th February 1999 he entered the McAlester Prison execution chamber singing hymns. He was twenty-nine years old.

  Sean was strapped down and both of his arms were injected with a drug designed to render him unconscious, stop his breathing then stop his heart. Watched by fourteen witnesses, he was pronounced dead at 12.17am.

  Sadly, there are still groups and individuals trying to blame his crimes on the medieval concept of demons rather than looking at the violence and neglect he endured for sixteen years.

  13 Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown

  Johnny Frank Garrett

  Johnny was born in 1964 to a young woman called Charlotte Garrett who lived in Amarillo, Texas. It was a difficult birth during which he suffered oxygen deprivation. This alone was enough to leave him slightly brain-damaged, but it wouldn’t be the last trauma dealt out to the unfortunate child’s brain. He came into the world to find that he had an older brother, and that brother (and other young relatives) would also be abused.

  The first father he remembered – who may or may not have been his real dad – battered his mother and beat his brother with a baseball bat. Meanwhile Johnny’s mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, had one nervous breakdown after another and couldn’t cope.

  When Johnny was a toddler his mother was incarcerated in a mental hospital yet again and he was sent to stay with his maternal grandparents in their freezing cold, cockroach-ridden home. They frequently half-starved him and hit him, just as they’d previously done to his mum. They did the same to Johnny’s cousin, Kathalene, who also lived with them.

  When he was three and a half his mother was discharged from hospital and decided she wanted him back. She divorced her husband but soon married again and introduced the child to the man he’d think of as father number two. He beat Johnny repeatedly on his backside and either he or Johnny’s grandmother deliberately held the child against a hot stove when he wouldn’t stop crying. His cousin Kathalene would never forget the terrible screams he made – and the scarred gouge in his flesh would remain for the rest of his life.

  Johnny’s mother continued to bear children and to have breakdowns that prevented her from looking after them. And so, for the next few years, Johnny made his way between his grandparent’s isolated old house and his mother’s extremely cramped trailer. His grandmother kept telling him that he was a bastard and was always hitting him about the head. She also dressed him up as a little girl and gave him to his grandfather for the old man to sexually abus
e. His cousin Kathalene heard Johnny crying during these sessions, which happened twice a week.

  At one stage his mother got the whole family back so that Johnny, his older brother, his two little sisters and his little brother were all staying in the trailer at the same time.

  Sexual abuse

  Johnny’s mother married again. This third ‘father figure’ made Johnny fellate him and another adult male. He made him strip and provide such oral sex on numerous occasions. Soon the abuse extended to forced sodomy. The man was keen to increase the child’s humiliation, making him bend over and spread his legs.

  Johnny’s mother was at work when the abuse was going on and sometimes his younger siblings were sleeping in the other room. Johnny looked increasingly shell-shocked but no one was looking out for him. The man would also fetch the boy from school and abuse him, threatening him with further beatings if he refused to comply.

  Child pornography

  Johnny’s mother divorced this violent man too but he remained in Johnny’s life, and began to take him to a friend who made porn films. There the boy was coerced to have sex with other adults and a dog. Johnny wasn’t the only minor taking part in such exploitative videos – he saw children as young as seven being forced to participate.

  By the time Johnny was in his early teens, his stepfather was setting him up with various older men for cash. Johnny was so slim that he looked much younger than his years and the punters liked this. He’d later claim that a judge and prominent businessmen were amongst the men who had sought out his sexual services.

  The relentless beatings and sex abuse took its toll. Johnny attacked another child at school, throwing a glass tumbler at him. He was sent to a reform school where he became increasingly paranoid, fearing that strangers were about to attack. He also began to insert thin bottles into his rectum whilst masturbating – abuse victims sometimes do this as a way of taking control of previously involuntary invasive acts. Meanwhile his mother had descended into alcoholism and had married and divorced for the fourth time.

  For years this multiply-abused boy had disassociative episodes where he tuned out of his body and tried to believe that the intense pain was happening to someone other than himself but it wasn’t enough to save his sanity. As more and more bad memories filled his every waking moment he became increasingly bizarre, attacking strangers before – in his deranged mind – they could attack him.

  School’s out forever

  Viewing Johnny as a neighbourhood bully, the authorities sent him to a school for delinquents. In the summer of 1981 they released him and he again began shuttling between his mother’s and grandparents’ house. He skulked around the neighbourhood, at one stage stopping to watch the nuns entering and leaving the local convent. Many were the same age as his violent grandmother, someone he had good reason to hate…

  On the last day of October the seventeen-year-old went to see his grandparents but they humiliated him so he hurriedly left and started drinking. He went on to his mother’s and could remember leaving her trailer feeling even more upset. He didn’t know what had happened when they were together – his ongoing brain damage plus the constant abuse had left him frequently confused and delusional – but could remember that she was clad only in a slip. A relative who saw his mother standing in the doorway of the trailer would confirm this.

  Rape and murder

  In the early hours of that morning – 31st October 1981 – he crept across the fields to the St Francis Convent. Under cover of darkness, he cut a window screen and broke a pane of glass. Then he dropped the knife he’d used, knowing that he had another sharper one in his possession. (Other accounts say that he stole this second knife from the convent’s kitchen but it’s impossible to know which statement is accurate as Johnny’s testimony was frequently confused.)

  Entering the convent, he walked until he found an open bedroom door. Sister Tadea Benz, also known as Sister Catherine, was lying in the darkness. He could hear that the seventy-six-year-old Catholic nun was deeply asleep.

  Johnny put his hand over her mouth so that she couldn’t scream. He either undressed the old woman or made her undress – her body would be found naked. He raped her, choked her and stabbed her. One newspaper report suggests that during the rape she recited The Lord’s Prayer. But no one came to deliver her from Johnny Garrett so her nude body was found on the floor a few hours later. Blood had seeped from her nose and further blood was found on the walls.

  Arrest and trial

  Witnesses had seen Johnny hanging around the convent so the police quickly arrested the seventeen-year-old who alternately admitted and denied the crime. The evidence against him was overwhelming. His fingerprints were in the nun’s bedroom and on the knives and his pubic hair was found on her thighs.

  He was sentenced to death and put on Death Row at Huntsville, in his home state of Texas. There, the guards frequently overheard him speaking to imaginary people, loud conversations that sometimes went on all night. Prison wardens are used to very disturbed prisoners but they had to admit that Johnny Garrett was the most insane inmate they’d ever known. Dr Dorothy Lewis, who evaluated him, ultimately became convinced that he had multiple personality disorder. In other words, he’d created additional personalities to take the pain inflicted on him by the numerous abusive adults in his life.

  The prison psychiatrist decided the boy was schizophrenic and administered various strong drugs, none of which could quell the voices in Johnny’s head.

  Death penalty

  In January 1992 Pope John Paul II asked for clemency in the Johnny Garrett case. The nuns at the convent also asked that his life be spared. Several medical experts argued that a twenty-eight-year-old mentally-ill man should not be put to death for a crime he committed when he was a multiply-abused child of seventeen.

  Defence lawyers said that he had been abused by his mother and by his alcoholic stepfathers. They also referred to his recent diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. But after due consideration the authorities decided not to grant clemency.

  On 11th February that year Johnny entered the execution chamber in Huntsville. His mother and his sisters, Jeane and Janet, watched and sung hymns. His mother said several times that she loved him and added ‘It’s okay to go to sleep, baby.’ Outside, thirty members of Amnesty International chanted anti-death-penalty slogans whilst approximately seventy students from San Houston State University shouted ‘Kill the freak.’

  When he was strapped to the gurney, Johnny said ‘Thank my friends who tried to pull me through all this… my guru who helped me go through this. I’d like to thank my family for loving me, and the rest of the world can kiss my ass.’

  He stared at the ceiling as the lethal injection took effect and died within minutes, his death much more humane than his life.

  14 Senses Working Overtime

  Recognised Typologies Of Children Who Kill

  Criminologists have defined at least ten different types of children who kill. They are the family killer, school killer, mentally ill killer, gang-based killer, incidental killer, hate killer, self-killer, infant killer, cult killer and sex killer. But if you look at them carefully you’ll find that they mostly stem from the same source – that is, the child hasn’t been loved and nurtured by his primary carers and this has spawned sufficient rage and hurt to make them want to kill. Examples of each of the typologies are:

  The family killer

  These killers, who are mainly male, are overwhelmed by parental cruelty or parental demands. Some crime writers believe that children kill their families for financial gain – but a look at many such cases shows that these wealthy parents have also been abusive. The financial motive, if it exists, is very much secondary.

  For example, numerous writers have suggested that Wendy Gardner had her grandmother killed in order to enjoy spending her money and partying in her home. But a quick glance at Wendy’s life shows that her grandmother beat her and constantly told her that she was turning into her mother, a dru
g-addicted prostitute.

  Similarly, much has been made of the fact that William Allnutt stole several sovereigns from his grandfather – but William only killed after his grandfather knocked him down for the umpteenth time and threatened to murder him next time. These children didn’t kill to enjoy a few days prosperity – they killed out of terror, desperate to escape further physical pain.

  Criminologists and psychotherapists such as Kathleen M Heide have found an overwhelming connection between patricide and child abuse. The children who killed their fathers had been physically and emotionally ill treated and neglected. Some had also been sexually abused. For case studies of children who have killed abusive guardians, please see the chapter Children Who Kill Their Families.

  The school killer

  Such killers – who often take out more than one victim – have often been bullied mercilessly for weeks or even years before they finally snap and take a gun to school with them. Most of these killers are male and often the hatred for the institution is so intense that they kill everyone in sight – but some have warned the one or two pupils who were kind to them to stay away from school that day. Kip Kinkel, profiled earlier, was bullied at school and wrote of how much he wanted to kill one particular pupil. Numerous other Stressors occurred at home as he couldn’t be the academic and sporting success his parents craved. Luke Woodham, also profiled, was endlessly abused at school and mocked at home to the extent that he spoke about ‘being beat his whole life.’ Luke expected to be killed by police at the end of his rampage and Kip planned to kill himself after the shootings, their respective plans being to take as many lives as possible before meeting their own deaths.