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

by Carol Anne Davis

  In the next case study, that of Kevin Peanut Hughes, the mother has frequent intercourse in front of her children and often demands that they join her in sexual acts.

  Kevin (Peanut) Hughes

  Kevin’s life was blighted whilst he was still in the womb, for his schizophrenic mother drank heavily throughout the pregnancy. He came into the world in March 1962 to find a home that was desperately poor and a mother who was increasingly turning to drugs. Kevin, who was black, was never to know his father and all five of his siblings were fathered by different men.

  The next few years were a living hell for the child and his brothers and sisters. His mother often left them alone without food or warmth. As a result, Kevin and his siblings often missed school. And when their mother was at home she invariably had an equally disturbed man in tow who would beat her and the children. Often the couple had sex with the six children watching and Kevin’s mother would try to involve them in these sexual acts.

  Kevin’s IQ was only in the seventies which is borderline retarded. As a result, he was picked on by his mother’s many lovers. After all, there’s nothing a loser likes more than finding someone more inadequate than himself. He was frequently beaten by these drunken males and also had to watch them raping his mum. At least one of them also sexually assaulted the helpless boy.

  By the time Kevin reached his teens, the link between sex and extreme violence had again and again been made clear to him. One of his mother’s lovers even made the point verbally, telling young Kevin that women should always be forced.

  In 1976, Kevin, now fourteen, raped an eleven-year-old girl. He threatened her with a knife and was clearly prepared to use it. She identified him and he was put on three years probation. It was too little too late. Perhaps he decided at this stage that he would silence any future victims – or perhaps his own rage was just spiralling. By now his mother had made numerous suicide attempts and Kevin had joined her by taking at least one failed overdose.

  He began to believe that he was protected by magical powers. This may have been the earliest signs of schizophrenia as schizophrenics often think that they are protected by a god or that they have an especial affinity with wild beasts such as lions. Obviously this is a fallacy and when they break into the lion enclosure at the zoo they are seriously mauled.

  Kevin’s odd fantasies – which would definitely have included sexual fantasies – continued. In March 1979, aged almost seventeen, he lured a nine-year-old girl called Rochelle Graham to an abandoned house. He attempted to rape her but failed so turned her over and sodomised her instead. Then he strangled her and stuffed a burning pillow into her vagina, the flames burning her sexual organs before spreading out to char much of her flesh. Adult rape-murderers such as John Duffy have carried out such post-mortem vaginal fires in order to destroy forensic evidence – but it’s unlikely that Kevin was bright enough to understand the importance of destroying DNA traces, so perhaps this was just another delusional action. He then burnt his nickname, Peanut, into the ceiling above her corpse.

  Kevin continued to suffer at home – and to fantasise about making others suffer. By now he was becoming increasingly mentally ill and had terrible mood swings. Like the previously-profiled Johnny Garrett, who came from a very similar background, Kevin was increasingly out of touch with reality.

  In January 1980 he grabbed a twelve-year-old girl from behind as she walked down the street and forced her into a vacant house. There he made her strip and forced her to fellate him. His rage still unassuaged, he proceeded to batter her and stamp on her face. Then he strangled her and left her for dead. But the child revived and was able to identify Kevin from his previous police photograph. He was arrested and soon confessed. Moreover, police found the name Peanut burned into the ceiling above his bed.

  The prison noted his severe mental illness before the trial and had him admitted to a psychiatric unit. One psychiatrist said that he wasn’t fit to stand trial but two others said that he was, providing he remained on anti-psychotic medication. This was duly provided and at the trial the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine made him so spaced that he sat and wrote nursery rhymes. Incredibly, the jury weren’t told how appalling his childhood had been. (It isn’t an excuse, but it is an explanation.)

  Kevin was found guilty and formally sentenced to death on 27th October 1983. For the next few years he worked his way through the appeals process. In 1989 the judgement was upheld and in October 1995 a warrant for his execution was finally filed. The following month, the Philadelphia County Common Pleas Court granted a stay of execution. After that there was a moratorium on the death penalty in Pennsylvania – but on 11th April 2000 Governor Tom Ridge signed a warrant for Kevin Hughes execution by lethal injection, a move that was condemned by Amnesty International. At the time of writing, he remains on Death Row, a forty-year-old man who killed when he was a teenage boy.

  Boys who are as multiply-damaged as Kevin Hughes possibly can’t be rehabilitated – the connection they’ve made between extreme violence and sex is foremost in their sexual identities. The earlier the authorities can intervene and help the abused child who abuses, the greater the likelihood of a return to normal life.

  If a child’s sexual assaults on other children aren’t taken seriously, he is more likely to reoffend, sometimes with tragic results. Speaking on the programme Manhunt: The Catching Of A Child Killer which looked at the paedophile murders of Robert Black, sexual offences expert Ray Wyre said that teenage sex crimes are often misclassified by the authorities. (Robert Black is one of the case studies in the chapter Children Who Kill Again As Adults.)

  Matricide and necrophilia

  One of the most unusual sex murders committed by a child is told in Greggory Morris’s The Kids Next Door, a book about children who kill their parents. It profiles a young man called Garry who was frequently beaten by older bullies at school for being artistic and different. The teenager started to steal and stay out late and his mother would shout at him and encourage his father to do the same.

  Garry retreated more and more into a fantasy world fuelled by sniffing large quantities of glue. He also started to masturbate outside the home of a girl he fancied. (Men who grow up to be rapists, child molesters or sex killers are often Peeping Toms from a very early age.) He felt unsure of himself around women but he was desperate to have sex.

  Six weeks after his father’s death, Garry had yet another argument with his mother about his glue addiction. Deciding to kill her, he battered her over the head with a metal bar. The assault fractured her skull but she was still breathing so he raced to another room for a knife and slit her throat then had intercourse with the still-warm corpse. He’d later explain that ‘I had Mother’s dead body there. There was nothing left to do but make use of it.’ So, at eighteen years of age, he entered his mother’s corpse and lost his virginity.

  A psychiatrist later said it was likely that the boy was a psychopath but that he wasn’t insane. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for this sexual killing.

  Early sexual experimentation

  It’s entirely normal for children to become interested in sex as they mature and most children will play doctor and nurses games as a way of finding out about their own and others’ bodies. But children who are sexually abused will be much more extreme in their search for a sexual outlet, and more likely to use force.

  Psychologist Patrick Carnes has written that ‘masturbation is an essential part of being a sexual person.’ He found that many sex addicts come from proscriptive families who often see masturbation as a sin. Ironically, people from such disapproving families are often inappropriately sexually active when they grow up. Carnes tells the story of a Lutheran minister who picked up men in the park for casual sex, despite the fact that he found these encounters humiliating. He was badly beaten up, but continued cruising – and only sought help after having sex with one of his young parishioners who he feared might tell.

  Another man, who went on to molest his children�
��s babysitters, had been sent to confession as a child where his penis was fondled by a paedophile priest. The priest said that Gene wasn’t supposed to touch himself as masturbation was a sin.

  Sibling sexual abuse

  Often such abused children carry similar abuses out on their younger brothers and sisters. Serial killer Rose West was sexually abused by her father and went on, in turn, to masturbate one of her younger brothers. One of Robert Thompson’s brothers was investigated for sexual assaults on a younger child. Mary Bell carved letters, post mortem, on one of her little victims – and it’s very likely that she was copying her mother who, as a sado-masochistic prostitute, might have been asked to carry out scarification (cutting for erotic purposes) on the flesh of her male clients.

  When normal development takes place, sexual exploration is healthy and simply gives rise to pleasure. But with abused children, masturbation also becomes a form of desperately-needed self-comfort. As a result, this masturbation will be frenziedly carried out as a replacement for parental love and nurturing. As such, it becomes something pathological rather than something good. As so much is wrong with the child’s life, the urge to masturbate can become all encompassing in a futile attempt to put things right. These children can become addicted to sex by the time they are adults, and are unable to cut down on self-pleasuring even when they’ve made their genitals bleed.

  Unfortunately most reportage of child sex offenders doesn’t include details of what they’ve endured, only of their crimes. For example, in November 2001, an eleven-year-old boy was tried at Cardiff Crown Court for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl. He was found guilty and placed on the sex offenders register for two and a half years (but found not guilty of unlawful sexual intercourse) with the judge commenting that the boy knew he’d done wrong. It would have been helpful if his background had also been reported so that readers could understand what made a child offend so seriously at such a young age. Similarly, a programme about the crimes of Robert Black – whilst offering first class information about his crimes and their effect on the victim’s parents – said only of his own tragic life that he’d had a troubled history.

  Animal sexual abuse

  Sometimes the person who has been frequently abused gives up on people altogether and turns to animals for sexual experimentation. One woman who’d had a terrible childhood wrote a fan letter to serial killer John Wayne Gacy in which she admitted that she liked to ‘jerk off’ her dog. And a documentary about bestiality included a man who had been so strictly raised by his Christian Fundamentalist parents that he found women terrifying and preferred to have sex with a horse. That said, this man felt romantic love for his horse and would have strongly objected to their ‘relationship’ being labelled as animal abuse.

  In fairness, it should also be noted that brutalised children don’t always remain cruel towards animals. Often they are animal lovers who, after removal from their abusive backgrounds, grow to love animals again.

  Aware of this, violence expert Gavin de Becker launched and continues to fund a scheme called Patient’s Pets which gives criminals of all ages in secure hospitals access to small animals. He’s seen for himself how some of these violent men from violent homes have broken their hearts over the death of a guinea pig. He writes that ‘many of these men will be locked up for life without a visitor and a mouse or bird might be all they have.’

  An article by Peter J Lewis published in the Insider magazine backs this up. It told of how staff at a maximum security centre in Ohio allowed the inmates on one ward to keep pets and ‘within a year suicide attempts were down to zero, and prescribed medication down by a half.’ The pets in prison scheme was so successful during its various American trials that it has now been adopted by South Africa, Australia and Spain.

  Sadly, Britain has opted out of the scheme and inmates at Garth Prison in Lancashire have been told that they can no longer breed budgies. As the inmates were giving the surplus baby budgies to senior citizens, everyone has lost out.

  The thinking behind this seems to be that we have to be tough on criminals – but some of these adult and young offenders have known nothing but toughness all their lives. Caring for a pet has been shown to reduce prisoner violence. It also reduces the recidivism rate.

  Many young offenders have been verbally and physically harangued by their parents then mocked as underachievers by their teachers. The pet they’re given in prison may be their first experience of unconditional love.

  18 Born to Run

  Children Who Kill Their Families

  Children who kill are least likely to kill a member of their own family. This is probably because these families are so violent that to risk their retaliation is terrifying. It’s easier to take that childish rage out on a stranger, usually an even smaller child (as Jesse Pomeroy, Robert Thompson, Jon Venables and Mary Bell did) or to choose an elderly weaker victim, the choice of Johnny Garrett, Cindy Collier and Shirley Wolf.

  Another reason that children don’t kill their abuser is that most children consider their childhoods to be normal, no matter how dysfunctional. The child has lived with the violent or neglectful parent since birth and has no other yardstick with which to judge his or her background. Plus that child is sometimes being told at school that he or she is a bad child, not that they are the result of inadequate or cruel parenting.

  Numerous parents emotionally and physically abuse their children and in the UK one child per week dies at its parent’s hands. The few children who do turn the tables have usually been abused so relentlessly that they can see no other way out. Even so, the child who kills a violent parent invariably blames himself and is filled with remorse.

  Barnard Smith

  Abuse that ends in patricide – or, even more rarely, matricide – is not a modern phenomena. Bernard Smith was born in 1923 to a drunken father. The man was incredibly violent, a violence which increased towards Bernard when his mother died. Indeed the beatings were so bad that by the time the helpful child entered his teens the NSPCC had been called in. Neighbours noticed that no matter how hard Bernard tried to please, he was emotionally and physically demeaned by his hate-filled parent. Everyone pitied the youth and feared for his life. In 1937 the fourteen-year-old shot his drunken father dead, at last putting an end to a life of torment. The jury took pity on him and found him not guilty, an unusual decision for the time – and for now.

  Richard John Jahnke

  Sometimes the jury is unsympathetic but there is public sympathy when full details of the child’s life emerge. Richard Jahnke junior snapped after years of extreme physical and emotional abuse from his father – and years of knowing that his father was also abusing his sister. Richard had sought help from various authorities but no one intervened. From the age of two he was severely beaten for such so-called sins as coughing at the table. His father was a former army sergeant who ran the family along military lines.

  By 1982 Richard had turned sixteen and his sister was seventeen. With her agreement, he lurked in the family garage waiting for his parents to come home. When they did, he shot his father six times. Four of the bullets entered his chest, killing him instantly.

  Adults who don’t understand the nature of child abuse sometimes have no sympathy for the child because the killing wasn’t carried out in the heat of the moment. They suggest that if the killing was really about self-preservation the child would kill whilst being beaten by his mum or dad. But to retaliate against a fist-swinging man or woman is too terrifying for most children. They dread the next beating and kill when the parent isn’t expecting it such as when they are asleep. An adult faced with another abusive adult (as with women who kill their abusive husbands) does the exact same thing.

  Richard Jahnke was initially given a long sentence but there was a public outcry when the level of abuse he’d endured became known. He was released at age twenty-one.

  Matricide

  Richard Jahnke and his sister had considered killing their mother but didn’t go thr
ough with it. Indeed, matricide is one of the rarest crimes committed. When it does happen, it usually follows especially prolonged abuse. Paul Mones, an expert in abused children who kill has noted that ‘sons kill mothers under almost identical circumstances. The father is physically or emotionally absent, the mother physically abuses the boy as a toddler and up to puberty, when she switches, albeit unconsciously, to a pattern of emotional abuse, the centre-piece of which is complete domination.’ Steven Cratton, who Paul Mones profiles in his ground-breaking book When A Child Kills, perfectly fits this category. (Paul made up the name Steven Cratton to avoid revealing this cruelly abused boy’s true identity.)

  Steven Cratton

  Steven was born to the mother from hell, a woman who demeaned most adults she came into contact with. Relatives saw her telling Steven to grow up and not be a sissy when he was only one year old. Ruth Cratton also hit Steven for eating too slowly or for falling over. As a result, the toddler would wet the bed and she’d hit him for that too. One relative saw the marks from a wooden spoon imprinted on the child’s buttocks when she went to change him. Others frequently saw the little boy crying and being verbally put down by his mum.

  His father, Roger, couldn’t cope with her domineering ways and left when Steven was four. Now the child was entirely at his mother’s mercy. His next few years were so horrendous that he blocked them out and it was neighbours and relatives who later testified to the numerous instances of cruelty they’d seen him endure. People saw him with bruises and with a bleeding nose but Ruth told them that he fell over a lot. Steven himself, like almost every child who is abused, assumed that every child was treated in this way.