Martin Brown, 4, lived with his parents and baby sister at 140 St Margaret’s Road. On his last day alive, he got up by himself, got washed and dressed, and ate a breakfast of milk and Sugarpops at around 9.00 a.m. Then he grabbed his anorak and shouted ‘Tarra’ to his parents, and was off out to play. That was the last time his mother heard his voice. He was murdered by 10-year-old Mary Bell.
When 12-year-old Lorna Lax left her parents’ home near San Francisco on November 14th, 1959, she left a note saying she was mad at the world” and would return the next morning. Her parents were not alarmed explaining later that Lorna was ” an unfortunate child, physically retarded and emotionally troubled.” When she had not returned by Mornday morning, they grew concerned. That afternoon Norman Fortner, thirteen, found Lorna’s body in a wooded area about two hundred yards from her home. Fortner told how Lax had often used the thicket as a “sex club,” charging “initiation fees” of thity-five cents to a dollar for local boys. Visitors to the sex club were questioned. Clifford Fortner, fifteen, told police he had gone to the thicket with Lorna early that night. Eventually, Fortner admitted that he had had sex with Lorna and then “something came over him.” He first battered her head with a torch, then strangled her with a rope from a swing nearby, and finally stabbed her in the stomach several times. Fortner was sentenced to be detained for an indefinite time.
When Mary Bell (here at age 16) was described as a child murderer, it was meant both ways: In 1968, when she was only 10 years old, she killed two boys, 3 and 4 years old. Bell mutilated the body of the older child. She was convicted of manslaughter after having been deemed mentally ill because of her horrific upbringing, and spent 12 years in prison.
Howard Lang offered a cigarette to his 7-year-old playmate, Lonnie Fellick, and then casually informed him: “That will be the last one you ever smoke.” In the presence of a third boy, 9-year-old old Gerald Michalek, Lang threw Fellick to the ground and attacked him with a switchblade and a heavy stone in Thatcher Woods, northwest of Chicago. Satisfied that Lonnie was dead, Lang and his friend covered the body with leaves. Howard Lang was only 12-years-old when he murdered Fellick on October 18, 1947. The young suspect attended classes at the Von Humboldt Grammar School on the city’s far northwest side. Lang had a 17-year-old girlfriend named Anna Mae Evans, who hid the his blood-stained clothes. Lang giggled as he reconstructed the murder for the police. The three boys took a streetcar to the forest preserve and walked to Thatcher Woods. “Lonnie asked me for a cigarette and I gave him one, and then he said he was going to tell my mother that I took $10 of her money.” That’s when Land noticed the thirty-five-pound concrete boulder imbedded in the ground. Howard knocked Lonnie to the ground, stabbed him, and then crushed him with the stone. Gerald Michalek told police what happened next. “Howie told me to hold his legs or else I’d get it the same way. I thought Lonnie was breathing but I was sure he’d die. I covered him with the leaves.” The two boys went to the home of Anna Evans, who refused to believe the story. The next day, she and two older boys went to the forest to see for themselves. Anna took Lonnie’s blood-soaked clothes with her and hid them in the woods. The police and the state’s attorney believed that Lang know what he was doing and they pressed for a murder indictment. The boy was eventually convicted, but the decision was reversed by the Illinois Supreme Court on April 27, 1949. The ruling was handed down by the Judge who exomplained that Lang was too young to be able to distinguish between right or wrong. As a result he was acquitted of all charges.
Clearly born to be bad, Jesse Pomeroy spent the two years between his twelfth and fourteenth birthday at the West Borough Reform School at Boston. For the two years prior to his detention a series of attacks had been made on young boys in which they had been savagely beaten and then tortured with knives and whips before being left unconscious where they fell. The trail led, unbelievably, to twelve-year-old Jesse who was living with his widowed mother in one of the depressed slums of Boston. A most ungainly youth, Pomeroy’s unnerving appearance with his harelip and blind white eye was further complicated by mental retardation. In March 1874, barely a month after Pomeroy’s release from custody, ten-year-old Mary Curran went missing; in the following month, the horribly mutilated corpse of four-year-old Horrace Mullen was found. All the evidence pointed in Jesse Pomeroy’s direction, though even if it had not, Jesse was willing enough to confess - not only to the murder of the Curran girl and young Mullen, but to twenty-seven others, twelve of whose tortured and mutilated bodies were unearthed from the ground around his mother’s house. Despite the fact that Pomeroy was still only fourteen years old, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. In the end his sentence was commuted to solitary confinement for life - at first in prison and then, after a number of attempts on his own life, in an asylum. Jesse Pomeroy spent fifty-eight years in solitary until his death in 1932.
On February 1993, a two-year-old boy was lured away from his mother in a busy shopping mall in Liverpool, England, savagely beaten and callously murdered on a railway track. What made this crime all the more appalling was the fact that the mall’s security captured images of a pair of 10-year-old bous, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, holding the infant James Bulger by his hand and walking him away to his death.
On the day that he died, toddler James Bulger had gone to the Strand shopping centre in Liverpool suburb of Bootle with his mother, Denise. Standing beside her as she was served in a local butcher’s shop, James inexplicably left her side at about 3.40 pm that afternoon. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were playing traunt from school and had spend almost six hours trying to lure a victim from one of the many shops at the mall. Once they had succeeded in gaining James Bulger’s confidence, they left the shopping centre within two minutes-while the boy’s mother frantically searched for him.
The now distressed James Bulger was taken to an isolated railway track on Wolton Lane, some 4 kilometres away from the shopping mall, and exposed to a series of violent attacks. Bulger was pelted with rocks and bricks, and blue Hombrol modelling paint was splashed on him. The toddler’s screams were silenced by prolonged kicking and stomping by the older boys, who finally used a metal bar to kill him. The young abductors took the infant’s pants off, and although there was evidence that the little boy may have been sexually abused this was not tended in court out of respect for the parents. As a final act of callousness, the older boys covered James Bulger’s face and body with bricks and rocks and left his body on the railway track, where the post-mortem found it was severed in half. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were released in 2001 after having served 8 years and 4 months in prison.
A native of Portland, Maine, John Joubert joined the Air Force after flunking out of Norwich University in Vermont. Stationed at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, the 21-year-old Joubert was fascinated by detective magazines and their glossy reenactments of sex and violence. In 1983, the fantasy world of Joubert exploded. Danny Ho Eberle, thirteen, was abducted September 18, 1983, on his way to school. His bound body was found three days later south of Bellevue, Nebraska. He had been stabbed repeatedly. Three months later, on December 5, the brutalized body of Christopher Walden, twelve, was found north-west of Papillion, Nebraska. The autopsy reported that Joubert had first tried to strangle the boy and then stabbed him five times. While there was no evidence of sexual assault, both boys were forced to strip down to their underwear before being killed. On January 11, 1984, Joubert was arrested for the murder of Eberle and Walden. During his trial, psychiatric evidence showed that Joubert had been fantasizing about bizarre acts with women and young boys since he was siz years old. Police found twenty-four detective magazines in his room, and Joubert admitted to having sexual fantasies about the captives depicted in them. On July 3, 1984, Joubert confessed to the murder of Danny Jo Eberle and Christopher Walden/ Three months later, a three-judge panel sentenced him to death. The parents of both victims had implored the court to give Joubert the death sentence, while Beverley Joubert had asked that her son be spared so that he might help other prisoners. John Joubert was executed in 1996.
“You can label me a monster, a cold-blooded killer, a demon child, Satan incarnate, I don’t care what the name you give me. It doesn’t mean that is who I am.”
13 year old Eric Smith was convicted of choking and battering a 4 year old boy to death in 1994. He proceeded to sodomize the 4 year old with a stick and to drop large rocks on his mangled body. Smith was sentenced to minimum of 9 years in prison for second degree murder. He is still in prison and has been denied parole 5 times already.
Trauma to the skull of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, thought to be made with a flashlight.
Ten-year-old William York lived in a workhouse in Eyke, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, where he shared a bed with five-year-old Susan Mayhew. One morning in 1748 William woke to find that Susan had wet the bed. He took her outside, cut her wrists and elbows, then slashed open her thigh; the little girl bled to death. William was given the death sentence, but chose a career in the navy as a reprieve.
Cayetano Santos Godino, aliased “petiso orejudo” (in English “big ear pest”) was a serial killer who terrified the Argentinian city of Buenos Aires when just sixteen. In the early 20th century he was liable for the murders of 4 children, the failed murders of another seven and arson of seven buildings.
On 26th January 1912 Aurora Laurona, 13, was found dead in an abandoned house. On March 7th Godino set fire to the dress of Reyna Vainicoff, 5 years old, who did not recover and died some days later. In late September he set fire to a railway station, which was extinguished without extensive damage. On November 8th he tried to choke Roberto Russo, 8 years old. He was seized and charged with failed murder but released until the trial. On November 16th he hit Carmen Ghittoni, who suffered minor wounds before a police officer intervened. On November 20th he kidnapped Carolina Neolener, who cried out and was rescued by a neighbour. In late November he set fire to two large sheds which were extinguished quickly. On December 3rd 1912, Godino saw Jesualdo Giordano playing outside his house, and offered to buy the boy some sweets to convince him to go with him. Providing a few sweets then offering more, Godino took Giordano to a country house. When they were inside, he threw him to floor and unsuccessfully tried to choke him with his belt. Then he cut his belt and tied his hands and legs. He started beating him and considered hammering his head. He left the house looking for a nail and saw Giordano’s father, to whom he said he did not know where the child was. He then re-entered the house with the nail. He hammered it into the side of Giordano’s skull and hid the corpse. The body was found by the father minutes later. At 8PM Cayetano went to the wake and touched the skull where he had fixed the nail. At 5:30 AM on December 4th he was seized by police, confessing his crimes.
On January 4th 1913 he entered a reformatory, where tried to kill some of the inmates. Due to medical reports, which declared him insane, the judge discontinued the case and ordered him to stay in the reformatory. On November 12th 1915 an appeal was approved ordering him to be moved to jail on November 20th. On March 28th 1923 Godino was transferred to Ushuaia Penitentiary. On 1933 he spent some time in hospital for a beating he suffered from inmates due to having killed two cats which were mascots for them. From 1935 onwards he was always ill and received no visitors until he died on 1944 in strange circumstances.
This is a copy of the ransom note recovered in the murder case of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, whose body was found in the basement of her family’s home the day after Christmas. She had been brutally beaten and strangled to death.
Nevada-Tan - On Tuesday, 1 June 2004, at Sasebo Elementary School, an 11-year-old girl killed her classmate, then returned to her homeroom in bloodied clothes. The classmate, Satomi Miratai, died later that day. The killer is now in juvie, apparently until 2013. The story, an unprecedented and grisly murder, was printed in newspapers around the world. However, nobody could have anticipated what happened next. On the Japanese side of the Internet, a class picture was discovered, and two of the girls stood out. On the far left, wearing glasses and a green sweatshirt, Satomi stood grinning, giving a victory sign to the camera. Right next to her, with an inexplicable expression on her face, stood the killer— Nevada.
For some reason, the specifics of the murder— a seemingly normal 11-year-old girl, with a box-cutter, in a Nevada sweatshirt— made a clear impression in communal consciousness of the Internet, all around the world. Stories were posted on Internet forums across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. In Japan, especially, she became a center of attention and was given the name “Nevada-tan”; “-tan” being the way a young child would pronounce the honorific “-chan”, i.e., “Widdle Nevada”. The investigation into her murder revealed a long story. Nevada was originally nearly a normal kid; she enjoyed Battle Royale, but of course that’s a very popular movie all over the world. Now, she was on her school’s basketball team, but her mother made her quit so that she could improve her grades. At this point Nevada became ill-willed and began to collect horror Flash movies on her website. She began to frequent violent websites, and wrote a Battle Royale fanfic and gruesome “recipes”. She focused her attention on the Internet, trying to gain fans with a LiveJournal-style diary. She rejoined the basketball team, but they excluded her from activities and she dropped out. On her diary, she wrote, “I don’t really like to play with my friends.”
Her good friend Satomi Miratai became an enemy after she slighted Nevada on her own, far more popular diary. Nevada demanded an apology, but Satomi was frank with her, calling her “pretentious”. Following this insult, Nevada focused in on Satomi as an object for her anger. She watched a horror series on television (“Monday Mystery Theater”) where many people were killed quickly and effectively with box cutters. Soon afterwards, she threatened a boy with a box cutter. Ten days later, she led Satomi into an empty classroom, covered her eyes, and slit her throat.
On 24 March 1944, George Stinney Jr, a 14-year-old illiterate boy, allegedly murdered two young girls. Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames’ skull had been smashed with a railroad spike. The tiny community of Alcolu in Clarendon County, South Carolina, was stunned. Stinney had been seen with the girls and, after and hours questioning, he confessed to the crime under interrogation. Since he had already confessed, his trial was only a formality; under South Carolina law Stinney was considered an adult, and the jury took just 10 minutes to decide on his guilt. On 16 June 1944 Stinney became the youngest person to die in the electric chair. Standing at 5’1” and weighing just over 90 pounds, he was small for his height. The adult-sized face-mask was too large for Stinney and while being executed it slipped off, revealing his convulsing face to the witnesses.