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.

Willie Bosket had committed over two thousand crimes in New York by the time he was fifteen, including stabbing several people.  The son of a convicted murderer, he never knew his father but revered him for his “manly” crime.  Just before he was sixteen, his crimes became more serious.  Killing another boy in a fight, he then embarked upon a series of subway crimes, which ended up in the deaths of two men.  He shot them, he later said, just to see what it was like.  It didn’t affect him.  He knew the juvenile laws well enough to realize that he could continue to do what he was doing and yet still get released when he was twenty-one.  He had no reason to stop. Yet it was his spree and his arrogance that brought about a dramatic change in the juvenile justice system, starting there in New York.  The “Willie Bosket law,” which allowed dangerous juveniles as young as thirteen to be tried in adult courts, was passed and signed in six days.  Willie went on to commit more crimes, although none as serious as murder, and ended up with prison terms that ensured that he would spend the rest of his life there.

Referred to as “the nicest boy” in his hometown of Wolcott, Kansas, by the local newspaper Lowell Lee Andrews did anything but live up to it when he attempted to fulfill his secret dream of becoming a hired gunman in Chicago. Andrews, at the age of eighteen, weighed 300 pounds, wore horn-rimmed glasses, never drank alcohol, never dated, regularly went to church, and was an honor student. But because he needed money for the trip to Chicago to see his dream through, Andrews decided to kill his sister and parents and sell the property owned by his well-off farming family. While his family watched television, he entered the parlor carrying an automatic rifle and revolver and shot his sister between the eyes, his mother three times, and his father twice, before reloading, since the first round failed to kill his parents. He confessed the killings to his pastor a few days later. He was found Guilty of murder, despite being diagnosed as schizophrenic, sentenced, and hanged at Leavenworth Prison.

Two 16-year-old girls have been jailed in Hickory, N.C., on charges of robbing and murdering a taxi driver last August. If convicted, the girls face life in prison. Emily Starnes and Consandra Tyree were arrested Saturday afternoon and are jailed without bond at the Catawba County Jail, ABC News reported. The girls were charged on Monday with murder, robbery, conspiracy and firearms offenses in the stabbing death of taxi driver Adam Williams. “In North Carolina, for criminal court purposes, when you’re 16, you’re treated as an adult,” Hickory Police Department Capt. Thurman Whisnant told ABCNews.com. “The possibility exists of life in prison, but it’s still early to tell.” The charges follow indictments last year accusing Camyron Johnson and Matthew Hopkins on murder and robbery charges, according to WBTV. The station reported that a third man, Robert McElwee, was indicted on one count of accessory after the fact. Adam Williams had worked for Yellow Cab Co. for a few weeks and had been  planning to quit for another job when he was slain. He worked two shifts the night he was killed.

Williams was attacked and stabbed around 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 23, 2011, answering a call at Fuddruckers parking lot, according to the Hickory Record. Williams, bleeding from slashes to his face and throat, struggled to the door of the nearby LongHorn Steakhouse. Employees called an ambulance to take Williams to Frye Regional Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. Officials told ABC News that robbery was the motive. Ronald Stevens, who manages the Yellow Cab Co. in downtown Hickory, said Williams had $39 on him. The money was missing when he was found, according to WSOC-TV. “It just makes no sense,” Stevens told WBTV. Starnes and Tyree were both arrested on Oct. 5, 2011, and charged with obstruction of justice. “We knew these two young ladies were involved from the get-go, but wanted to do a complete, thorough investigation,” Whisnant told ABC News. “It was clear that they had involvement before, during and after the crime.” Whisnant would not say what role police believe the girls played in the crime. The teenagers are scheduled to appear in court on May 14.

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.

The youngest person ever to be convicted of multiple murders in Canada, Jasmine Richardson was twelve when she brutally murdered her parents and younger brother in Medicine Hat, Alberta. After the bodies were discovered on April 23rd, 2006, police feared Jasmine could also be a victim. However, she was later found alive with her 23-year-old boyfriend Jeremy Allen Steinke, whom her parents did not approve of. Steinke, who, like Jasmine, had an interest in goth culture, monsters and vampires, was also charged with the murders. On July 9, 2007, Jasmine was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to ten years in prison, the maximum penalty for a child under fourteen under the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act.

“She was mean. She hit me and stuff”

16-year-old Cody Posey faced life in prison but was sentenced to treatment and a juvenile correction facility in 2006 for the shooting deaths of his father, Delbert Paul Posey, stepmother Tryone and stepsister Marilea on the Chavez Canyon Ranch owned by ABC newsman Sam Donaldson. The 16-year-old admitted his role in the July 5, 2004, shootings, but says the incident was precipitated by a lifetime of physical and mental abuse at the hands of his father. He was released in October 2010.

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.