People always think of children as the ultimate innocents, but these 18 kids committed grisly murders that shocked the world. These infamous child murderers may make it hard for you to sleep tonight.
Mary Bell
Mary Bell was only a day away from her 11th birthday when a young boy, 4-year-old Martin Brown, was found dead. The year was 1968. No one suspected that the young girl from the same neighborhood could possibly be responsible. The young boy’s death was classified as an accident, despite the fact that Bell had strangled the tot. Experts later speculated that because Mary was so young and small, her hands didn’t leave marks on the boy, which was how she initially got away with her crime.
A few weeks later, Mary and her friend Norma Bell (no relation) broke into a neighborhood nursery school and vandalized the place. Mary even wrote a confession to her crime on the walls, but the authorities thought it was just a prank.
In August 1968, she and Norma abducted and strangled 3-year-old Brian Howe. Mary even allegedly returned to the body later to carve the letter “M” onto the boy’s body. Mary was found out and charged with the murders of both Brown and Howe. She was released soon after she reached adulthood and has sued to keep her identity and location, and that of her daughter, a secret from the public (Source)
Jesse Pomeroy
It was never easy for Jesse Pomeroy to blend in. Born in 1859 with a defect in his right eye that caused it to be completely covered in a thick, white film, Pomeroy was despised by his father, ignored by his brother, coddled by his mother, and tormented by his peers. When Pomeroy was about 12 years old, tales of younger boys being led to isolated locales by an older boy, nicknamed The Boy Torturer and The Red Devil, who would then tie them up, beat them with his fists, belt, and, eventually, knives, began to spread. Pomeroy’s mother recognized her son from the tales and moved her family to avoid suspicion. Pomeroy couldn’t give up his favorite habit, however, and was eventually caught after one of his victims was able to identify Pomeroy by his distinctive right eye. Pomeroy was sentenced to six years of reform school. His mother was able to renegotiate the sentence and Pomeroy was free again in just a few months. In 1874, a young girl named Katie Curran went missing. Close to five weeks later, the body of a 4-year-old boy, Horace Millen, was found on the beach. Witnesses placed a young man of Pomeroy’s description at the beach, blood was found on Pomeroy’s clothing, and his shoes matched the prints of those found at the beach. Upon investigating Pomeroy’s home, where his mother ran a dressmaking shop, they found Curran’s remains hidden in an ash heap in the basement. The crimes were enough to put Pomeroy away for life. Other than the Birdman of Alcatraz, Pomeroy held the record for the longest incarceration in U.S. history (Source)
Cindy Collier and Shirley Wolf
Shirley Wolf, 14, and Cindy Collier, 15, had only met each other eight hours before they joined forces to commit murder. They went to a condominium, determined to find a car to run away in. They randomly knocked on doors, asking for simple things, like a glass of water or to use the phone. Most of the residents refused to open their door, unsettled by the girls’ strange demeanor. Eventually, Wolf and Collier came to the door of 85-year-old Anna Brackett, who let the girls in and spent an hour chatting with them. When Brackett turned to answer the phone, Wolf grabbed her and threw her to the ground while Collier grabbed a knife from the kitchen. She tossed it to Wolf, who began stabbing the old woman. Collier then ransacked the place, looking for keys to the car. Once they left, they realized they hadn’t grabbed the right keys, plus the car was a manual, which they couldn’t drive. In a twist of irony almost too unbelievable, Brackett’s son spotted the girls running off to the highway as he and his wife pulled up to pick his mom up for her bingo night. “They’re stupid. Two young girls like that hitchhiking. Or else they’re tough,” he had said to his wife. Both Wolf and Collier are free today, though Wolf has had further run ins with the law, though nothing involving murder (Source)
Edmund Kemper
Sometimes the revolving door of the justice system can spin a little too fast for comfort. Such was the case with Edmund Kemper, or as he’s better known, “The Co-Ed Killer.” Before he preyed on young hitchhikers in the area around Burbank, California during the early 70’s, he was just a young man, with strange, troubling fantasies. After a falling out with his mother when he was 15 years old, she sent him to live with his grandparents on their farm. He hated it there. He and his grandmother got in an argument on August 27, 1964 that resulted in Kemper shooting his grandmother to death. When his grandfather came home, Kemper went outside to meet him at the door. Kemper shot him, then hid his body. He confessed to his crimes, admitting that he killed his grandmother “to see what it felt like.” He killed his grandfather so he wouldn’t have to know that his wife was dead. Since he was a juvenile at the time of his crime, he was released once he turned 21. He returned to live with his mother, against the advice of those familiar with his case who thought his relationship with his mother was deeply unhealthy. He began picking up young, female hitchhikers, at first just dropping them off at their destination. Soon, the urge to kill was too strong to deny. All together, Kemper killed eight women, including 15-year-old Aiko Koo, a dancer on her way to practice, and his own mother and her close friend. He turned himself into authorities in 1973 and is still serving the first of his eight consecutive life sentences (Source)
Jasmine Richardson
Young love isn’t always a beautiful thing. For 12-year-old Jasmine Richardson, it led to the murder of her entire family. After her parents forbid her to continue her relationship with 23-year-old Jeremy Steinke, a self-proclaimed 300-year-old werewolf, Jasmine began to plot their murder. The two lovebirds had met at a heavy metal concert and had become inseparable. Once given an ultimatum and ordered to stop seeing her much older boyfriend, Jasmine began sending Steinke plans on how the two could rid themselves of her parents then run away together. On the night of April 22, 2006, Steinke and Jasmine entered the family home, where Steinke stabbed Jasmine’s mother 12 times. Jasmine’s father heard his wife’s scream and came to save her, but instead was stabbed 24 times by Steinke. Jasmine then went upstairs to the bedrooms where her 8-year-old brother was sleeping and slit his throat. While they were in jail, the two wrote love letters to each other, never once apologizing or acknowledging any sort of remorse for their actions. Steinke is still in prison, where he’s changed his name to Jackson May. Jasmine has since been released and is living in the same community where the murders took place (Source)
Carl Newton Mahan
On May 18, 1929, Carl Newton Mahan, 6, and his friend Cecil Van Hoose, 8, were playing together when they found a scrap of iron. They decided to take it to junk dealer for a little bit of money. When Cecil snatched the scrap away and hit Carl in the face, the younger boy ran home and grabbed his father’s 12-gauge shotgun. He returned to Cecil and said, “I’m going to shoot you!” And that’s just what he did. He was tried for murder, but the jury decided to downgrade that charge from murder to manslaughter. Carl was sentenced to 15 years in reform school and released to his parents after they paid the $500 bail. A circuit judge soon issued a “writ of prohibition” to stay the judgement, since it was against protocol for someone as young as Carl to be tried in front of a jury. Instead, Carl simply went back home (Source)
Eric Smith
With his freckles and bright red hair, Eric Smith looked less like a killer and more like a boy scout at his trial, but a killer he was. When he was 13 years old, he lured 4-year-old Derrick Robie into the woods, less than a block away from the young boy’s home. Once there, he strangled the pre-schooler and played sick games with the boy’s lifeless body. Two days after the murder, when the entire small town was in a frenzy to find the little boy’s killer, Eric walked into the police department to offer his help. At first, the authorities thought Eric was a key witness, never suspecting that he could be at all culpable. After questioning him about the case, however, they began to realize the boy with the almost cherubic face was more involved in this crime than they’d ever believed possible. Today, Eric is still behind bars, though he comes up for parole every two years (Source)
William York
William York was a young lad growing up in 1784. He grew up in a British poor house, meant for wards of the state with no relatives or guardians to care for them. At age 10, he shared a bed with a 5-year-old girl named Susan Mahew. He murdered her, using a knife and a hook (as a newspaper of the time took pleasure in illustrating), and hid her body in a dungheap outside. When her body was discovered, he confessed to his crimes, explaining that “the child had fouled the bed in which they lay together; that she was sulky, and that he did not like her.” For his crimes, York was sentenced to death, but the judgement was stayed until his 18th birthday, at which time he given a royal pardon and joined the Royal Navy (Source)
Barry Dale Loukaitis
Barry Dale Loukaitis was only 14 years old when he walked into his fifth period middle school algebra class dressed as a Wild West gunslinger, complete with a black duster. He opened fire in the classroom, killing two classmates and his algebra teacher, as well as injuring a third student. “This sure beats the hell out of algebra, doesn’t it?” he’s alleged to have said during the attack. He had planned to use one of the students as a hostage and escape via the roof, but a nearby teacher heard the gunshots and came to investigate. The teacher offered to stand in as a hostage, then wrestled the gun away from Loukaitis and held him down until authorities arrived. Loukaitis is currently serving two life sentences with an additional 205 years, without the possibility of parole (Source)
Josh Phillips
On November 8, 1998, the small, Florida community of Lakewood came to a screeching halt. Maddie Clifton, an 8-year-old girl well known throughout the neighborhood, had gone missing. For days, volunteers searched the neighborhood and surrounding areas, hoping to find her. A little over a week later, Melissa Phillips was cleaning the bedroom of her 14-year-old son, Josh. She noticed liquid leaking from the corner of his waterbed. Worried that there might be a leak, she peeled back a board that had been hastily taped together and saw young Maddie’s legs. She had been brutally attacked with a knife and baseball bat. According to forensic evidence, she was still alive when she was stuffed inside the waterbed. Josh was sentenced to life without parole and is still incarcerated today, at the age of 32 (Source)
Robert Thompson and Jon Venables
In 1993, James Bulger, only 2 years old, was out with his mom at a popular shopping destination in London. His mother left him outside the butcher’s shop for a few moment while she bought a few items. When she came back, her young son was gone. CCTV video captured images that sent chills through the nation. A boy, not many years older than the toddler, had taken the tot by the hand and led him away to where his friend waited. Both 10 years old at the time of their crime, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were the perpetrators of one of the most grisly cases ever seen in Britain. Together, Thompson and Venables tortured and murdered the boy before leaving his body on a set of nearby train tracks, apparently in an attempt to see the boy’s body cut in half by a passing train. There was plenty of evidence tying the boys to the crime, but because of their age, their punishment was lenient, considering the depth and degree of the attack. Thompson and Venables are now out of prison and have each been given new identities by the British government to protect their privacy (Source)
Alyssa Bustamante
The details of 15-year-old Alyssa Bustamante’s crime are almost too surreal to believe. She used her younger sister to lure 9-year-old neighbor Elizabeth Olten to a secluded spot in the woods with the promise of a play date. The games Bustamante had in mind were far more deadly than anyone could have imagined. She strangled the girl, stabbed her, and slit her throat before leaving her in a shallow grave covered in fallen leaves. When she got home, she wrote in her diary, “I just f—ing killed someone. I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed them now they’re dead. I don’t know how to feel atm. It was ahmazing. As soon as you get over the ‘ohmygawd I can’t do this’ feeling, it’s pretty enjoyable. I’m kinda nervous and shaky though right now. Kay, I gotta go to church now…lol.” After a massive two-day search for the missing girl, Bustamante led authorities to the grave, only about a half-mile away from Bustamante’s home. Bustamante is still in prison for what she did (Source)
Graham Young
With a nickname like the Teacup Poisoner, you already know what Graham Young’s method of execution was. Born just outside of London in 1947, Young had always been fascinated by chemicals and loved to tinker with the chemistry set his father had bought for him. By the time he was 13 years old, he had a mastery of toxicology that helped him convince local chemist that he was actually 17 so they would let him purchase a more dangerous array of poisons like antimony, digitalis and arsenic, as well as the heavy metal, thallium. His first victim was a schoolmate he routinely poisoned, which led to the boy suffering from vomiting, headaches, and painful cramps that baffled medical experts.
Perhaps unsatisfied by his inability to properly watch the effects of the poison once his schoolmate left school for the day, Young’s attention moved on to those closer to home, his own family. No one in his family was safe from his deadly experiments. On occasion, he even poisoned himself, but it’s unknown if this was purposeful or if he simply forgot which teacup he had added the poison to. His first fatality was his stepmother, Molly. One day in 1961, Young’s father found his wife outside in the back garden, convulsing in pain as Young watched, fascinated. Molly eventually died from the poisoning, which had occurred over a long period of time. It was only after Young switched to thallium that his stepmother’s “mystery illness” finally took her life. He switched to thallium because she was building up a tolerance to the other poisons he slipped her.
It was only after Young’s father was hospitalized himself that he realized that his son had been poisoning the entire family. Even then, he couldn’t bring himself to turn his own child into the authorities, but Young’s chemistry teacher, suspicious, had found a supply of poisons and meticulous notes about dosages and experiments in Young’s school desk and reported it. Young, at only 14 years old, pled guilty to poisoning his family and his schoolmate and was sent to an asylum.
Very soon after his arrival, a fellow inmate died from cyanide poisoning. Young claimed that he was responsible for the death, saying he knew how to make cyanide from laurel bush leaves, but no one took him seriously and the death was written off as a suicide. Throughout his stay, Young tried to hide his still burning passion for poisons and toxicology, having realized that any signs of continued obsession could hurt his chances of release. That day finally came when Young was 23. He told a nurse just before his release that he planned on poisoning one person for every year he had been locked away. Though the comment was added to a report, it did not affect the decision to release him.
After he was free, Young found a job at John Hadland Laboratories, a photographic supply firm, where he proceeded to poison most of the people he worked with, killing two of them. With so many people falling ill and even dying, the on-site doctor tried to reassure the staff about the nature of the illness. Perhaps impatient with how slow people were to recognize his genius, Young suggested that thallium poison, the very substance he’d used to poison his stepmother so many years ago, was the culprit. The doctor was uneasy about Young’s thorough knowledge of toxicology and reported the incident to management, who then reported it to authorities. When the police searched Young’s residence, they found more poisons as well as diaries with notes charting the dosages he gave to certain individuals and their responses over time. The Teacup Poisoner (a moniker he was never very fond of) died in prison in 1990 of heart failure, though some suspect he poisoned himself once he tired of life in prison (Source)
Jordan Brown
Jordan Brown is one of the youngest murderers in the United States. When he was 11 years old, he fetched the family’s 20-gauge shotgun and stood over his father’s sleeping, pregnant fiancee and killed her and his unborn sibling. Then he took the shell, buried it in the yard, and hopped on the school bus and headed to school. He was released in 2016 and still maintains that he never did it and refuses to admit any guilt (Source)
Harvey Miguel Robinson
Harvey Miguel Robinson is an infamous figure in American history. He’s the youngest serial killer to be sentenced to death ever on U.S. soil, since he was apprehended when he was only 18 years old. He terrorized Allentown, Pennsylvania during a 1993 killing spree that left three women dead, including a 15-year-old newspaper deliverer, and two others seriously injured, including a 5-year-old little girl. Robinson has been sentenced to death, though he’s still alive and on death row (Source)
Alex and Derek King
Brothers Derek and Alex King, aged 12 and 13 respectively, murdered their father by beating him in the head with a baseball bat as he slept in a chair in 2001. The violence of their crime shocked their Florida community. A family friend who hid the boys after the murder was charged as an accomplice for his involvement and, since he already had a record, he received 35 years in jail. Derek was freed from jail in 2013. Alex was released a little earlier, but was reincarcerated after a probation violation (Source)
Michael Hernandez
Michael Hernandez was only 14 years old when he lured Jaime Gough, also 14, into the boy’s bathroom at their middle school. He promised to show his friend something cool, but once he had him inside the stall, he slit his throat. Another student happened to come in while Hernandez was still cleaning up at the sink and ran to fetch school authorities. After his capture, authorities found evidence that the young boy was obsessed with the macabre and all things violent. He was fascinated by serial killers and wanted to become one himself. Police found plans he’d made to kill his sister and another friend after he’d finished with Jaime. Hernandez is currently serving out a sentence of life in prison (Source)
Daniel Bartlam
Daniel Bartlam made headlines in 2011 when he murdered his mother, Jacqueline, with a claw hammer. Afterwards, he poured gasoline around her body, lit a piece of newspaper on the gas stove, and set the whole house on fire. During the investigation, Daniel initially claimed the murder was committed by an intruder. Later, he recanted that story, instead claiming he’d lost control during an argument. Investigators searching his computer, however, found a story he’d written, then deleted, in which a character named Daniel killed his mother, Jacqueline (Jackie) with the exact same murder weapon and under suspiciously similar circumstances. At 14-years-old, Daniel was sentenced to 16 years behind bars for his crime (Source)