What turns children into murderers?
The conviction of two teenagers this week for a brutal double murder raises the issue of why children kill, reports
The law is not there to tell us why. The guilty verdict delivered by a jury in Nottingham Crown Court this week confirmed a 15-year-old girl’s calculated culpability in the brutal double murder of a mother and daughter in Spalding. But not what could have caused this teenager and her boyfriend (who pleaded guilty at the start of the trial) to act with terrifying violence and callous premeditation that belied their youth. Both were just 14 at the time.
The court heard how the couple made extensive plans before heading, last April, to the house in the Lincolnshire town where 49year-old school dinner lady Elizabeth Edwards slept, with her 13-year-old daughter Katie in the next room. T he boy stabbed Mrs Edwards eight times, targeting her throat to stop her screams, then moved on to kill Katie.
Leaving the two dead bodies in blood-stained bedrooms, the pair took a bath, had sex, ate ice cream and watched four of the teenage vampire
films. But the “why” in this horrifying chapter of events remains a mystery – not least because, as minors, the perpetrators cannot be named, or their stories told. A member of the public in the gallery did offer one answer: “You’re sick,” he screamed at the girl in the dock.
She had denied murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Her barrister said she had been diagnosed as having an adjustment disorder at the time, and pointed to her diary entries which read: “Help me. Death is the only way. Madness is in me.”
Yet Dr Philip Joseph, the consultant forensic psychiatrist who examined the couple after their arrest, gave evidence that although the girl may have been in emotional turmoil, he could not detect any mental illness.
He pointed, instead, to their “intense, toxic” partnership. “It is the relationship that is behind the killings,” he attested, likening the youngsters to Bonnie and Clyde: “that sort of intense attraction, emotional closeness – them against the world”.
Murderous couples have long held us in appalling thrall, whether it be Bonnie and Clyde’s killing spree in Depression-era America, or Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who in the Sixties abducted, abused and killed five children, burying their bodies on the moors above Manchester.
But perhaps of even greater fascination than couples who kill are children who kill, and in this respect the Spalding pair has achieved the chilling accolade of being the youngest British couple ever to have been convicted of murder. They join a list of some 400 other children who have been convicted of the same crime in the past two decades. Most remain anonymous, but when their names are released by the courts, on the grounds of public interest, they become monsters in the public imagination.
Mary Bell was just 11 when, in 1968, she was found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility for strangling four-yearold Martin Brown and Brian Howe, aged three, in Scotswood, Newcastle.
The trial judge, Mr Justice Cusack, labelled the heart-faced Bell a “very grave risk to other children”, and she became notorious – causing a national wave of soul-searching. Can a child ever be born evil?
Detectives investigating Robert Thompson and Jon Venables for the murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger certainly seemed to believe so. The pair were just 10, even younger than Bell, when, in 1993, they snatched the toddler from Bootle’s Strand Shopping Centre and were seen in CCTV pictures leading him away from his mother, heading for a railway line, where they tortured and killed him.
In both cases, though, some clues to the question “why?” slowly emerged. Mary Bell later described to the author Gitta Sereny her abusive childhood at the hands of her prostitute mother. And in his startling account of the Bulger trial, Blake Morrison examined Thompson and Venables’s with why children kill is heated debate about how they should be treated after conviction. At the time of the Bulger trail, John Major, then the prime minister, said that “society needs to condemn a little more, and understand a little less”. And Jane Blandford, a friend of Elizabeth Edwards in Spalding, has appealed for the judge to lock up her “scum” killers “and throw away the key”.
A very different approach was taken to child killers in the Norwegian city of Trondheim. In 1994, in the local playground, two six-year-old boys turned on and battered to death their five-yearold friend, Silje Redergard, for no apparent reason.
As in Spalding, Bootle and Scotswood, the crime shattered the local community, but reporting of it was strictly limited, the killers’ names were never released, and the two boys were dealt with by social services, not the law. Some claimed one of the boys had been the victim of sexual abuse, but neither were demonised and they were both enrolled in another local school within weeks, with the knowledge and support of parents there.
“There is strong evidence,” says Dr Ruth Armstrong of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, “that early imprisonment of youngsters makes their problems worse rather than better, and therefore leaves them more likely to offend again. And that is why, over the last eight years, we have reduced the population of our youth offender institutions by 60 per cent.”
That will be another consideration for Justice Haddon-Gave to weigh, on November 10, when the two teenage killers return for sentencing.
The Norwegian approach of treatment and protection, rather than punishment, is not without flaws. It did not satisfy the parents of Silje Redergard. “We’ve forgiven them [the boys] for being children,” said Jorgen Barlaup, her stepfather, “but we’ll never forgive them for what they did.”
Few would demur. For the family and friends of the Edwardses, answering the “why” of such terrible crimes is surely just as necessary as the who, when and where.