Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (26 page)

Relatively little was known about psychopaths in Harold Jones day – so his smiling and unperturbed demeanour after eight-year-old Freda’s death was originally taken as proof of his innocence.

Nowadays we know that psychopaths simply don’t get nervous as they have very low levels of emotional arousal. They don’t learn from experience, which explains how Harold could commit a second sex killing
within days of being released from jail after the first. And psychopaths don’t fear punishment, so Harold was equally blasé when the police found Florrie’s blood-drained corpse in his parent’s attic.

Harold Jones’ two sex murders were highly opportunistic. The girls came to him whilst he was alone – and trusted him enough to follow him – so they died. He had the superficial charm that is the hallmark of the psychopath but also had the homicidal psychopath’s obsession with control, need for sensation and lack of shame.

More usually, disturbed teenagers commit lust murders because they don’t believe that they can have a consensual relationship with a girl. They’ll desire a female from afar but know that they lack the social skills to impress her. As a result, more and more anger gets mixed up in the lust. They feel stupid and clumsy when they think of approaching a pretty young female – but they perversely blame her for making them feel bad.

George Stinney probably fits into this category as do several of the other lust murderers whose case studies appear later in this chapter. In other instances, there are multiple motives, with the anger and lust mixed up with the need for excitement and monetary greed.

Adult burglars often go on to commit rape or sex murders and occasionally this is also true of teenage burglars. These are crimes of both wrong-thinking and opportunity. Sometimes the burglar will find women’s lingerie and be aroused by it so he’ll wait until she gets home and will attack. In other instances, he’ll think that the house is empty – then find a woman ill in bed or in the shower. Already sexually excited through the act of entering her home, he moves on to a sexual assault. Kenny Houseknecht fits into this category.

Kenny Houseknecht is a good example of social ineptitude stemming from insufficient nurturing, mixed up with a robbery that went wrong. At age fourteen, Kenny was a six foot tall and heavily built American schoolboy living in New Jersey. He had a history of bedwetting and was very stressed. He turned to a neighbour for parenting but the man instead introduced him to burglary and drugs.

Kenny owed a friend fifty dollars and the friend kept asking for it. Kenny said he’d steal it from a neighbour’s house – the Andersons – as they left lots of money lying around.

On 19th April 1988 he sneaked into the house after the adult Andersons had left. He’d just grabbed a piggy bank when twelve-year-old Kim Anderson confronted
him in the hallway. She’d probably just left the shower as she had a towel around her breasts.

He’d later say that she grabbed the knife, but that’s very unlikely. What’s known is that they struggled in the hall then she probably raced into the bedroom to phone for help and was pursued by him. They landed on the bed for there was blood all over the bedspread and on the carpet. He hit her with the telephone, causing heavy bruising but she remained conscious. By now he was on top of her.

As she tried to fight him off, he stabbed her in the hands nineteen times. He received cuts to his own hands during the struggle but continued to stab her, moving his knife to her chest so that the blade punctured her lungs.

By now Kim was unable to fight back, but the fourteen-year-old flipped her over onto her stomach and continued to stab her, reigning blows on her back. He also stabbed her in the head, and the tip of the knife snapped off and remained embedded in her skull.

At some stage during or after the assault, Kenny ejaculated, for a pair of women’s panties with his semen on them were found in Kim’s garden. It’s not unusual for such sex killers to take away a trophy and he may have dropped it in his rush to flee the house.

Kenny then went to school and had the nurse bandage the cuts on his hands. Several people noticed that he was acting jumpy and an acquaintance told the police that Kenny had planned to rob the Andersons’ house that day.

Meanwhile, Kenny went home and wrote a naive
letter to Kim’s family, suggesting the killer was someone else who would try to pin it on Kenny. He also drew a naked woman, a large vagina and a couple having anal sex.

Police searched his home and found the incriminatory letter in his bedroom. They duly arrested him. As he was only fourteen, the police asked one of his relatives to sit in on the interview. At this stage he was still technically innocent – yet the first thing the relative did was slap his face.

Social workers at the trial testified to his unnurtured childhood which included abuse and abandonment but psychiatrists said he was sane at the time of the killing. In July 1991 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Sometimes it’s impossible to know if the teenage sex offender is solely attracted to children (that is, a paedophile) or if he only vents his lust on a child because he believes that an adult woman will spurn him. One British killer whose motivation is indeterminate is Tony Craven. He was a very immature seventeen-year-old who only looked thirteen and was mercilessly teased by his more worldly workmates about his virginity.

That said, Tony fits the pattern of a young paedophile. He spurned other young adults in order to spend all of his time with children. And he immersed
himself in their games and in their favourite pastime of riding their bikes. Local parents approved of the well mannered and cleancut youth though it’s unclear if he formally babysat for any of their children – 48% of paedophiles find their victims through babysitting work.

By August 1991 Tony Craven was determined to lose his virginity. He lured a seven-year-old girl called Angela Flaherty into the woods near their Huddersfield homes where he persuaded her to take off some of her clothes. When she hesitated he took the rest of her garments off and stared at her immature body. He then raped her and told her not to tell.

But the badly injured little girl couldn’t stop crying and he panicked and semi-strangled her then beat her to death with a rock, causing a brain haemorrhage. Thereafter he tried to ‘help’ the police solve the fatal crime. He was eventually arrested and tried to commit suicide three times before being sentenced to life imprisonment by Leeds Crown Court. He will become eligible for parole in 2009.

Because most teenage sex offenders – and adult sex offenders – who are caught are male, there’s an erroneous belief that women don’t commit sex crimes. In truth, they do but their victims are less likely to report them. Even if they do report them, they are much less likely to be believed.

Johnny Garrett (profiled in chapter thirteen) wasn’t
believed when he said that his mother had initiated sex with him – and we can’t know for sure that she did, given that Johnny had increasingly lost touch with reality. But we do know that he’d been forced to have sex with his grandfather and that his grandmother – his mother’s mother – encouraged this. Clearly the older woman had no incest taboos to overcome.

In the book
Female
Sexual
Abuse:
The
Ultimate
Taboo
twelve men told of being sexually abused throughout their childhood by women. (The other cases featured are those where girls were sexually abused by women.) The offenders were mothers, stepmothers and aunts – but therapists have also heard of boys being abused by female teachers, babysitters and nuns. The phenomena is more commonplace than lay people imagine – after a television debate about women who abuse, the TV station received over a thousand phone calls in a single day.

Of 127 people who talked to a counsellor about being abused by a woman, 42% had been abused by their mothers. The abuse had often begun before the child was five years old. The mothers were often abuse victims themselves and some were mentally ill.

Johnny Garrett was abused with his grandmother’s aid in the sixties and seventies – but this crime still isn’t believed by many today. Only three percent of convicted sex offenders are female – but some field workers estimate that the true figure may be closer to ten percent. When children grow up and admit they’d been molested by a female relative they are often told by therapists that they must be confused, that the abuse has been committed by a man.

There is also confusion about what these women do to their victims given that they don’t have a penis. In truth, the abuse is varied. Female sex offenders have made their victims perform oral sex on them or have had full intercourse with them. Other offenders abuse more covertly, perhaps rocking themselves against the child’s body until reaching orgasm.

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’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.)