Prepubescent psychopaths commit the vilest evil
against an infant; today, they walk free among you. A tyrannical teen becomes a serial
killer of taxi drivers and disco dancers. These are just a couple of cases in our gruesome
catalog of killer kids, the young monstrosities you won’t believe are real.
Zachary Davis We’ll start with a boy that we will
call the ultimate face of evil, a young man who perfectly fits
the description of disturbed. The date is August 10, 2012. A 15-year-old
boy in Tennessee, USA, is going about his normal day. He’s a quiet kid. He doesn’t have too
many friends. Those that do know him think he’s a bit strange. He’s obsessed with serial killers
for some reason. He loves reading about their methods. One of his pastimes is Googling types
of torture. He often downloads images of obscene gore. His favorite book? Stephen King’s “Misery.”
You could say that he’s one to keep an eye on. Not long ago, he wrote in his notebook,
“You can’t spell slaughter without laughter.” This is a kid who is loved
by his mother, Melanie, a paralegal, and triathlete who adores Zachary
and his 16-year-old brother Josh. On this day, all three of them go and see
a movie. It’s been a good day out. Melanie knows both boys have not been right since
their father died in 2007 of ALS. She sent Zachary to see a psychiatrist. While the
psychiatrist did say her son was suffering from a depressive disorder, Melanie decided
it was best to cure her son with her love and understanding. This was a mistake, a grave one.
After they get home from the movie, Zachary goes to his room and starts packing things into a
backpack. The items include his beloved notebooks and a toothbrush, but what’s entirely disturbing
is he also packs a pair of gloves, a ski mask, and a claw hammer. He has plans for the future.
But right now, he’s concentrated on the present, which means waiting for Melanie to go to bed.
She does that at about 9 p.m., and when Zachary can hear the sounds of her slumber, he calmly
walks into her room with a sledgehammer held in his hands. Towering above Melanie, he strikes her
head with significant force. He keeps striking, maybe 20 times, until his mother is well and
truly smashed like someone on a Medieval wheel. Blood is everywhere, splattered all over the
bed and on the wall, covering Zachary himself. He looks like a maniac, clenching the weapon in
his now red hands. He walks to what he calls the game room and takes whisky and gasoline to
drench the place. Soon the room is aflame, and Zachary, purposefully leaving his
sleeping brother alone, leaves the house, hoping his brother will die in the fire. Thanks
to a fire alarm and the fact Zachary has closed the game room door, his brother will survive.
Zachary’s plans are thwarted when he’s picked up by police about ten miles away from his
house. During a subsequent interrogation, in what can be described as a voice that
epitomizes evil, he explains some things. The detective already knows some things about
Zachary; his obsession with killing; his mental distress, and what seems like a willingness to
emulate his favorite serial killers. Zachary explains what his plans were; what would have
happened had he not been picked up by the cops. “I didn’t feel anything when I killed
her,” Zachary said about his mother. Something was obviously very wrong with
this kid. He had some serious mental issues. His father’s death obviously
hurt him. But he had a loving family, unlike the majority of the serial killers he
admired, whose lives were mired in trauma from a young age. Zachary’s evil seemed to come
from an unknown place. He was an enigma, like all the kids you’ll hear about today.
Even in court, he showed absolutely no remorse when he was shown photographs of his mother’s
beaten body. He quite calmly explained that he’d used a sledgehammer because there was
no chance of missing or leaving her alive. He smiled when describing the sound the
weapon made when connecting with her head: “It was a wet thumping sound,” he recalled.
In later interviews, he looked like a madman. When the judge sentenced Zachary to life in
prison, he shared some words with the court, “You became evil, Mr. Davis; you went to
the dark side. It’s that plain and simple.” Can we beat this story? You know
us viewers, of course, we can. Let’s now have a look at one of the murders
that Zachary had read about and was highly impressed with, a crime that he admitted
served as an inspiration for his own crime. Nevada-tan
What’s so utterly shocking about this next crime is that the murderer was only 11
years old and to most people she seemed like a little girl who was as harmless as the teddy
bears she kept by her bed. She was, in fact, a brutal killer of the highest order. That’s
why young Zachary had so much respect for her. On June 1, 2004, Girl A is at her elementary
school in Sasebo in Japan’s Nagasaki Prefecture. It’s lunchtime, and Girl A walks up to
another girl, 12-year-old Satomi Mitarai. It’s just an ordinary lunch break for all the
other 6th graders, some of whom are playing, others napping, but most are still eating
from their bento boxes. Girl A goes over to Satomi’s desk and says to her, “Hey, come outside
with me. I have something funny to show you.” Satomi has never really had any issues with Girl
A. So, why not go see this thing? The two walk out of the classroom, and Girl A leads the way
to another room, an empty one. Satomi asks her what this funny thing is. Girl A’s face
suddenly transforms into an expression of infantile rage. She whips out an incredibly
sharp box cutter and slices Satomi’s neck. Soon after, the teacher realizes the girls
are missing. She goes to see where they are when she finds young Satomi lying in a pool
of blood. When she asks Girl A what happened, she hears the reply, “I have done a bad thing.”
There has never been a clear motive. Maybe Girl A had read too many violent comic books. Maybe
she was stressed or had Asperger’s Syndrome, but she wasn’t the only case of
kids killing other kids in Japan. Satomi’s father later said, “I can't
understand it at all. I don't have a clue.” Sometimes, the reasons for such acts are not
easy to ascertain, especially when the killer is so young and seemingly innocent. Girl
A apparently cried a lot after the murder. She was sent to a kind of special school for
rehabilitation. Strangers even wished her well. Others did not. They knew about the stories of
Girl A kicking and punching other students. They knew that she was very capable of violence.
They’d heard the police psychologist who said Girl A scared the hell out of her classmates
and that there had been an incident with her and a knife not long before the murder.
They also knew about her obsession, which was looking at violent images
online. She loved the Battle Royale story and was a big fan of the death-themed
flash animation urban legend, “Red Room.” You can, of course, hope that
she’ll get better and one day become a functioning member of society. It
might be possible, but with this next sicko, we seriously doubt that’s ever going to
happen. That’s because this young chap didn’t just kill one person. He became
the USA’s youngest-ever serial killer. Craig Price
When this young man was arrested at the age of 16, like many of the
kids we’ll talk about today, he was as cool as ice. He had that look of a psychopath - which
featured the iconic complete lack of remorse. It’s July 27, 1987. Craig is just 13 years
old. He’s already gotten into petty crime, stealing, breaking into houses, and even a
bit of stalking, but tonight he’s about to up the ante. He has a plan, and that is to
break into his neighbor’s house in Warwick, Rhode Island. The owner is 27-year-old
Rebecca Spencer. She might have seen Craig around the neighborhood,
but the two don’t know each other. Craig crawls through her window. He
walks into the kitchen and grabs a knife, after which he goes to her bedroom, where
she’s sleeping and stabs her 58 times. This is a boy whose friends like to watch Scooby
Doo and still play with action figures. Despite some bad behavior, Craig is liked in the
neighborhood. He is a large kid but with a baby face. He’s good at football, given his bulk, and
soon gets the name, Iron Man, even though he’s still just a kid. No one suspects that he’s
a vicious killer. Like all serial killers, once he had a taste for blood, he needed more.
It’s two years later when his neighborhood becomes frozen with shock when Craig’s own family
starts talking about a monster in their midst, someone who’s done the most terrible thing.
Craig takes pleasure in the fact they have no idea they are talking about him. By all
accounts, Craig lives in a stable family, and he is loved and cared for. His home life,
at least to friends of the family, is great. The other night, he broke into the
house of 39-year-old Joan Heaton. He had one intention as he sneaked into her house
with the butcher’s knife he’d bought earlier. This 15-year-old savage stabs her as she sleeps. She
screams out as he bites her face. He loves the sound she makes when she’s hurt. After stabbing
her 62 times, he walks into the bedrooms of her kids, both now awake and shaking with fright.
The girls, Jennifer, 10, and Melissa, 8, are later found in a similar state to their mom.
For the detectives that arrive on the scene, it’s a sight they never thought possible.
They are traumatized by what they see. Soon the newspapers are talking about the
Warwick Slasher. People put extra locks on their doors. They never leave the windows
open. They order their children home long before nighttime sets in. They are literally
terrorized by a boy who they often chat with, someone they think is a little bit cheeky
at times but a good kid on the whole. The police know something they don’t. They are
looking for a killer with huge feet, size 13, which is not a common size at all. Believing these
crimes are the work of someone local, they put their heads together and find a kid who’s been
done for burglary before and other minor crimes. That’s Craig Price, and when
they look in his backyard shed, they find a collection of knives. They bring
him in, and one of the first things they ask is, “Where did you get that big gash on your finger?”
Craig didn’t deny it for long. In fact, he seemed almost proud of his work. The newspapers were
soon talking about the capture of Rhode Island's most notorious serial killer, but what most people
talked about was the fact this 5-foot-10 inch, 240-pound kid was 15, and he’d started killing
when he was 13! How on earth was that possible? It was unheard of, even in ultra-violent America,
a country where serial killers were seemingly propagating like tadpoles in a large swamp.
Craig didn’t seem one bit bothered about his crimes when he described them to the detectives.
When he talked about killing those children, it was like he was explaining
what he’d had for lunch that day. One of the detectives later said, “He talked
about killing these people like it was nothing, I mean absolutely nothing. It’s incredible.”
And he took pleasure in telling them that because he was a juvenile, he’d soon be out
of prison. To say the least, the detectives who’d seen the bite marks on the mother’s face
and witnessed knife blades snapped off in the arms of her young daughters were furious. All they
thought was, this is a person that has no remorse, and we believe when he says that he will make
history when he gets out in a few years. Craig actually told them he would, bragging about it.
That night, detective Tim Colgan returned home to his wife and children and bawled his eyes out.
He cried and cried and cried. He’d been the first person on the scene in that triple murder, and
to see this kid smirking at his actions broke him. Detective Kevin Collins reacted differently.
He flew into a rage, promising himself that as long as he lived, this kid was not going to walk
out of juvenile detention in a few years' time. With relatives of the victims and local
people, Collins created the “Citizens Opposed to the Release of Craig Price” group.
The pressure mounted, and the state soon passed a law that allowed juveniles to be tried
in adult court but only for serious crimes. This is why Craig is still in prison
today and may never be released. Since his arrest, he’s seen many psychiatrists.
As we said, it seemed that Craig Price came from a loving family. There’s no evidence of
any abuse, not even aggressive spanking. He has said in the past that white people
were to blame because when he was young, on occasion, people issued racist slurs at him.
That might have been true, and as wrong as it is, people generally don’t mutilate children
when they’re offended. Psychiatrists have said Craig is a psychopath. His violence has
nothing to do with racism. One of them said, “I suspect from all that I have seen and
know of these murders that Craig was in a psychotic rage at the time of these events
and that he should probably be classified as a serial murderer, a disorganized type.”
The Heaton family he killed had only lived in the neighborhood for two weeks. They’d
even helped Craig fix his bike chain one day. Craig later said he felt a racist “aura”
around the mom. He later admitted, “I knew the act of killing Joan Heaton was the answer.”
Now a grown man, Craig has had multiple fights in prison and, on occasion, has attacked other
inmates with shivs (knives). He did just that in 2019 and was sentenced to 25 years for it.
While inmates who kill kids and women can face harassment and “Kill on Sight”-type violence
from other inmates, his history of incarceration shows that he’s the one who initiated most
of the attacks against inmates and officers. Can some people be born evil? Can the brain
just be wired up the wrong way with some folks? We’ll tell you our theory soon, but first, you
need to hear about another blossoming beast. Jasmine Richardson
If there ever was a natural-born killer, Craig Price was one, and we have no doubt that
Jasmine Richardson could also be given this title. Like Craig, she had a few screws loose. As we
said before, with just about ALL serial killers, there is a history of extreme childhood trauma
and horrific violence, but with some killers, it’s never obvious where they got their evil
side from. Jasmine is one of these people. This story contains two killers, but one of
them was 23 at the time they met in 2016. He was the lover of Jasmine, Jeremy Steinke. She
was 13 at the time of the murders but 12 when she met him. Sure, you can say he made her do it.
She’s also a victim. But we are not buying that. The story takes place in Medicine Hat, a city in
southeast Alberta in Canada, population 63,000. They meet at a punk rock concert. Jasmine is
really taken with the older guy, who most people think is way too old for her. He’s an unusual guy,
too, claiming he’s a 300-year-old werewolf. He’s an angry goth, a rebel without a cause, more
Marilyn Manson than Siouxsie and the Banshees. Jasmine’s parents don’t want their daughter seeing
a guy who’s so much older than her. She’s a child, and he’s a young adult. They don't actually
know he is a bit messed up. His mom is a very angry alcoholic, and his stepfather has
been abusive to him. Jasmine’s parents, who love her dearly, try and stop
the relationship in its tracks, and Jeremy becomes enraged. He writes online:
“Their throats I want to slit. They will regret the BEEP they have done.
Especially when I see to it that they are gone…Their blood shall be payment!”
The thing is, this is the kind of thing he always writes. He does claim to be a werewolf after all.
People took him about as seriously as they would a child throwing a tantrum because Santa didn’t
bring him a helicopter for Christmas. Nonetheless, bad plus bad doesn’t equal good. There is someone
else in this equation who looks at his words online and says, ok, good idea. Let’s do it.
About one month later, Debra Richardson and her husband, Marc, are stabbed to
death in their basement at home. Just after Jeremy has done this to them, he goes
upstairs to where Jasmine’s little brother, Jacob, is pleading for his life. As he whines at them,
“I’m too young to die,” Jasmine starts feverishly stabbing him. Jeremy then finishes him off by
slashing his throat. As planned, the two go on the run with some help from a third party.
Right now, it seems like the young girl might have been taken advantage of by a very
troubled man. But is that the case? Is Jasmine also a victim? We think not.
Not only did she stab her brother, but she had made this plan with her lover, whom
she promised to marry. In fact, it seems killing her parents was her idea. Police records show the
first time anyone talked about killing anyone was in an email when Jasmine wrote to Jeremy, saying,
“It begins with me killing them and ends with me living with you.” She received the reply,
“Well, I love your plan, but we need to get a little more creative with like details and stuff.”
Later, Jeremy said, “When you find your soulmate, you do anything for them; I did anything.”
Jasmine also shared some words in court of a similar nature, saying about
her plan, “I loved him so much. I thought it would bring us closer together.”
Jasmine was charged with first-degree murder, as was her lover. She spent some time
in young offenders’ units and later in a psychiatric unit. To some people’s dismay, she
was released back into the world in 2016. Jeremy Steinke is still serving a 25-year sentence.
This next story will make you wonder what it means to be human. Even though it happened years
ago, the wound it left on Great Britain is still oozing with anger and tears. The question you
have to answer is, just how evil can you be when you’re just a kid, we mean barely past
the age when you don’t like sleeping without a light glimmering in your bedroom.
Robert Thompson and Jon Venables It’s February 12, 1993. Two kids, Robert
Thompson, and Jon Venables, both just 10 years of age, are in a shopping center not
far from the city of Liverpool in England. Like they often do, they’re skipping
school. They hate school and find much more pleasure in going to the local shops
and stealing candy and toys. On this day, they’ve stolen a bunch of things, including some
modeling paint that they will later use in the vilest way you can imagine.
This is what happens next. They’re looking at people in the shopping
center, many of them mothers with children too young for school. What they are actually
doing is looking for a victim. They’re like jaguars assessing their prey. They intend
to steal a child away from their mother and take them to a quiet place in the street,
where they will throw them in front of a car. That would be evil in itself, but
they’re going to do much, much worse. They find their prey, a two-year-old named
Jamie Bulger. He’s with his mother, Denise. Just for a second, she lets go of Jamie’s
hand because she needs to pay for the meat she’s just bought at a butcher’s shop. When
she turns around to see where Jamie is, he’s gone. CCTV is right now showing
Jamie being led away by two young boys, images that will soon be seared into
the minds of the British public. The boys take Jamie to a canal not too far away
from the shopping center. That’s where they begin their torment by dropping the small child on
his head. They keep walking and are seen in total by about 38 people. Some adults naturally
ask what two kids are doing with an infant, to which the reply that he is their young
brother. They giggle as they walk along, even going into a pet shop for a
while. It’s all good fun for them. When they get to a secluded bit of
railway line somewhere in the distance, they begin their sadistic torture, which
includes using that modeling paint. They do things to him with batteries, bricks, and
stones, hurting him as an angry child might do to an old doll. They finally kill Jamie with a
heavy weight taken from the train tracks. Doctors will later say the child suffered 42 serious
injuries, any of which could have killed him. Jamie is already dead by the time they place
him on the railway tracks, when both boys are talking about how cool it will look when a
train goes over him. They get bored waiting, so just leave him there, and later a train
does pass by and cuts his body into two pieces. These kids were not criminal masterminds.
They’d been seen on CCTV. Scores of people remembered their faces. When the police spoke
to them, one of them had modeling paint on his shoes. Does this sheer lack of cunningness
show they didn’t know what they’d done? One of them actually asked a cop if they’d make him
come alive again as if he was a broken toy. Barely anyone in the country didn’t want
to string these two kids up by their necks, even though some argued that they literally didn’t
know the difference between right and wrong and had violent upbringings themselves. “Hang them!”
shouted some of the public. Age didn’t matter to them. These boys were sick in the head.
So, when in 2001, and the boys turned 18, they were released under new identities;
the people were again furious. The press had never been able to photograph them, so
how they looked as young adults was a mystery, even though the outrage-inducing tabloids
tried to help them form a picture in their heads. The question was, can people who’ve
done such a horrible thing be rehabilitated? The British system, perhaps quite
a bit kinder than the US system, thought the answer was yes. It should be
said both boys came from broken homes, with Robert’s mom drinking her way through
life and almost losing her kids to a care home. Jon’s mom was less prone to violence,
but a case report from a social worker said she had a “serious depressive problem,”
which had led to neglect of her children. Venables has now been in and out of trouble all
his life, using drugs, drinking and spending time in prison for various things, including some
sexual transgressions. His identity has always been kept a secret because he will be killed and
probably killed horribly. The system will always have to protect him. At least Robert Thompson
is said to have integrated well into society. Do they even deserve to be living among the
public? Many people on the tough streets of northern England still want their pound of flesh.
Turning the other cheek is not their thing. They say leopards don’t change their pots. Once a
killer, always a killer. The USA will soon face a similar predicament, as you’ll see later on.
As for this next killer, he proved that some kids never get better.
Ed Kemper There’s a line in a movie that goes, “You
tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified as you did
in the face of the man who killed you.” We imagine that was true for the victims of Edmund
Kemper, a creep, a killer; the literal lover of decapitated heads that he kept in his bed. But
what was he like as a youngster? A bundle of joy? It’s August 27, 1964. All is quiet in the house of
Grandpa and Grandmother Kemper. 15-year old Ed has been living in their house for a while. Truth
be told, he hates his mother with a passion, and living with her is a nightmare. She used to
lock him in a dark cellar for days and nights on end with the spiders and rats, sometimes screaming
through the cellar door as the light crept in, “You deserve this, Edmund; this is what
happens when you look at women’s breasts, you disgusting little pervert.”
Grandmother Kemper is focused, editing a manuscript she’s written about the boy
scouts called “Boy’s Life.” Her husband is out doing the grocery shopping. As she’s busy with
her pen, Ed walks into the kitchen. She says, “Hi, Ed darling,” not even looking up. Ed walks
behind her and fires two bullets into her head. He then grabs a knife and stabs her three times.
As her lifeless body drips blood, Ed sits down and waits for the return of his grandfather.
He then decides it might be best to take his grandmother's body to one of the bedrooms.
Even at 15, he’s a hulk of a boy, not far off the 6′9” and 250 pounds he will become. He
picks his grandma up like she’s a mannequin. As soon as he hears his grandad’s car pull into
the driveway, Ed gets up and goes out to greet his grandfather. Ed’s always adored this man. He’s
been his rock in a life of emotional quicksand. As the grandfather gets out of the car,
shopping bags in hand, he wonders why Ed is carrying a rifle, although Ed’s always
messing about with that gun. The grandfather has had to confiscate it now and again because
Ed keeps shooting animals. “Hey buddy,” says the grandfather. Ed lets him walk in front and points
the end of the .22 rifle at the back of his head, about an inch away. Bang. The grandfather
drops to the floor and dies instantly. When the cops pick Ed up, this well-spoken
boy with an IQ of 145 tells them he did it. They ask why he stabbed his grandmother three
times after shooting her. Ed replies, “I wanted to make sure. I didn’t want her to suffer.”
“But why, why did you do it in the first place, to people you obviously love?”
Ed looks at them with a blank expression on his face and says, “I just
wondered how it would feel to shoot grandma.” That’s what evil looks like. It looks unconcerned.
It looks normal, with a strange undercurrent of the absence of emotion. Heightened senses
can see pure evil; these people can feel the coldness of violent psychopathy on their skin.
If you look into the lives of serial killers, you start to see patterns. Physical and sexual
abuse is common, as is abandonment. In general, being shown no love whatsoever is the story of
most serial killers’ childhoods. And as with Ed, quite a few serial killers have
had absent fathers and very, very controlling, often narcissistic mothers.
Ed’s mum physically and psychologically tortured him. She systematically
humiliated him. She destroyed every ounce of self-worth he had. This never bodes
well for kids, but the vast majority don’t end up becoming serial killers. We’ll explain why soon.
Ed fooled the psychiatrists who later treated him. He played them like fools. He stayed in
a psychiatric hospital for a few years. The doctors and staff loved him. They thought
he was always friendly and impressively intelligent. Right before Ed was released at
the age of 21, one of the psychiatrists wrote: “I would see no psychiatric reason
to consider him to be a danger to himself or to any member of society.”
He was talking about the same man that later said, “When I meet a pretty girl, one
side of me says I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side of me says I wonder
what her head would look like on a stick.” One of the conditions after Ed’s release was that
he went for regular chats with the psychiatrists, who were now saying Ed’s juvenile record
should be wiped as it wasn’t fair to have that taint his good character. That was that,
Ed started his life again with a clean record. On September 14, 1972, Ed saw fifteen-year-old
Aiko Koo hitchhiking, so, as usual, he picked her up. He was already an
expert at manipulation and murder. He choked her to death, then went for a
beer. He later took her home, dissected her, and buried the body parts. He kept her
head, though, as he liked to sleep and play with the heads of his victims. Her head
was in the trunk of his car when he went for his usual appointment with his probation
psychiatrists. One of them wrote that day, “If I were seeing this patient without
having any history available or without getting the history from him, I would think
that we’re dealing with a very well-adjusted young man who had initiative, intelligence,
and who was free of any psychiatric illness.” Another that day said Ed’s motorcycle was
“more a threat to his life and health than any threat he is presently to anyone else.”
Ed was eventually convicted of murdering 10 people in all, including his mother, whose
head he used as a dartboard. Even after everything he’d done, the many detectives,
the “Mindhunter” guys, and the prison staff and doctors all liked him. Ed was a star and
very generous with his answers in interviews. The question is, how did he fool everyone? How
do the so-called experts know when a rotten kid should be taken out of society forever? With this
next child, it was pretty obvious, but yet again, mistakes were made.
Juan Fernando Hermosa It’s 1991, and the 15-year Juan Fernando
Hermosa is in the mood to cause trouble. He’s raging inside, tired of his deaf
mother and angry at the fact his father is hardly ever at home. He spends most of
his time hanging around gaming arcades in Ecuador’s capital city of Quito. This is the day
he gets his gang together for something serious. After drinking away much of the day and later
going to a disco, the boys get in taxis. As the driver pulls up at the destination, Juan
pulls out a 9mm pistol and shoots him in the head. The others laugh nervously, some are quiet,
and some are afraid. They just killed a man! Wow. They push the dead man into the back
and take his car, dumping his body outside town. This is just the beginning
of a reign of terror. About a week later, Juan and his gang visit their regular hairdresser,
Charlie. After getting haircuts, they invite Charlie to go for drinks and shoot her dead.
Make no mistake, Juan is the ringleader. Some of his buddies are just too scared to say anything
like “murdering people isn’t too cool.” They know how dangerous he is. Not long ago, he came
into school with the head of a cat in his bag, showing it off like it was a Star Wars
figure. He’d changed. Ever since he’d found out he was adopted, something had snapped.
Over the next few weeks, bodies keep being found, all shot with a 9mm pistol. 11 of them are
the bodies of LGBTQIA people, obviously lured someplace and then executed. Eight are taxi
drivers. One time the gang pulls over a truck, and they shoot two of its occupants. The
city is in a panic. Someone is out there killing people for nothing, a serial killer.
The police put together a task force and warn people not to go out alone at night. The gang's
downfall happens soon after one of them is caught shoplifting. The cops interrogate the boy,
asking him what he knows about the murders. These delinquents all seem to know each other.
But the kid keeps quiet. He won’t squeal…well…not until they give him the customary beating that
many Ecuadorians in police custody are used to. The game was up. It was time
to bring the young killer in. On the night they planned to capture Juan, they
waited until the early hours of the morning and get into his house through a skylight.
But Juan heard them and soon pulled out his gun. Bullets flew in the darkness;
someone threw a grenade into a room, and then another. There was so much firepower
that a roof collapsed, trapping two cops under the rubble. Juan, still not hit, saw his
chance and tried to get out of a window. Hundreds of rounds were fired, but the only
person who got hit was Juan’s deaf mother. She lay dead with 11 bullet holes in her body as
Juan was trying to lower himself down from the window. The place was surrounded, and he was taken
in, unbelievably, with barely a scratch on him. The people of Ecuador couldn’t believe
the serial killer was just a kid, who they named “Niño del Terror,” The Child
of Terror. As the law stood, he was a minor, and so when the judge handed him four years for
at least 22 murders, the people were outraged. The judge asked Juan why, why did you kill them. Juan
said he would have let them live had they just kept quiet. He was a psycho, no doubt about it.
As psychos are apt to do, he became a leader in the juvenile prison, not through brute
force, but through his cunningness. He even managed to get a gun sneaked in for him. On June
17, 1993, he led a group of ten young prisoners outside the prison with that gun, shooting
a cop five times on the way. After that, he fled to Colombia but was captured again and
sent home. Incredibly, they let him finish his short sentence, and he was let out in 1996.
He was free, but he was wanted. In Ecuador, you don’t shoot cops and kill innocent
civilians and get away with it. Just after Juan’s 20th birthday, in another city, while
living with his father, five men with hoods over their heads got hold of him. His body was
later found. He’d been horrifically tortured, cut to pieces with a machete, and then shot so
many times he looked like a human showerhead. To many people in the country, that
was justice, rough justice maybe, but necessary. Leopards, they said, don’t
change their spots. This one had to be put down. At the time, the media around the world was
saying no child on earth had been that evil. What kind of kid starts serial killing at
15? They obviously had very short memories. Éric Borel
For decades, people have tried to figure out what went wrong with this
next kid. This is what we’ll say about evil. When the brain is wired a certain way and
the environment is ripe for wretchedness, you can get something monstrous. Maybe that’s
what evil is - when nurture and nature perfectly intertwine to form a human weapon of mass
destruction; when the wicked components of environment and biology don’t cancel each other
out but make a highly destructive compound. Such as with Eric Borel, whose fundamentally
religious mother beat the hell out of him and told him he was the “child of sin.” Most kids would be
traumatized, but their frontal lobes would come to their rescue and tell them not to go through with
what they want to do in their dark fantasies. Not with Eric. Eric’s frontal lobes hissed and
fizzed as he had an emotional short circuit. Here’s the story.
The year is 1995. Eric is quiet in school. He studies electromechanics, and
he’s not a bad student. When he finishes school, he goes home to admire the pictures
on his wall: old photos of his hero, Adolf Hitler. Swastikas are painted above
his bed. Books about war and war crimes are scattered around. He has a particular interest
in America’s Waco siege. Today, he has a plan. It’s September 23, and at the age of 16, Eric
takes an Anschütz .22-caliber rifle into the family kitchen and shoots his stepfather four
times. That’s not enough. Gritting his teeth in anger, he takes a hammer to the dead man’s head.
It’s early evening, so as usual, Eric’s stepbrother is watching TV in the living room.
After hearing the screams, he turns around to see Eric staring at him from the living room
door. Within a minute or two, he’s dead, suffering the same fate as his father. Covered in
blood from head to toe, Eric grabs the TV remote and turns over the channel. He waits patiently
for his mother to return from the place where she’s learned he is sinful: her beloved church.
At 8.30 pm, she enters the house, saying, “Hi. I’m home.” She screams when she sees her husband’s
bashed-in head. Bang! One shot, and she’s dead. For some reason, Eric doesn’t go to work on
her with his hammer. We will never know why. Outside in their beautiful, scenic village of
Sollies-Pont, in southeastern France, it is quiet. He looks outside, thinking about his next
move, and then covers the bodies under sheets. He takes a backpack and fills it
with cookies, a raincoat, a map, some cash, and a handgun that fires only rubber bullets. He
packs a bunch of real ammunition into his pockets, and now dressed in all black with the rifle
strapped to his back, he begins what he regards as his one-man Blitzkrieg through pastoral France.
He walks through the wilderness alone, passing sprawling vineyards and terraced
orchards. Now and again, he stops to rest, having a cookie or two while thinking about what
he’s going to do. It’s almost seven in the morning when he gets to the next village, another quiet
place famous for its wine. Eric looks at a house. He knocks on the door, and his buddy from
school answers, 17-year-old Alan Guillemette. What happens next, we don’t know, but it
seems Eric wants something from Alan. They talk in the garden for a while, and then
Alan sends Eric on his way. As Alan turns, Eric blasts him in the back, killing him.
Eric walks through the town. It’s getting busier now. No one thinks anything is wrong.
It’s hunting season. Rifles are a common sight, and murder is almost unheard of in this part of
rural France. Then Eric gets to the town square, calmly brings the rifle sight up to his eye,
and starts firing at anyone. One witness says it was like a Hollywood movie. It was surreal.
One woman is bringing out the trash when she is shot and killed. Eric runs closer to a house in
which he can see people. He takes aim and fires, killing an elderly woman and injuring
her husband. The neighbor pulls back the blinds in the next house to see what all
the commotion is about, and Eric shoots her dead. He then kills another elderly man
who is drinking coffee outside on a terrace. Eric moves again, firing at two young boys.
One, just 15, is killed on his way to buy baguettes. He shoots a shopkeeper, a man buying
a newspaper, and a guy at an ATM. He kills an old man walking his dog who is on his way
to play boules with his retired buddies. Now people are running, alarms are ringing,
and the fire brigade is out. People are diving under cars, jumping into doorways,
as this young psycho keeps firing. Finally, he’s chased toward a vineyard but doesn’t
get there. He walks over to a cypress tree, and his life ends there. Many people have been
seriously injured. The death toll will be 15. But why? Because his mother called him evil,
and his real father wasn’t around? No. It’s as we said, certain bad elements all have to meet
to create something so purely and demonstrably malevolent. People read in the papers that Eric
sympathized with Hitler, that he liked the movies, Terminator and The Silence of the Lambs, and
that he had a thing about guns and the military, but it still didn’t make sense.
With this in mind, we come to our last two evil children, who, if you meet them in
the USA today, you might do well to turn on your psycho-sensitivity reader.
Eric Smith August 2, 1993. A four-year-old
child named Derrick Joseph Robie is playing outside in his quiet, tree-lined
neighborhood of Steuben County, New York. There’s another kid playing outside,
13-year-old Eric Smith, a bespectacled kid, who’s the perfect picture of youthful fragility. Eric seems like a normal kid. He has
loving parents. He’s not even close to being impoverished. But he’s experienced many
problems. With his small frame, his glasses, bright red hair, and his speech impediment,
he gets bullied at school almost daily. He’s beaten up frequently. Inside him
is an unaddressed anger that is about to explode into something terrifying.
Both boys are on their way to summer camp on their bicycles when Eric stops the younger
boy in his tracks. For whatever reason, for a reason perhaps only the devil
himself knows, Smith gets hold of Derrick. This is not to bully him or even hit him
with his fists. This is something beyond rational thinking. Eric strangles the boy and
leaves him for dead. He then thinks about what he’s done. He has time to consider the product of
his rage, and he isn’t done, never mind in shock. He takes a large rock and drops it on Derrick’s
head. Eric’s actually taken the time to dig up two rocks and chosen the larger one. If this
isn’t macabre enough, he takes the Kool-Aid from Derrick’s lunch box and wipes it into the
open wounds. Police see the body is left posed, as serial killers sometimes do when they take
great enjoyment from their work. Posing bodies for serial killers is their art form, the piece de
resistance of their signature. A 13-year-old doing this is unheard of in the annals of murder.
A few days later, Eric looks at his mom and tells her, “Mom, I did it. I killed
Derrick.” His mom wants this to be a lie, a strange fantasy, but he is telling the truth.
On November 7, 1993, Eric was convicted and sentenced to nine years to life, to be served in a
young offender’s prison and later an adult prison. In 2002, the parole board agreed that Eric, then
22, showed “little remorse.” Two years later, he started talking about his murders a bit
more. He admitted what he’d done was terrible, explaining that the bullying he’d
faced made him take his “emotional anger and rage out on someone who had
done nothing to bring on such violence.” In 2009, just before another parole
hearing, he told a journalist that all that anger inside him back then was saved
for other kids that tormented him. He said, “If I could switch places with him and take the
grave for him to live, I'd do it in a second.” The Robie family didn’t believe a word of
this. The attack wasn’t one strike with a bat, a knife plunged in rage. It was
sustained torture, the work of a maniac. In 2021, during his eleventh parole board hearing,
Eric said he just wanted a normal life, a wife, a job, and kids, and after a risk
assessment, he was granted parole. He’s now free. He’ll have to see parole officers
until his dying day, and if he commits a violent crime, he can kiss goodbye to freedom for the rest
of his life. Still, the Robie family is furious. The question is, will that rage reappear?
This is what some Brits said would happen to the kids who tortured and killed Jamie
Bulger, but while there have been some issues, those boys haven’t resorted to extreme
violence again. Is Eric now cured? Is that possible? Can you rehabilitate a killer
when he committed a crime that brutal? This is a question you need to ask yourself
because the next killer will be released at some point, too.
Alyssa Bustamante October 21, 2009, St. Martins, Missouri.
15-year-old Alyssa Bustamante has a plan, an utterly wicked plan.
This is a girl with issues. Her father is in prison. Her mother is an
addict. So, she lives with her grandmother. She has no sense of self-worth. She hates
herself and takes it out on herself. She is lacking the love and attention all children
deserve, but that doesn’t excuse what she does next. She’s like a million troubled girls and
boys in America, but the difference is she’s ready to commit evil deeds. She has experienced
the nurture and nature that is destined to create that wicked compound we talked about.
On this day, she’s hanging out at her grandparent’s large property, the perfect place
for adventures. Most of the time, she does enjoy running around the woods and even attending her
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But today, she has something different on her mind.
She tells her younger sister to go get that girl that lives down the street to come out
and play, nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten. That she does, and Elizabeth never returns home.
Elizabeth’s mom calls the police, and the next day they turn up at Alyssa’s house asking
questions. “Have you seen this girl?” “She was out playing with you” “Where did she go?”
Alyssa, almost grinning inside, tells them she has no idea where little Elizabeth is.
Earlier, she’d written in her diary: “I just…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
amazing. As soon as you get over the ‘oh my god, I can’t do this’ feeling, it’s pretty
enjoyable. … I gotta go to church now… lol.” The cops find this diary in her messy bedroom,
which has dark poetry written on the walls and some words written in what looks like blood. In
the diary, one entry says how she plans to burn her house down with everyone in it. Another entry
says, “When I explode, someone is going to die.” Police see what looks like a shallow grave close
to Alyssa’s house. Little do they know that Alyssa dug that grave five days before she committed the
murder. This crime wasn’t a moment of unfettered suppressed rage. It was carefully planned.
The police discovered that Alyssa had taken the girl to a wooded area, strangled her, slit her
throat, and stabbed her repeatedly in the stomach. Psychiatrists later said this kind
of behavior was partly due to a major depressive disorder and borderline
personality disorder. As for Alyssa, she said she just wanted to know how
it would feel to take someone’s life. The victim’s mother called Alyssa “an evil
monster.” Who could argue with that? She was appalled when the judge sentenced Alyssa to life
in prison with the possibility of conditional release in 2024. That’s coming up soon.
In 2021, someone started a petition called “Repeal Law That Could Free Elizabeth Olten's
Murderer Alyssa Bustamante Within 3 Years.” So far, it has 3,565 signatures of the 5,000
target. One of the last comments reads: “She doesn’t deserve any kind of freedom. This
is more than she deserves, being fed and living. Elizabeth didn’t get to have her life with
her family. I am Elizabeth’s mother’s friend, and there is nothing I would love more than to
see Alyssa pay for her evil the rest of her life!” Who do you think are the worst
out of these killer kids? Now you need to see how the old-timers did it
in “How These Sneaky Serial Killers Finally Got Caught.” Or, have a look at “WW2 Serial
Killer Even the Nazis Wanted Dead - Dr. Satan.”
