It's hard to assimilate a child being able to kill a person.
That a child is manipulative and dangerous to society can be difficult for many individuals to understand. But until the true story of the lives of these killers has been heard, in which there is often abuse, ill-treatment, broken families, etc., it seems impossible to visualize the brutality of the crimes of many of them. Therefore, the behavior of these little killers is, at least in part, a product of their environment, which must be taken into account in order to understand the behavior of many of these child killers.
Many psychologists and psychiatrists have questioned whether it is possible for children to be psychopaths. They can be naughty and, in some cases, very cruel to other children. But how is it that they commit murder and show no repentance?
Since their brains are still developing and their personalities are still being forged, it is very difficult to detect the line between mischief and evil. For this reason, and in the face of the murders of underage children, health professionals have tried to develop tools to detect psychopathic children.
The problem arises because the tests on the market are questionnaires that predict a possible psychopathy in adult life, but not during childhood. An example is the scale of detection in children between 6-11 years of traits prone to psychopathy in adulthood, created by Paul Frick and Robert Hare, which is called "Antisocial Process Screening Device".
1. Amarjeet Sada (8 years old)
The parents of this little murderer, knowing that his son had killed two people, covered for him.
Amarjeet was only eight years old when he was arrested in India in June 2007. He was accused of having killed three babies, two of them from his family. The first of his victims was a cousin of his who was six months old. His second victim, also his cousin, who was less than a year old, was beaten to death. Both crimes were covered up by his parents, and surely they would not have stopped him if he had not committed the murder of a six-month-old neighbor.
2. Eric Smith (13 years old)
Eric Smith used to ride his bike through his town every day. When four-year-old Derrick Robie was found dead, no one suspected him. The brutality of his murder makes him one of the most chilling cases.
Derrick's body was found in a forest not far from his home and the park where he played regularly. He was taken from there, where he was hanged and hit in the head with several rocks.
When Smith was interrogated, the boy not only didn't care about the case, but also enjoyed the attention of being interrogated. He was charged with second-degree murder and is still serving a prison sentence.
3. Carl Newton Mahan (6 years old)
It seems impossible to imagine a six-year-old being able to kill. In May 1929 Carl Newton and his friend Cecil Van Hoose (8 years old) were looking for junk to collect. Cecil stole from Carl the one he had gotten by hitting him on the head with it. After what happened, Carl decided to take revenge. Instead of fighting, he went home to get his father's gun. Then he went back for Cecil and shot him point-blank after saying, "I'm going to shoot you. Cecil died right there.
Carl is considered one of the youngest killers in history. He was sentenced to 15 years in reform school, but another judge considered it inappropriate to try a boy of that age and was acquitted.
4. Cayetano Santos "Petiso Orejudo" (9 years old)
Cayetano Santos (better known as Petiso Orejudo), an Argentine boy, committed his first murder in 1906 when he killed a three-year-old girl named Maria Rosa Face. He kidnapped her from a warehouse door and, after a failed strangulation, buried her alive in a vacant lot.
In September 1908, just 8 days apart, he tried to kill two 2-year-olds. The first, Severino González Caló, was saved from being drowned in a cellar sink. The second, Julio Botte, was rescued by his mother after the little serial killer burned his eyelids with a cigarette. After these events, he was sent to the Colonia de Menores Marcos Paz to reform, but over the years he left with an even less flattering psychological picture.
At the time of his release, in 1912 he began to carry out murders without ceasing. On January 25, he suffocates 13-year-old Arturo Laurora. On March 7, Reyna Bonita Vanicoff, three years old, is burned alive after her clothes are burned. During the month of November, he tried in less than 2 weeks to hang Roberto Russo and beat Carmen Ghittone and Catalina Naulener to death, but was unsuccessful. Two weeks later, he tied, beat up, hanged and nailed a 4-inch nail to Gesualdo Giordano's temple.
In November 1914 a judge ordered his internment in the Hospicio de las Mercedes. There he attacked two patients. One of them became invalid and the other ended up in a wheelchair. After these crimes, he was imprisoned until he died in the same prison.
5. Brenda Spencer (14 years old)
This 14-year-old girl had everything in life to be happy, but lost it for a Christmas present. At the Christmas holidays of 1978, Brenda received a rifle as a gift from her parents. In January 1979, the strange young woman decided to use the gun at her school, wounding eight children and killing two teachers who tried to avoid the tragedy. When asked why he did so, his answer was, "I don't like Mondays.
6. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson (10 years old)
One of the most aberrant murder stories of all. In 1993 Jon and Robert, best friends, escaped from school to walk through a shopping mall; there, they took James Bulger, two years old, by the hand, who innocently shook their hand for the sake of it. The infant murderers took the youngest to the railroad tracks and that's where the tragedy occurred. They threw bricks at the little boy, then beat him with a metal bar; and if that wasn't enough, they removed his diaper and tortured him with electric batteries, then threw him into the train.
7. Luke Woodham (16 years old)
This boy suffered constantly from the teasing of his schoolmates, and after a breakup with his girlfriend, his whole world became cloudy. The young man stabbed his mother and took his father's rifle and gun, then went to his school; at the school, he murdered his girlfriend and a friend, and then wounded seven more students. When he testified in court, he claimed that he had been possessed by demons manipulated by a close friend.
8. Mary Bell (11 years old)
No one noticed in time, Mary Bell was in trouble. In 1968 she was sent to jail for strangling a little boy with her friend Norma Bell, but the police released them because they declared it an accident; months later, both girls killed a three-year-old boy named Brian Howe again, this time Mary Bell wrote with a razor in the boy's stomach the letter "M", and also cut his hair and genitals.
9. Jesse Pomeroy (14 years old)
At the end of the 19th century, Pomeroy was known as " The Boston Boy Fiend ," as he had kidnapped and tortured eight children under the age of 10; after that, Jesse continued his desire to kill, killing an 11-year-old girl and then a four-year-old baby whom he stabbed so many times that he almost left him beheaded.
10. George Stinney (14 years old) Was sentenced to death
George Stinney, 14, became in June 1944 the youngest person to be legally executed in the United States in the 20th century. The young man was convicted of the murder of two girls: Betty Jane Binnicker (11) and Mary Emma Thames (8). Both were found in a hole, with skull fractures. Stinney confessed to the crimes, and explained that he had tried to have sex with one of the girls, but how he refused to kill her and her friend. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to death in the electric chair. Although there is still controversy over whether or not he was the killer, it is believed that the entire conviction was a racist act.
11. Cristian Fernandez (12 years old)
Cristian had a very hard life. His mother was raped and pregnant at the age of 12, his stepfather committed suicide in front of him, at the age of 6 he killed a cat just because he scratched it, and so on. On the afternoon of March 14, 2011, Biannela Marie left home and left Cristian, the eldest of her children, in charge of her siblings. When she returned at night, she found the youngest, two years old, unconscious bleeding from the nose and ears, Cristian had murdered him.
12. Joshua Phillips (14 years old)
In 1998, at age 14, Joshua beat his 8-year-old neighbor to death; after that, he hid her under his bed for an entire week. When his mother discovered the body because of the foul smell, Joshua fled his home, but not without first viciously stabbing 11 times the body of the murdered little girl.