Killer Kids
Killers who were still in their teens, or younger.
21 cases
Rat Alley
In Newcastle's crumbling Scotswood slums in 1968, four-year-old Martin Brown was found dead in a derelict house — and the trail led police to Mary Bell, a ten-year-old girl the neighborhood children already feared.
Written in Blue Ink
Nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten set off on the four-house walk home from a neighbor's in tiny St. Martin, Missouri, and never arrived — and her cell phone signal pointed hundreds of searchers into the dark woods directly behind their homes.
A Walking Shadow
Nineteen-year-old Myles Fukunaga worked eighty-hour weeks to keep his family afloat in 1929 Hawaii, but when the Hawaiian Trust Company came collecting back rent once again, his quiet desperation fixed on a plan inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case.
The Broomstick Killer
Doted on by his pistol-packing mama in tiny Rosebud, Texas, Kenneth McDuff grew from small-town bully into one of the most sinister figures in Texan history — a killer handed unprecedented leniency by the very system meant to stop him.
Mom, I'm a Monster
On October 5, 2012, ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway started her ordinary morning walk to school in Westminster, Colorado and vanished — while the man who had attacked a jogger at nearby Ketner Lake months earlier was still unidentified.
Saving a Soul
Devout Tom Pendergast made it his God-given mission to rescue wayward boys, so when he found six-foot-four teenage runaway Carl Eder sleeping in a coat closet at the Mission Beach Ballroom, he brought him home to his wife and children in El Cajon.
The Carnival Cult
Johnson County police wrote off the pentagrams and '666' graffiti around Whiteland, Indiana as harmless heavy-metal kids — but Mark Goodwin's homegrown cult, Satan's Disciples, had begun recruiting among the traveling carnival crews.
Like Mother, Like Son
In Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, Cheryl Kunkle raised her son Greg Rowe on resentment and control. When sixteen-year-old Kristin Fisher refused the abortion Greg demanded and gave birth to baby Kaylee, mother and son came to share far more than a grudge.
Mommy's Little Helpers
Hilma Witte's Indiana household was ruled by her husband Paul's beatings — until it wasn't. Before the story ended, a grandmother lay dead in her bed, shot with a medieval crossbow as she slept, and Hilma's teenage sons carried the secrets.
Horseshoe Lake
Martha McKay returned to Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas, to restore Snowden House, the antebellum mansion of her childhood summers — the same estate where her mother had been murdered years before. The teenager convicted of those crimes, Travis Lewis, wouldn't stay behind bars forever.
Touchdowns and Pom-Poms
Freshman cheerleader Emma Walker and senior football star Riley Gaul were Central High School's picture-perfect couple in Knoxville, Tennessee — he the polite boy next door, she a girl dreaming of nursing newborns. Her parents' fondness for Riley wouldn't survive what came next.
Tennessee
Algebra teacher Colleen Ritzer stayed after class at Danvers High School to help any student who needed it. On October 22, 2013, fourteen-year-old Philip Chism — a quiet newcomer from Tennessee — was in her final class of the day.
The Hitchhiker Slayer
In 1970s Isla Vista, hitchhiking was simply how UC Santa Barbara students got around — until young women with outstretched thumbs began to vanish. When Jacqueline Rook missed Thanksgiving with her family, the community's free-spirited trust began to crumble.
Langworthy Road
Two motorists on a country lane outside Manchester stopped for a horribly burned girl staggering toward the road. 'Help me. I'm Suzanne Capper,' she rasped — then named every one of her tormentors, exposing a week of horror at 97 Langworthy Road.
The REDRUM Murder
When David Lutz came home to his Reading, Pennsylvania apartment at 3:30 a.m., he found his roommate Stanley Detweiler decapitated — and the word 'REDRUM' scrawled on the wall in blood. Even the police chief asked: what kind of lunatic would do this?
The Waterbed
Eight-year-old Maddie Clifton finished her piano practice and went out to play in her Jacksonville neighborhood on November 3, 1998, then vanished. For days, hundreds searched — while the answer lay closer to home than anyone could bear to imagine.
The Witch's Castle
Hunters walking a frozen Indiana soybean field in January 1992 thought they had found a burned mannequin. It was twelve-year-old Shanda Sharer — and those responsible were four teenage girls, drawn together by jealousy over a single classmate.
The Gilbert Goons
Sixteen-year-old Preston Lord was walking away from a Halloween party in Queen Creek, Arizona, when a mob of teenagers descended. The beating exposed months of organized violence festering beneath Gilbert's wealthy suburban surface.
The Broken Arrow Massacre
A whispered 911 call from a Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, home began: 'My brother's attacking my family.' Then the screaming stopped, a male voice said hello, and the line went dead.
The Ordinary Boys
Two boys Lisa Sorger had never seen before knocked on the family trailer in Ephrata, Washington, asking if Craig could come out and play. Her autistic thirteen-year-old followed Evan Savoie and Jake Eakin into the drizzle.
Vigilante Killer
Born on a Brazilian farm with a dent in his skull from his father's boot, Pedro Rodrigues Filho — 'Pedrinho Matador' — grew into a killer who claimed his victims deserved it, and whose count defied belief.
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