Category: Passion Blog

Children- so innocent and pure, right? Nope. Not all. Here are a few famous cases where children chose violence.

Michael Hernandez

At 14 years old, Hernandez was convicted of the murder of his best friend Jaime Gough. His goal was initially to murder Gough and another classmate of his by luring them into a school bathroom, but the other friend didn’t bite. Gough unfortunately followed his friend and his body was found later that day. After investigation, police found extensive plans by Hernandez to kill other students at school and Hernandez himself said he was aspiring to be among the most famous killers of all time.

Craig Price

One of the youngest serial killers out there, Price violently killed his first victim, a neighborhood girl, at a mere 13 years old. He would go on to murder three more individuals before he even turned 16. Price stabbed all of his victims to death and crushed one’s skull. He has been in prison since and has had his sentence extended after stabbing a fellow inmate.

Mary Bell

One of the most famous child killers in British history, Bell killed two boys. The first, a four year old boy, Bell strangled in an abandoned house. Despite bragging about having committed the murder, people didn’t believe her. Two months later, she and a friend strangled a three year old and proceeded to mutilate his body, carving the letter ‘M’ into his stomach. She was barely 11 years old. Bell had an incredibly difficult upbringing laden with sexual and physical abuse and a neglectful prostitute mother. Before her first murder, Bell was involved in multiple violent incidents, like an ‘accidental’ young boy’s fall that resulted in severe injuries, and the attempt to choke at least three other young girls. Bell ultimately gave herself away accidentally after the second murder, was found mentally incapable of standing trial and was put through intense rehabilitation. Released a decade later, she now has a daughter and is living in anonymity.

Amardeep Sada

The youngest serial killer to date, Sada was a mere eight years old when he murdered three infants: the first, his eight-month old sister, then his six-month old cousin and finally his neighbor’s six-month old child. Sada showed no remorse for any of his actions and couldn’t seem to comprehend the severity of what he had done. He was put in a children’s home until he turned 18 years old, but nobody knows what has happened to him since.

Those are the four that I’ve chosen to highlight today, but disturbingly, the list of young serial killers does not end here. To my surprise, from what I found when researching, none of these children aside from Mary Bell had abnormal, abusive upbringings. While an abusive upbringing doesn’t justify killing, it can at least shed a bit of understanding as to why violence came so easily. Regardless, it’s shocking to think of children committing such horrific acts with no remorse.

Well, that’s the end of these Thursday morning uplifting blog posts. Sleep easy everybody:)

 

8 Youngest Serial Killers in History

https://vocal.media/criminal/10-of-the-youngest-serial-killers-in-history

https://allthatsinteresting.com/mary-bell

https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/Craig-Price#:~:text=Craig%20Chandler%20Price%20was%20born,to%20hold%20blue%2Dcollar%20positions.

640 S Main St, Los Angeles, CA 90014- The address of the Cecil Hotel, a building with a grisly history ranging from countless suicides and unexplained deaths to the harboring of multiple notorious serial killers. In 2013, the discovery of 21-year old Elisa Lam’s body in a rooftop water tank would only further contribute to the hotel’s chilling history, and her mysterious death would be scrutinized by millions across the world. 

Elisa Lam was a Canadian student visiting the United States in 2013. Alone at 21-years old, she stayed at the infamous Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. Lam checked in on January 26th, but was switched to a private room after complaints from her roommates of strange behavior. Lam was last seen on January 31st. As she was traveling alone, she had promised her parents that she would check in daily to assure them of her wellbeing, so when she did not touch base with them on the 31st, they feared something was up and eventually contacted the Los Angeles police. After searching the hotel, Lam was nowhere to be found. Then came some eerie elevator footage showing the last view of Lam before she disappeared.

This footage has tens of millions of views as individuals across the world have tried to unpack her strange behavior. If you watch the video, it shows Lam stepping into the elevator and pressing all of the buttons. The doors remain open (likely because she pressed the open door button among the others). Initially she just stands in the elevator, but then darts her head out one point checking both ways before drawing back into the elevator and pressing herself into a corner. Eventually she steps out of the elevator entirely, makes inexplicable gestures with her hands before going back in once more and then exiting for good.

Heads up, this video freaked me out. If it might keep you up at night just roll with my description of it:)

 

Two weeks after the elevator footage surface was made public, a maintenance worker found Lam’s body floating in a hotel water tank. It is said that he was responding to guest complaints of low water pressure and abnormal-tasting water. She was found undressed, but with the same clothes she had on in the elevator video in the tank with her; there is nothing to explain how she ended up in that tank. According to hotel staff, it is extremely unlikely that Lam would have been able to access the water tanks as roof entry was restricted to employees and there were alarms in place that should have notified the hotel. There is no evidence of foul play, however, and her autopsy report concluded that she had died by drowning. People, however, continue to be perplexed by shortcomings of explanations offered. For example, if she was killed, why were no prints or DNA? But if she simply ended up there herself, what are the odds that she could get through security, climb the tank, lift the heavy lid and then get inside?

So, in the end, there is no complete answer. The most widely accepted understanding of her death attributes the tragic situation to Lam’s mental health struggles. Lam had diagnosed bipolar disorder and many speculate that she had fallen off her medication. If this were the case, it may explain Lam’s strange behavior that her roommates noted early on as well as what can be understood by her body language as hallucinations in the elevator footage. Nonetheless, there are still many questions that will likely never be answered and inconsistencies that will never see explanations. May Elisa Lam rest in peace.

 

If you’re interested in an explanation of her body language this video was super interesting and made a lotttt of sense.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/elisa-lam-death

biography.com/crime-figure/elisa-lam

Last week, I wrote about Harold Shipman, a doctor who deeply abused his title and profession to murder hundreds of patients. On a similar thread this week, I will be looking into John Wayne Gacy, the upstanding community member who was able to hide behind his reputation for years.

John Wayne Gacy, born 1942 in Chicago, Illinois, grew up in a blue-collar family. His father was an abusive alcoholic, but Gacy was close to his mother and siblings. He dropped out of high school before completing his senior year and moved West looking for employment. He eventually enrolled in Northwestern Business College and graduated in 1963 becoming a management trainee with a shoe company. In 1964, he was transferred back to Illinois in Springfield where he met his wife and married her later that year. Gacy went on to become an active member in the local community, getting involved in political activism and even went on to become vice-president of the Jaycees (organization in Springfield) by 1965. In 1975, Gacy began dressing as a clown for charity events as part of the Jolly Joker clown club, and named his alter ego “Pogo the Clown”. Gacy’s political involvement would gain him clearance by the Secret Service, and he would even meet the first lady, Rosalynne Carter at a 1978 private reception.

Gacy was convicted of sexual assaulting two teenage boys in 1968 and given a 10 year prison sentence, however, within a short couple years, was released on parole. The following year, he was arrested when accused yet again of sexual assaulting a teenage boy, but this time the charges were dropped when the boy failed to appear in trial. Over the next few years, he would be accused two more times of rape and questioned by police about mysterious disappearances, but somehow it led nowhere. All the accusations thrown his way never seemed to be looked into all that seriously; nobody in the community believed that this upstanding citizen- I mean he dressed up as a clown to entertain children for goodness sakes, how much more wholesome could he get- could possibly be the capable of the ghastly crimes that would eventually surface.

For a span of about 6 years in the mid 1970s, Gacy committed most of his murders, manipulating his young victims into handcuffs under the promise of a “magic trick” before sexually assaulting, torturing and ultimately strangling them. He buried some of their bodies in the crawlspace beneath his house and threw others into the nearby river. It wasn’t until 1978, with the disappearance of 15 year-old Robert Piest, that Gacy would be turned on as a legitimate suspect. Piest was last seen with his mother dropping him off at a drugstore before heading out to meet Gacy for a potential construction job. This finally led to an in-depth investigation that linked Gacy to numerous crimes, including murder. After combing through his house, officials finally found a trapdoor leading to the crawlspace beneath Gacy’s house, in which they found several trenches filled with human remains. With no where to hide from the evidence, Gacy confessed to the murders of about 30 people.

In trial, Gacy tried to plead insanity, but was ultimately found guilty by jury and executed at the age of 51 in 1994. His last words were supposedly “Kiss my ass”.

Gacy’s crimes were as gruesome as they come, yet people just didn’t seem to believe he could be capable of such horrific crimes, allowing him to evade suspicion and capture. Years later in conversing with detectives, Gacy himself chillingly remarked,“Clowns can get away with murder.”

https://criminalminds.fandom.com/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy

https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/john-wayne-gacy

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wayne-Gacy

https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-wayne-gacy

Harold Frederick Shipman, born in 1946 in Nottingham England was born into a working-class family, but would go on to become one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers.

At a young age, Shipman’s mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and given morphine to cope with the pain; the administration of the drug prompted his interest in medicine, leading him to pursue a medical career. Shipman attended Leeds University medical school and went on to become a family practitioner. Initially, he did well, married and would go on to have four children, however, he became addicted to the painkiller pethidine. Eventually caught forging prescriptions for the drug by his colleagues, he was forced out of his practice. After spending time in a drug rehabilitation program, he was deemed clean and went on in the hopes of continuing his medical career.

In 1977, he landed a job as a family doctor at the Donneybrook Medical Center in Hyde, Greater Manchester, where he cared for many elderly members of the community. Generally well-liked and respected among his colleagues, there was little suspicion of foul play when elderly patients began dying under his care. On two occasions, the local undertaker and a medical colleague did raise concern over Shipman’s patients’ unusually high death rate, but despite police investigation, Shipman’s records were in order and he was cleared. Later on, it was found that Shipman had indeed altered these medical records, but at the time the investigation was not conducted thoroughly enough.

In 1998, another of Shipman’s patients, 81-year old widow Kathleen Grundy, was pronounced dead after a visit from him.; however, Grundy’s daughter, Angela Woodruff, a lawyer, did not accept Shipman’s explanation as easily as many. Her suspicion grew for multiple reasons, first due to the suddenness of her mother’s death given her good health, second due to Shipman’s insistence on not conducting an autopsy, and third, due to her mother’s will. Woodruff was shocked to discover that in light of her wealthy mother’s death, a will existed naming Shipman the inheritor of her estate, valued at about £400,000. She quickly contacted the local police after coming to the conclusion that Shipman had forged the document and then killed her mother to benefit from her death. Upon investigation, it was found that Grundy had indeed died due to a morphine overdose that had been administered within hours of her death. Alongside other discovered evidence, Shipman was convicted in 2000 on 15 counts of murder and one count of forgery. Sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, Shipman ended up committing suicide in 2004.

With the government order to delve further into Shipman’s career, it was later discovered that Shipman had killed at least 215 of his patients but as many as 250. Most of these murders were carried out by the injection of a lethal dose of morphine which Shipman covered up by recording the deaths as the result of ‘natural causes’. There are different theories explaining his motive for killing so many individuals, one attributing his killings to pleasure of the power over life he held as a doctor, and another connecting them to his mother’s death by morphine early in his life. Regardless, the sheer number of people that died by his hand easily made him one of the world’s most prolific and notorious serial killers.

In hindsight, many wonder how Shipman was able to murder so many individuals with such little suspicion and questions raised especially considering that most of his patients were in good health prior to Shipman’s visits and died shortly after. In many ways, his doctor status protected him, allowing him to take advantage of the public’s trust in him without any misgivings. His abuse of power as a medical profession makes his crimes particularly horrid and abominable. Finally, it is frustrating to think that he may have been stopped earlier had proper procedure been executed at the first signs of foul play.

 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harold-Shipman

https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/harold-shipman