A small compendium of underage murderers, breif description of their crimes and procedence both masculine and femenine with the intention of creating a debating question... Should these children be judged as they were adults due to the nature of their crimes?

1. Underage murderers

2. Let the game… begin

3. • Killing has no age limit. While we like to
think of children as innocent, the truth is
that they are capable of some truly
demented stuff. In this article, we’ll share 10
stories of youngsters who committed
murder. These twerps snuffed people out
before they even got their driver's licenses.
We'd be careful walking by the playground
if we were you. Behind every Bieber haircut
could lurk a killer.

4. Luke Woodham

5. • One of the most chilling school massacres in history
came courtesy of Mississippi high schooler Luke
Woodham. On Oct. 1, 1997,
• Woodham walked into Pearl High School clad in a
trenchcoat and orange jumpsuit and began shooting,
killing two and wounding seven. Before his rampage,
Woodham had also stabbed and beaten his sleeping
mother to death.
The truly chilling part comes in the message Luke gave
to a friend shortly before the killings began. He said, “I
am not insane, I am angry. I killed because people like
me are mistreated every day ... If I cant do it through
pacifism, if I can't show you through the displaying of
intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet.” He was
eventually subdued by the school’s assistant principal
and stood trial for his crimes.

6. Eric Smith

7. • Some of the kids on this list got raw deals from the very
start. On most days, New York tween Eric Smith was an
ordinary kid who loved to clown around. But because of
a mental condition known as intermittent explosive
disorder, he could become a terrifying, unpredictable
cause of violence. That’s exactly what happened one day
in 1993 when he was riding his bike to day camp.
• Walking along the sidewalk was 4-year-old Derek Robie.
It’s unknown what Robie did to
• draw Smiths attention, but the older boy grabbed him,
strangled him, dropped two large rocks on his head,
poured Kool-Aid in the wound and crammed a tree
branch in his butt. Less than a week later, Smith
confessed to the crime and was sent to prison, where he
remains to this day

8. Eric Borel

9. • One thing that you’ll find in common among many
of these murdering kids is cruelty on the part of the
parents. On the outside, French teenager Eric Borel
seemed like a quiet kid who took good care of his
pet chickens, but at home his mother referred to
him as a “child of sin” and beat him frequently. One
day in 1995, Borel snapped. He killed his stepfather,
his half-brother and his mother, then loaded a rifle
and a pistol and traveled to the town of Cuers, first
by car and then on foot. Once there, he went to the
house of one of his good friends, where
• the two had an argument. Borel shot him in the
back, killing him, and then targeted other civilians
at random on a rampage that eventually claimed 11
other victims before Borel, surrounded by police,
committed suicide.

10. Jordan Brown

11. • We may never know the motivation for Jordan
Brown’s hideous crime. In 2009, the 11-year-old
Brown picked up a shotgun that he had been
given for Christmas and walked into the
bedroom where his stepmother, Kenzie Houk,
was sleeping. He shot her in the back of the
head, killing both her and her unborn fetus.
The boy then calmly got on the school bus and
headed off to class. Houk’s body was found by
her 4-year-old daughter, who ran to some
groundskeepers to report her horrifying
demise. Investigators discovered a spent
• shotgun shell and traced it back to Brown, who
was found guilty of the crime in 2012.

12. Mary Bell

13. • It’s not just boys who get a little too rough with their
toys. In 1968, on the day before her 11th birthday,
young Mary Bell took 4-year-old Martin Bell into an
abandoned house and brutally choked the life out of
him. Just a few months later, Mary and a friend
abducted another child, 3-year-old Brian Howe, and
took him to an abandoned lot in the same area,
where they strangled him. Mary returned to the
scene of the crime with a pair of scissors to carve an
“M” into his stomach and mutilate his genitals.
What caused this young girl to turn into such a
terrifying
• psychopath? The general consensus is both nature
and nurture. Her father was a habitual criminal and
her mother subjected her to sexual abuse from the
age of 4 onward.

14. Paula Cooper

15. • One of the biggest controversies surrounding
juvenile murderers is the appropriateness of the
death penalty in punishing their crimes. It’s not
surprising that Indiana juries pushed to give Paula
Cooper the chair. One day in 1985, Cooper went to
the home of elderly Bible-study teacher Ruth Pelke
with three other girls and brutally stabbed her 37
times. The quartet had been involved in robbing
empty houses before, but this was their first time
using violence, and things rapidly went very out of
control. The girls were busted and Cooper became
the youngest person to ever
• be sentenced to death in the state. After significant
protests, including an appeal from the Pope, her
sentence was commuted to life in prison.

16. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson

17. • Here’s a two-for-one that will chill you to the bone.
When 2-year-old James Bulger went out shopping
with his mother one day in 1993, he had no idea of
the cruelty the outside world would shortly show
him. Two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert
Thompson, were playing hooky from school. They
surreptitiously approached Bulger while his mother
was talking to a store clerk, and led him away. Then
the sick duo walked him through town, past dozens
of onlookers, to an abandoned railway line where
they tortured and murdered him. They then laid his
body
• across the tracks and weighted it down with rubble
in the hope that a train would hit it and make their
grotesque crime seem like an accident. That didn’t
happen and they were brought to justice.

18. Graham Young

19. • Most of the killers on this list don’t return to a
life of crime after being punished for their
deeds, but Graham Young was a different sort
of kid. At age 13, the weird, introverted English
boy started poisoning his stepmother, father
and sister with a variety of toxic substances he
had procured. His stepmother died, and a tip
from a suspicious aunt resulted in Young’s
arrest. He was placed in a mental institution.
While there, the doctors let him study medical
texts, ironically making him an even better
poisoner. When he was released, he went on to
poison more than 70 people before being
• caught again and sentenced to life in prison.

20. Laurie Tackett

21. • Girls can be mean, but this is ridiculous. In January
of 1992, 17-year-old Laurie Tackett and four other
friends drove to a house in Jeffersonville, Ind.,
ostensibly with the goal of scaring 14-year-old
Shanda Sharer. One of the girls, Melinda Loveless,
thought Sharer was a “copycat” and had stolen her
girlfriend. The quartet got Sharer in the car and
drove her to a ruined, abandoned mansion in the
town of Utica. Once there, they made her strip, beat
her viciously and tried to cut her throat with a dull
knife. Eventually, Tackett beat her to death with a
tire iron. The quartet
• brought Sharer’s body to a field, poured gasoline on
it and set it on fire. Just days later, one of the girls
confessed and snitched on the others, who were all
tried as adults.

22. Josh Phillips

23. • Parents often feel like they have no idea what’s
going on in their kids’ rooms. Thankfully, what
they find in there isn’t nearly as horrifying as
the discovery that the mother of 14-year-old
Florida boy Josh Phillips made in 1998. When
she saw a wet spot under his waterbed, she
moved the mattress to find the decomposing
body of child Maddie Clifton, who had been
missing for eight days. Phillips had struck her
in the face with a baseball bat, strangled her
with a phone cord, and stabbed her multiple
times. He hid the body out of fear of his strict,
abusive father. Phillips was
• sentenced to life in prison with no possibility
of parole.

24. Girl, 16, stabs newborn daughter and
stuffs body in closet just HOURS
after giving birth

25. Bibliography
• http://www.mandatory.com/2012/08/17/the
-10-scariest-underage-killers/01
• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
2007409/Girl-16-stabs-newborn-daughter-
stuffs-body-closet-just-HOURS-giving-
birth.html