The 10 Scariest Underage Killers

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 Smith's 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.