A child might be the last person you’d expect to be a murderer, most of the time they are one the receiving ends. Children are often considered as the epitome of innocence. Until they’re not. The way these children killed is nothing short than a serial killer’s way of finishing the victim.
Eric Smith
Eric Smith was a peculiar thirteen-year-old boy, Eric was a victim of bullying as he was often teased on the basis of his looks. Besides his red hair and freckles, Eric wore large thick glasses which were supported by a pair of low set ears that protruded unusually from the top.
Eric didn’t have many friends and was often seen riding his bicycle alone for hours. His grandparents described him as a child who liked to goof around a lot and often sought attention.
In the summer of 1993 Eric took part in a recreation program, the program might have done well for him to get out and socialize with others in a different type of environment, despite his poor experience with it in the past.
Derrick Robie, 4 was also attending the program, Derrick’s mother used to walk him to the program as he lived less than a block from where it was held but that particular day she had been tending to his younger brother. Derrick assured her mother that he could walk himself and she doesn’t need to come.
Within a matter of 5 minutes, the Robie family’s life would be forever changed. Derrick was quickly walking across the sidewalk approaching his destination. Eric was riding on the same route as well.
Eric pulled his bike over and lured Eric to an area away from the road, he strangled Derrick and chocked him to death. After he chocked him, he digs up a couple of large rocks and dropped them on Derrick’s head.
After killing Derrick he ripped off Derrick’s clothes and sodomized him with a stick he found nearby and then dumped the Kool-aid from Derrick’s packed lunch into the gaping wound in his head.
Eric just simple didn’t kill Derrick, he stuck around to enjoy what he had done.
Few days later Eric went to the police station but not to confess but to try to aid the police in solving the case, he spoke with investigators and gave them information about what Derek was wearing the day he was murdered.
Derrick Robie was buried in his baseball uniform on August 1993.
Investigators believed that Eric was only a witness at first but Eric confessed to the murder two days later. Eric was given the maximum sentence for juveniles, nine years to life and he continues to serve today.
Now, he is known as the child killer Eric Smith, and is denied parole for the 10th straight time.
This is what he had to say in his parole hearing in 2014:
“He didn’t deserve anything that I did to him, no one deserved that kind of violence, What I did to him was brutal”
Eric is eligible for parole every two years and was first denied parole in August 2002, and his next parole hearing is in October 2021.
Mary Bell
While other little girls were playing with Dolls and having sleepovers with their friends, Mary Bell was killing for fun. Mary was morphed into something a child should never become.
Mary Bell was born in 1957 to a 17-year-old prostitute and was fathered by a habitual criminal living in a slum without adequate love or care, Mary lived a terrible from claims that she was forced into sexual acts with men since the age of four.
Her mother tried to kill her numerous times in the earliest years of her life. Mary had begun attacking and choking a number of children and was reprimanded for it but no further action beyond that was further taken.
Things went out of hands when Mary turned 10, she became lethal, she had managed to corner a four-year-old boy, named Martin Brown in an old derelict house, where she strangled him to death.
Investigators believed that Martin’s death was accidental as there as an empty pill bottle near his body, this assumption would cost another life.
A short time after Martin’s body was discovered, Mary took a walk to his family’s house, and when Martin’s mother answered, she asked to see Martin.
Her mother reminded her that Martin had unfortunately died and to which she replied: “Oh, I know he’s dead, I wanted to see him in his coffin.”
Few months after her first kill, she began to crave for another, and this time she had help from a 13-year-old friend Norma. Mary and her friend Norma managed to trap a three-year-old boy named Brian. Brian was strangled to death just as Martin.
But Mary wasn’t done yet, she came back to Brian’s body after some time and with the help of a razor blade carved an N into his stomach, and then turning the N into M, possible to signify the first letter of each girl’s name.
She then used the scissors to cut off some of Brian’s hair, splash his legs and mutilate his genitals.
Mary and Norma was caught by the investigators and when they were told that they would be charged with the death of Martin and Brian. Mary said: “That’s all right by me.”
Mary was released from prison in 1980 at the age of 23. She’s now in her 60s and is now a grandmother.
Jesse Harding Pomeroy
Jesse Harding Pomeroy was a convicted murder and the youngest person in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to be convicted of murder in the first degree.
Jesse was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1859 to a widowed dressmaker. Jesse looked different from the normal kids, just like he came right out of a horror movie.
Jesse’s right eye was entirely white, there is not much information about his childhood but by the age of 11, he had developed a habit of taking younger boys to secluded areas and then stripping them of their clothes and tying them up.
After tying them he would punch and kick them until their entire bodies were bruised. Jesse’s dark desires began to evolve however and eventually, he would begin to cut his victims with a knife and knock out their teeth to disfigure them having such identifiable features victims were able to easily assist the police in finding their attacker.
Jesse was soon caught and sent to a reform school, where he has to remain until he was 21 years of age. But Jesse tricked everyone, he kept his best behavior and led the staff at school to believe that he was a changed boy that he would be safe to release to the public once again, so instead of staying there for the 10 years he was supposed to but he was released after only two years.
Jesse wasted little time, he had beaten and mutilated a 10-year-old to death and a month later Jesse had taken a four-year-old to a secluded area and cut him up so badly that he was nearly decapitated.
The police knew of Jesse’s reputation and they knew that he had just been released from reform school, Jesse was taken in and interrogated and with an overwhelming amount of evidence was charged.
Although Jesse was given the death penalty, there was a great outcry against sentencing a child to death. He was eventually sentenced to life in solitary confinement and he spent almost the rest of his entire 58 years on earth.
A news reporter explained to him as a creature gazing with lusterless eyes upon a world that meant nothing to him. He died on September 29, 1932.