Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers by Carol Anne Davis Read Free Book Online

recognises that the parent who hits or mocks him is bad. But that is too terrifying a notion to live with, for it means that he is totally at the mercy of a bad person. So he changes his viewpoint to believe that the parent is good and he is bad and deserves to be hurt. This gives him back the illusion of control. But if the violence recurs again and again, thejuvenile redefines the hurt so that he still believes he is bad – but determines that when he grows up he will punish others who are equally bad.
    The increasingly punitive-minded Peter attended a school for handicapped children but he felt different to his schoolmates. They went back to loving homes each night whereas he returned to the functional briskness of council care. Here he was sexually abused by persons unknown, probably older male inmates. He’d later say that they used him sexually from the time he was small. Sadly, the abuse of such handicapped children is commonplace. In a study of over 40,000 disabled American children, 31% of them had been maltreated, often in the first five years of life.

Intellect
    With so much abuse to contend with, Peter found it hard to concentrate in school and though he learned to read and write, his spelling was very poor and he used language badly. The lack of nourishment and lack of stimuli that he’d received as a baby and a toddler may well have affected his growing brain. That said, he liked human biology and maths classes and enjoyed his trips to school on the bus.
    Peter had by now been diagnosed as epileptic, but his anti-epilepsy medication kept the convulsions at bay. Unfortunately his partial paralysis meant that he limped with his right leg and held his right hand highand crooked across his chest, which made him look intellectually challenged. As a result, the local boys called him Daft Peter and often laughed at him.
    But though Peter would never become scholarly, he was blessed with a native cunning. He’d found that when he shared his secrets with others they told someone else – so he learned the art of silence. The outside world was so untrustworthy that he preferred to live inside his own head.
    During these formative years, Peter saw a bonfire for the first time and found it excited him. By nine he had become obsessed with fire.

First serious arson attack
    When Peter was nine he lit a fire in a shopping arcade, causing £17,000 worth of damage. No one suspected the small disabled boy. Peter watched till the flames got out of hand then hurried away. He continued to play with matches and seek out bonfires and had dreams about people burning in flames that he’d created, but it was another four years before he killed for the first time. His first murder victim – and several of his later murder victims – were physically handicapped. He’d fallen out with them at school, or simply felt jealous that they had pleasant homes to go to, so determined to exact a terrible revenge…

Not so happy families
    The local authorities were still trying to forge a relationship between Peter and his mother, so sometimes sent him home for trial weekends. When he was eleven his mother married. From then on these weekends included a stepfather called Lee who he described as ‘alright.’ Often when he went home for the weekend, his mother and stepfather would be partying and he’d be expected to entertain himself as best he could. Trying to join in, the eleven-year-old went around the house finishing off all the beer cans, something he’d first done as an undernourished toddler. As a result he soon built up a remarkable tolerance for alcohol and could drink without getting drunk. At night he couldn’t sleep and would wander about the house or the darkened streets. The location of these streets would vary because his mother moved from Manchester to Hull and had several addresses within each city – but the lack of care he received didn’t vary. Peter simply didn’t have a childhood.

The first murder
    In June 1973