Kip Kinkel: Voted by his classmates, the “Most Likely to Start World War III,” Kinkel was a crime just waiting to happen. Add guns to the mix and you have a massacre.
Eric Smith: The brutal murder of a young boy shocks a small community in upstate New York. No one could have guessed that the killer was just 13 years old.
Barry Loukaitis: The tragic tale of a bullied child, an unstable mother, and a shooting spree that destroyed three young lives.
Cayetano Santos Godino: Known as the “Jug-eared Dwarf,” Godino was a juvenile serial killer who terrorized Buenos Aires, Argentina during the early 1900s.
Dedrick Owens: A cold-blooded murder committed by a killer who, shockingly, was just six years old.
Sam Manzie: A problem child from an early age, Manzie eventually devolved to murder when he lured, raped and strangled an 11-year-old boy.
Joshua Phillips: A horrific sex crime with an unlikely perpetrator, the most popular kid on the block.
Jesse Pomeroy: A malevolent youngster who killed at least two children and tortured many others, Pomeroy might just be America’s youngest serial killer.
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Killer Kids Volume 1
Kim Edwards & Lucas Markham
It started with a slap, delivered by Elizabeth Edwards to her
6-year-old daughter Kim during an argument over which TV show to watch.
Elizabeth immediately regretted lashing out and felt so badly about it that she
reported herself to social services. That resulted in her daughters, Kim and
Katie, being taken away from her for a time and placed in state care. The girls
would be returned to their mother’s home in Spalding, England, within months.
But while Katie seemed unaffected by the brief separation and soon rebuilt the
bond with her mother, Kim appeared to harbor a grudge, one that would grow into
full-blown hatred over the next eight years; one that would lead eventually to
a brutal double homicide.
Kim Edwards was an unusual child who, even as a pre-teen, seemed to
view herself as an outsider. She was resentful of the relationship that her
mother had with younger sister Katie, one that she believed showed favoritism
and left her on the outside looking in. In truth, it was Kim who kept her
mother (and the rest of the world) at arm’s length. In September 2013,
Elizabeth Edwards asked teachers at her daughter’s school to keep an especially
vigilant eye on the eleven-year-old as she had threatened to run away from
home. Eight months later, Kim told a social worker that her mother had tried to
strangle her, a claim denied by Elizabeth and disproved by a medical
examination.
In January 2015, a teacher at Kim’s school alerted Elizabeth to the
fact that Kim had written her a letter in which she’d spoken of suicide. “I
have tried to remain strong,” the letter read, “but I can't fight any more. Now
I feel that death is the only way.” Concerned, Elizabeth spoke to her GP and
asked him to arrange counseling for Kim. The subsequent sessions led the
therapist to conclude that there was no indication of mental illness.
Then, in September of 2015, there appeared at last to be a chink of
light in Kim Edwards’s self-imposed darkness. It came in the form of
14-year-old Lucas Markham, a student at her school. Elizabeth was initially
uncertain about the relationship, but at least Kim was smiling again. Even the
strained interactions between mother and daughter seemed to improve. All too
soon, however, Elizabeth’s fears would be realized. Lucas was a surly and
petulant youth, a delinquent and a trouble maker with a precocious interest in
sex. Soon his bad influence would rub off on Kim.
In October 2015, after one of his frequent clashes with the school
authorities, Lucas was given detention and decided instead to run away from
home. Kim did not need much persuading to join him, and the pair departed that
same afternoon, leaving town on their bicycles and carrying with them a tent,
clothes, food, and other supplies. They would remain at large for five days
during which a search was launched. The police eventually tracked them to some
woods between the villages of Cowbit and Crowland. Thereafter, Elizabeth
forbade her daughter from seeing Lucas, but she might as well have been talking
to herself. Kim was beyond her control by now.
In March 2016, Kim ended up spending two days in hospital after an
apparent suicide attempt. Then, on April 9, she got into another furious row
with her mother after which she decamped to Lucas’s house. There, the two of
them barricaded themselves in Lucas’s bedroom, resisting all attempts by
Elizabeth and by Lucas’s aunt to talk them out. Eventually, they escaped
through a window. Just days later, while they were eating hamburgers at
McDonald’s, Kim raised the possibility of killing her mother. She’d suggested
it, she’d later claim, as a joke. It was a joke that would soon turn deadly.
Just after midnight on April 13, 2016, Kim Edwards heard three closely
spaced knocks on the window of the room she shared with her sister Katie. This
was a pre-arranged signal, and Kim had been lying awake, eagerly waiting for
it. She immediately slipped out of bed, padded on bare feet to the adjacent
bathroom and opened the window. Lucas, standing in the darkness beyond, said
nothing, instead handing Kim a sports bag. Something inside rattled as she
placed it on the bathroom floor. Then Lucas was climbing through the window,
and then he was inside.
The couple exchanged a brief embrace. No words were spoken and none were
required since they’d discussed the plan in detail in the days leading up to
this moment. Now they walked the short distance to Elizabeth’s bedroom with Kim
in the lead until they reached the door. Then she stood aside while Lucas
placed his bag on the floor, crouched beside it and began rummaging inside.
When he stood up again, he was holding a large kitchen knife.
Elizabeth Edwards was fast asleep when the first blow was struck, the
cold steel of the blade biting into her throat and severing her windpipe.
Despite this horrible wound, she instinctively fought back, grappling with her
attacker as he straddled her. But Lucas was in a frenzy, delivering eight
vicious blows in rapid succession. Five of those connected with Elizabeth’s
hands, slicing through flesh and tendons as she fought vainly to defend
herself. But two thrusts of the knife got through and penetrated her neck,
severing arteries and sending sprays of blood onto the walls and bedding.
Standing in the doorway, Kim heard “gurgling sounds” coming from her mother.
Then those sounds were extinguished as Lucas took a pillow and pressed it down
on the stricken woman’s face, holding it there until Elizabeth stopped moving.
Phase one of the deadly murder plot was complete. Now it was time for
Kim to kill her 13-year-old sister, an act she’d been sure she could carry out.
At the last moment, however, she shirked, telling Lucas that she could not go
through with it. It was left to Lucas to knife the innocent child to death as
she slept. Kim, standing in the hall outside their shared bedroom, heard her
sister utter the words, “Get off me,” and “I can’t….” Then there was silence
and moments later Lucas emerged from the room holding the bloody knife.
It was a horrific double homicide, made all the more so because of the
tender ages of the perpetrators and the fact that the victims were the mother
and sister of one of them. But what the teenaged killers did next was arguably
even worse. As her mother and sister lay hacked to death in their beds, Kim Edwards
led her juvenile lover to the bathroom where they shared a bath, gently
sponging the blood from each other’s bodies. Afterwards they went downstairs
where they ate ice cream while watching a marathon of all five Twilight movies,
breaking off periodically to have sex.
Kim and Lucas would remain in their macabre love nest for the next
eighteen hours, even as the slaughtered bodies lay upstairs. During that time,
members of the Edwards family became concerned that they were unable to reach
Elizabeth by phone and called on the house. But their knocks went unanswered,
and after three separate attempts, they went to the police. By then, Lucas
Markham's aunt had also reported him missing.
Officers were dispatched to the house on April 15, arriving to find it
securely locked. Getting no response when they knocked, they forced their way
in, uncertain of what they’d find. What they did find was Kim and Lucas sitting
under a duvet in front of the TV. Asked about Elizabeth and Katie, Lucas tartly
informed them: “Why don’t you look upstairs?”
Both Kim Edwards and Lucas Markham were charged with murder. Not that
either of them was denying it. Edwards, in particular, left officers stunned
with her cold demeanor. “I did it because I did not like Mum at all and I did
not want her to ruin or corrupt anyone else,” she said. “I did not feel
anything for my mother, she deserved it and I'm glad she's dead.”
The next day, Edwards made full admissions to police, giving a
step-by-step account of the murders and their planning. Although she denied
carrying out the actual killings, she insisted that Markham had carried them
out with her full agreement. “We made sure we were both definitely, like, okay
with it,” she said. “He continuously asked me if I still wanted to go through
with it and I said yes.”
Edwards would carry that attitude with her into her trial, where she
and her co-accused pled not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter. In
Edwards's case, her counsel cited “an abnormality of mental function which
impaired her ability to form rational judgments” as the reason for her plea.
That, however, was rejected by the jury who found both defendants guilty.
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