Sunday 15 April 2018

Killer Kids Volume 1



 22 shocking true stories of kids who kill, including;


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.

Kim Edwards and Lucas Markham were each sentenced to life in prison with at least 20 years to be served before they are eligible for parole. The minimum term was later reduced to 17 years on appeal. That means that the so-called “Twilight Killers” could be back on the streets by their early thirties, a frightening prospect when you consider that the prosecutor likened them to the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.

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