14 SET 2026 · They are supposed to be innocent. Protected. Pure. The idea that a child could take a human life is so unsettling, so fundamentally wrong, that society often refuses to accept it. We call them "troubled." We blame the parents. We search for explanations—abuse, neglect, mental illness, video games. Anything to avoid the terrifying truth: sometimes, a child becomes a killer. And when they do, the question that haunts us all is simple: were they born that way, or did we make them?In this episode of Deadly Kin, we confront one of the darkest questions in true crime: Can a child become a killer? We explore the cases that shocked the world—children who murdered, sometimes with chilling calculation, sometimes with explosive rage, and sometimes for reasons that defy all understanding.We begin with the case of Mary Bell—an eleven-year-old girl from Newcastle, England, who strangled two toddler boys in 1968. She was not abused in the way we might expect. Her mother was a prostitute who frequently abandoned her, and Mary had been subjected to horrific abuse from a young age. But her crimes were not acts of self-defense. They were deliberate. She and her friend led the boys to an abandoned house, strangled them, and returned to play. When asked why she did it, Mary said she wanted to know what it felt like to kill. She was convicted of manslaughter, not murder, because the court believed she was too young to understand the full weight of her actions. She was released at twenty-three and given a new identity. She has lived in hiding ever since.Then we examine the case of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson—two ten-year-old boys who abducted two-year-old James Bulger from a shopping mall in Liverpool in 1993. They tortured him, beat him with bricks and an iron bar, and left his body on a railway track, hoping a train would make it look like an accident. The CCTV footage of James being led away by the hand remains one of the most haunting images in British criminal history. The boys were tried as adults, convicted of murder, and detained at Her Majesty's pleasure. Both were released in 2001 with new identities. Venables has been repeatedly returned to prison for possessing child abuse images. Thompson has never reoffended.We also explore the case of Eric Smith—a thirteen-year-old boy from New York who murdered a four-year-old boy in 1993. Eric had been bullied for years, and his mother had recently died. But none of that explains why he lured Derrick Robie into the woods, strangled him, dropped a large rock on his head, and sodomized him with a stick. Eric was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to nine years to life. He was released in 2022 after serving nearly thirty years. He still maintains that he doesn't fully understand why he did it.And we travel to Japan, where the Kobe child murders of 1997 stunned a nation that believed juvenile crime was a foreign problem. A fourteen-year-old boy, known only as "Boy A," murdered an eleven-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy, mutilating their bodies and leaving their severed heads at a school gate. He sent taunting letters to the police and the media, signing them with a name he invented: "Seito Sakakibara." The case forced Japan to lower the age of criminal responsibility and sparked a national conversation about youth violence, mental health, and the failures of the education system.What creates a child killer? Is it brain chemistry, trauma, or something far more disturbing—a fundamental absence of empathy that exists from birth? The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit has studied child killers for decades, and their conclusions are chilling. Many child killers share common traits: a history of abuse, a fascination with violence, a lack of remorse, and a disturbing ability to mimic normal emotions. But not all abused children become killers, and not all child killers were abused. The answer, it seems, is not simple. It may never be.We also confront the difficult question of justice. When a child kills, who is responsible? The child? The parents? Society? And when that child grows up, are they still the same person who committed the crime? Should they be given a second chance, or locked away forever? These are the questions that courts, psychologists, and families have struggled with for generations. There are no easy answers.Join us as we explore these haunting cases, examine the psychology of juvenile killers, and confront the terrifying possibility that the monster we fear most is not born. It is made.This is Deadly Kin. Press play—if you dare. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/deadly-true-crime--7310460/support.
This episode includes AI-generated content.