The Youngest Serial Killers Explained

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]Jesse Pomeroy 14 years old 14. Most kids at 14 are worried about acne and whether or not their crush is going to sit next to them at lunch.

[00:00:12]Jesse Pomeroy was busy becoming the youngest person in Massachusetts history to be convicted of first-degree murder.

[00:00:20]And honestly, the story gets worse from there.

[00:00:25]Jesse grew up in Boston in the 1870s, which was already a terrible time to be alive for basically every reason imaginable. No antibiotics, horses everywhere, everything smelled awful.

[00:00:36]But Jesse had a particular brand of terrible that stood out even in that chaotic era. He started young, like disturbingly young.

[00:00:45]At 12, he was already luring younger kids into isolated areas and torturing them.

[00:00:50]Seven victims. He'd beat them, cut them, do things I genuinely don't want to type out. And somehow, every single time, he let them go.

[00:01:00]Which is almost more unsettling than the alternative because it means he was making a choice. He got caught, obviously, sent to a reform school, which, in the 1870s, was basically just a slightly more organized form of chaos.

[00:01:15]They released him after 16 months because they thought he was reformed.

[00:01:20]Spoiler alert, he was not reformed.

[00:01:23]Within months of being released, a 9-year-old girl named Katie Curran went missing.

[00:01:28]Then, a 10-year-old boy named Horace Millen was found dead on a beach, brutally mutilated.

[00:01:35]Jesse was arrested.

[00:01:36]>> [music] >> He was 14.

[00:01:39]The trial was a sensation. The whole city of Boston was horrified, fascinated, and completely unable to look away. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. But because he was so young, the governor commuted his sentence to life in solitary confinement.

[00:01:57]Solitary. He spent the next 41 years almost entirely alone in a cell. He taught himself to read. He wrote poetry.

[00:02:06]He petitioned for release over and over again and was denied every single time.

[00:02:11]Jesse Pomeroy died in 1932, having spent more of his life in prison than almost any American criminal in history.

[00:02:19]Mary Bell, 11 years old Newcastle, England, 1968 If Jesse Pomeroy is the story that makes you question humanity, Mary Bell is the one that makes you question everything else.

[00:02:34]Mary strangled two young boys, Brian Howe, aged 3, and Martin Brown, aged 4, with her bare hands.

[00:02:42]She then returned to the scenes.

[00:02:44]She carved an M into Brian's stomach with a pair of scissors. She told police she enjoyed it. She was 11 years old when she said that.

[00:02:53]Just let that sit with you for a moment.

[00:02:57]The investigation was one of the most disturbing in British history. Partly because nobody could believe what they were looking at.

[00:03:06]A child had done this. Detectives would interview her and come out of the room visibly shaken.

[00:03:12]Not because she was frightening in some dramatic Hollywood way, but because she was charming, articulate. She played games.

[00:03:20]She smiled at the wrong moments.

[00:03:22]She seemed to genuinely not understand why everyone was so upset.

[00:03:27]What came out later was a picture of a home life so nightmarish, it almost almost reframes the whole story.

[00:03:35]Her mother had reportedly tried to kill Mary multiple times as an infant, staging the attempts as accidents. Mary Bell had essentially been a victim since the moment she was born. She was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, released at 23 with a new identity, and has lived anonymously ever since. She had a daughter. She became a grandmother.

[00:03:59]Somewhere in Britain right now, there is a grandmother who was once the most feared child in England.

[00:04:05]Whether that's a redemption story or something more complicated, nobody has fully answered that one.

[00:04:12]Craig Price. This one is going to make you angry. I'm warning you now.

[00:04:17]Craig Price started killing at 13 in Warwick, Rhode Island. And here is the detail that will follow you around for days. He got away with it twice.

[00:04:28]His first victim was 27-year-old Rebecca Spencer, stabbed 58 times in 1984.

[00:04:36]Craig was 13.

[00:04:38]The investigation stalled. No arrest. In 1987, he killed again. An entire family this time. Joan Heaton and her two daughters aged 8 and 10.

[00:04:50]432 stab wounds between three people. He wasn't caught until 1989 when he was 15 for an unrelated break-in.

[00:04:59]During questioning, detectives noticed a wound on him consistent with a crime scene.

[00:05:04]They pressed. He confessed to everything.

[00:05:08]And here is where the fury arrives.

[00:05:11]Because Craig Price was 15 at the time of arrest, and because juvenile records in Rhode Island were sealed, he could not be tried as an adult for the murders.

[00:05:20]The maximum sentence the juvenile court could hand down meant release at 21. He served 5 years. 5 years for four murders.

[00:05:31]The legal system had glitched in the most catastrophic way imaginable. But, and this is one of those rare moments where the universe at least tries to correct itself. Craig Price could not stop. After his release, he was implicated in a murder-for-hire plot, then accumulated more charges, ultimately landing multiple life sentences.

[00:05:53]He will die in prison.

[00:05:55]Just not for the murders he actually committed.

[00:05:59]Justice, technically. The ugly, broken, legally baffling kind.

[00:06:06]Amarjeet Sada, 8 years old 8 The number of candles on a birthday cake. The age at which most children's biggest moral dilemma is whether to tell their parents they broke a vase.

[00:06:19]Amarjeet Sada, from a small village in Bihar, India, allegedly killed three children, including two members of his own family, before turning 9. The full details only emerged after a neighbor's baby girl went missing and was found dead.

[00:06:34]Amarjeet allegedly confessed calmly to police. Investigators reportedly said he showed no remorse whatsoever. He smiled during questioning. He asked for biscuits. He asked for biscuits. I don't know why that specific detail is so unsettling, but it absolutely is.

[00:06:54]Because of his age, he couldn't be tried criminally. He was sent to a child welfare facility. What happened after that is largely unknown. He'd be in his 20s now, and nobody knows where. The frameworks we use for understanding violence, culpability, and evil were simply not designed with an 8-year-old in mind.

[00:07:14]Jon Venables and Robert Thompson 10 years old both of them February 12th, 1993 Bootle, England This is the case that broke an entire country's idea of what childhood meant.

[00:07:30]James Bulger was 2 years old. He was at a shopping center with his mother when he wandered away for a matter of seconds. Jon and Robert took him by the hand and led him away.

[00:07:41]They walked him nearly 4 km across Liverpool, through crowds, past dozens of adults who noticed the crying toddler but did nothing.

[00:07:49]At a railway embankment, they beat James Bulger to death.

[00:07:53]The CCTV footage, grainy, blurred, two boys and a small child, became one of the most reproduced and most haunting images in British criminal history.

[00:08:05]The trial was a national trauma.

[00:08:09]The two boys sat in an adult courtroom, their feet barely touching the floor.

[00:08:13]The tabloids called them evil incarnate.

[00:08:17]Both were released in 2001 at 18 with new identities. Robert Thompson has, as far as anyone can tell, disappeared entirely into a normal life and never reoffended.

[00:08:30]Jon Venables has not managed the same, recalled to prison in 2010 and again in 2017 for possession of child abuse material.

[00:08:40]Two boys, same crime, same age, same day, completely different outcomes.

[00:08:47]Criminologists still argue about why.

[00:08:50]The answer probably involves everything that came before February 12th, 1993, rather than the day itself. Barry Dale Lukaitis, February 2nd, 1996 Moses Lake, Washington 14-year-old Barry walked into his algebra class dressed in a long black duster coat, carrying a hunting rifle, two handguns, and 78 rounds of ammunition.

[00:09:16]He killed his teacher and two classmates.

[00:09:19]He held the rest of the class hostage for 10 minutes before a gym teacher tackled him.

[00:09:25]Barry Lukaitis matters in this conversation because he came before Columbine. Before there was a cultural script for this kind of event. Before schools had active shooter drills.

[00:09:34]Before anyone had given it a category.

[00:09:37]He was, in the horrifying language of statistics, a pioneer.

[00:09:41]His home life was a disaster.

[00:09:44]His father had announced he was leaving the family. His mother had reportedly discussed her own suicide plan with her son, specifically mentioning Valentine's Day.

[00:09:55]Barry moved the date up by 12 days.

[00:09:58]In his room, investigators found references to a Stephen King novel about a school shooting. A book so frequently cited in real incidents that King eventually asked for it to be pulled from print.

[00:10:10]Barry was tried as an adult and sentenced to two life sentences plus 205 years.

[00:10:16]He is in his 40s now, still incarcerated.

[00:10:20]The students who survived that morning are in their 40s, too, somewhere.

[00:10:25]Cayetano Santos Godino, known as El Petiso Orejudo, roughly the big-eared shorty, Godino is considered one of Argentina's first documented serial killers. He started his attacks at 7.

[00:10:39]7. Setting fires, attacking children, strangling animals before he was old enough to be in secondary school.

[00:10:47]His first confirmed kill came at 10.

[00:10:50]Four children total, dozens of attempted attacks, somewhere between 40 and 70 arson fires across Buenos Aires.

[00:10:58]The city was baffled. The crimes were too scattered, too random, the victims too small.

[00:11:04]Nobody suspected a child.

[00:11:07]When he was finally caught at 16, his confessions were detailed and calm.

[00:11:11]Physicians who examined him concluded he was not legally insane, but was perhaps biologically oriented toward violence.

[00:11:18]His father had been institutionalized.

[00:11:21]His mother had a serious criminal record. Nature and nurture had both failed him at exactly the same time, in exactly the same direction.

[00:11:30]He died in prison in 1944.

[00:11:33]The Buenos Aires papers covered his death with the same fascination they'd given his crimes 30 years earlier. Some things really never change.

[00:11:43]Joshua Phillips, 14 years old, Jacksonville, Florida, 1998.

[00:11:49]Joshua was the boy next door.

[00:11:52]Literally, his victim, Maddie Clifton, was 8 years old and lived directly next door. She went missing on November 3rd.

[00:11:59]Joshua joined the search parties. He helped look for her. He talked to police who found him cooperative and concerned.

[00:12:07]He went to school. He came home. He did his homework.

[00:12:11]8 days later, his mother noticed a smell coming from under his waterbed. She lifted the frame. [music] Maddie Clifton's body had been hidden there the entire time, while Joshua attended class, ate dinner with his family, and helped search the neighborhood for the child he had killed.

[00:12:29]The explanation Joshua offered was that it had been an accident, that she'd been injured while they were playing, and he panicked.

[00:12:36]Whatever actually happened, what's undeniable is the 8 days, the waterbed, the search parties, the homework.

[00:12:43]Whatever was going on inside Joshua Phillips's head during those 8 days is something that psychiatrists have never fully agreed on. He was tried as an adult, sentenced to life without parole, and later resentenced to life with the possibility of parole following a Supreme Court ruling on juvenile sentencing.

[00:13:00]Whether he'll ever be released is an open question.

[00:13:04]Whether he should be is one that everyone who hears this story seems to answer differently.

[00:13:10]Brenda Ann Spencer, 16 years old, San Diego, California, January 29th, 1979.

[00:13:19]Brenda lived directly across the street from Grover Cleveland Elementary School.

[00:13:25]On a Monday morning, she opened fire on children arriving for school, killing the principal and a custodian, wounding eight children.

[00:13:33]When police made contact with her during the standoff, a reporter asked why she had done it. She said, "I don't like Mondays."

[00:13:42]That quote became the title of a Boomtown Rats song that hit number one in the UK.

[00:13:48]Bob Geldof wrote it after seeing the story on a news wire.

[00:14:03]Brenda Spencer, meanwhile, remained barricaded for 6 hours before surrendering.

[00:14:09]She said later she had expected to be shot. She had, in her own words, wanted to die. Her father had given her a rifle for Christmas. She had asked for a radio. Her home life was described by investigators as chaotic and neglectful.

[00:14:24]She had told a school counselor she was going to do something big enough to make the news.

[00:14:29]The counselor called her father. Her father did nothing.

[00:14:34]Brenda Spencer was tried as an adult, sentenced to 25 years to life, and has been denied parole nine times. She is in her 60s now. The children she shot are in their 50s.

[00:14:46]And somewhere there are people who still can't hear that song without their stomach dropping. [music] Willie Bosket, 15 years old, New York City, 1978.

[00:15:00]Willie Bosket is one of those cases where the consequences extended far beyond a single story.

[00:15:05]He didn't just end two lives, he changed American law.

[00:15:11]Willie grew up in Harlem, raised largely by his grandmother because his father, Butch Bosket, was himself a convicted killer serving time in prison.

[00:15:21]Willie had been in and out of juvenile facilities since he was 9.

[00:15:26]9.

[00:15:27]He had a documented history of violence, a string of assault charges, and a file that any reasonable observer would have looked at and called a crisis. Multiple institutions had him, evaluated him, released him.

[00:15:41]Nobody did enough.

[00:15:43]In March 1978, Willie Bosket shot and killed two men on the New York City subway during robberies. He was 15.

[00:15:51]Because of his age, the maximum sentence under New York's juvenile law was 5 years in a youth facility. He was out before he was 21. The public outrage was enormous, and it was directed at the legal system as much as at Willie himself.

[00:16:07]New York Governor Hugh Carey responded by pushing through the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978, one of the first laws in American history to allow children as young as 13 to be tried as adults for serious crimes.

[00:16:21]That law became a template for similar legislation across the country.

[00:16:25]Willie Bosket spent the following decades racking up more convictions inside prison, assaulting guards, attempting to stab a guard, setting fires, to the point where the state of New York eventually built a special cell specifically for him, the most restrictive incarceration conditions in the state's history. He has said in interviews that he built his identity around being the worst person the system had ever produced, that he was, in some twisted way, proud of it. His father abandoned him.

[00:16:56]The system processed [music] him.

[00:16:59]Nobody at any point managed to interrupt the trajectory before it became unstoppable. Willie Bosket is the case study that every conversation about juvenile justice eventually arrives at, whether it means to or not.

[00:17:12]Cindy Collier and Shirley Wolf, 15 and 14 years old, respectively, Auburn, California, 1983.

[00:17:20]Two girls, a Sunday afternoon, an 85-year-old woman named Anna Brackett, who made the mistake of answering her door.

[00:17:30]Cindy and Shirley had met in a group home just weeks before.

[00:17:34]They bonded quickly over shared troubled backgrounds, over a mutual fascination with violence that both had apparently been nursing independently before they found each other.

[00:17:44]There is a well-documented phenomenon in criminology sometimes called folie à deux, a madness shared between two people, where each one escalates the other past any limit they would have reached alone.

[00:17:57]Cindy and Shirley are a textbook case.

[00:18:00]They knocked on Anna Brackett's door asking to use the phone.

[00:18:04]She let them in. They stabbed [music] her 28 times.

[00:18:08]Afterward, Shirley Wolf wrote in her diary, "Today, Cindy and I ran away and killed an old lady. It was lots of fun."

[00:18:16]That diary entry became evidence. Both girls confessed.

[00:18:21]Cindy Collier was sentenced to the California Youth Authority until age 27, then released.

[00:18:28]Shirley Wolf received the same. Both have lived largely anonymous lives since their release. The case is remembered now primarily in criminology courses as an example of what happens when two damaged people find each other at exactly the wrong moment.

[00:18:45]Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, 19 and 18 years old, the oldest on this list, barely, Chicago, 1924.

[00:18:54]Sometimes called the crime of the century, though that particular title has been claimed so many times it's basically meaningless at this point.

[00:19:02]Leopold and Loeb were both from extraordinarily wealthy families. Both were genuinely brilliant. Leopold had already been accepted to Harvard Law School.

[00:19:12]Both had absorbed Nietzsche's concept of the superman, the idea that exceptional individuals existed beyond ordinary moral constraints, and had decided, as brilliant, wealthy, 19-year-old boys occasionally do, that they were those individuals.

[00:19:27]They decided to commit the perfect crime purely as an intellectual exercise, to prove they could. They kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks, the son of a neighbor.

[00:19:39]And then, almost immediately, they were caught because Leopold accidentally dropped his custom-made, extremely traceable glasses at the scene.

[00:19:48]The perfect crime lasted approximately 48 hours before unraveling entirely. The universe has a sense of humor, though it tends to [music] pick terrible moments to deploy it.

[00:19:59]Their trial was a sensation.

[00:20:03]Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense attorney in American history, took the case and delivered a 12-hour closing argument that is still studied in law schools today. A sweeping condemnation of the death penalty and a meditation on the nature of criminal responsibility.

[00:20:19]He saved them from execution. Both were sentenced to life plus 99 years.

[00:20:26]Richard Loeb was killed by a fellow inmate in 1936.

[00:20:32]Nathan Leopold was paroled in 1958, moved to Puerto Rico, married, earned a master's degree, worked in public health, and died in 1971.

[00:20:43]Two boys who committed the same crime together ended up in completely different places.

[00:20:50]Tell me in the comments what video you want me to make next. See you later.