Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (8 page)

Luke was born on 5th February 1981 to John and Mary Anne Woodham who lived in Pearl, Mississippi. John was an accountant and Mary Anne a kindergarten teacher. The couple already had a son, John junior, who was eight years old. Mary Anne was thirty-four and John senior was forty-two by the time baby Luke came on the scene but she was able to take him to work with her, which made it easier to cope.

It also suited Mary Anne as she was an over-
protective
mum obsessed with her sons’ diet, neatness and bath times. She was also very protective towards the children she taught at her work, constantly asking them if anything was wrong at home. Ironically she didn’t seem to notice that her older son resented the sudden arrival of his baby brother and often nipped Luke as he lay in his crib.

Mary Anne also seemed not to notice when her
husband
started to work longer and longer hours. When he did come home he’d find her still obsessing over the children. There seemed no place for him in her very full life. He pointed out that the house was a mess and she retorted that she’d been busy working and
shopping
. Their voices rose until the neighbours could hear and decided to keep their own children away. Little Luke listened to these increasingly common screaming matches and was terrified.

Mary Anne was religious and took both children
to the Baptist church but it’s not known how the increasingly timid Luke fared at Sunday school. He did his best to please his mother at home though,
saying
his prayers at meal times and last thing at night.

Luke became very clumsy and Mary Anne
frequently
shouted at him for knocking over her
ornaments
or his teacup. Perhaps realising that she needed some space, she tried taking him to a friend’s house but he’d been so used to an aggressive atmosphere that he immediately managed to create one, breaking the other children’s toys.

By now his dad was staying away more and more often and Luke doubtless blamed himself for his absence. His older brother was able to visit
schoolmates
to escape from his mother’s nagging but Luke had nowhere to go because he was too young to be independent and hadn’t any friends. So the pre-school Luke adopted various pets and made them into his confidantes instead. He’d go out into the yard and speak to his cats and dogs in order to keep out of his angry and over-critical mother’s way.

Not that his mum was always so negative. At other times she was very loving towards Luke and gave the impression that he was all that mattered. But it wasn’t the healthiest type of love – friends thought that she acted as if she owned the little boy.

By the time Luke was four or five, his mother had had enough of simply being a wife and mum. She decided she wanted more fun in her life and started going out with her friends most evenings. This meant that John junior, now in his early teens, was left to
babysit Luke. Unfortunately John still had no feelings for his brother and tended to trip him over or tease him mercilessly.

Unsurprisingly, Luke was school-phobic by his first day at school. He’d had so few good experiences of life that he suspected everyone was out to get him. And as his older mother had given him an old fashioned
haircut
he really did stand out in a negative way from the crowd. Mary Anne also insisted that Luke wear shorts all year round so he was teased in winter when the other boys wore trousers to school. Before long the trendier boys were pushing and shoving him and calling him names.

Luke hadn’t been in junior school for long when his father got the sack. Now his dad was at home all day and his parent’s fights intensified. Mary Anne insisted on bringing both children into the room to hear these arguments, telling them to listen to what their father had done now. Sometimes Luke’s dad would take him out to the park but at other times he hid away in his study for the entire day. Luke did what he could to cheer up both parents but by now the marriage had crumbled irrecoverably.

When Luke was seven his father finally walked out. Luke had loved his dad and he was devastated. He turned even more to his animals for succour as they didn’t let him down in the way that other people did.
Mary Anne was also thrown by the desertion and began to party even more determinedly. She also
worried
about how she’d pay the bills. John junior
understandably
stayed at a friend’s house as often as he could because he hated the tension in the household. This meant that Luke was left on his own most evenings with his pets.

Even when Mary Anne was home, the evenings were not a success. She wanted Luke – still only eight or nine – to talk to her like an adult. But Luke was so tired of her criticism that he preferred to keep his
feelings
to himself. He possibly also resented the fact that he could only see his mother when she felt like it – he was clearly second best to her friends. So he’d answer in monosyllables and she’d shout at him some more and further alienate him. He’d end up watching TV with her in complete silence or escaping to the privacy of his room.

Not that his room was as private as he’d have liked it to be. His mother often checked up on him and took away some of his pocket money if his bedroom wasn’t immaculate. If she found one of his toys or games out of place she’d throw it out and refuse to let him fetch it from the trash.

Desperately lonely and bored, Luke often took a large packet of crisps up to his room with him. It was one of his few pleasures, given that he knew he’d be picked on again by his schoolmates the following day. At other times his mother gave him fattening snacks to cheer him up then criticised his expanding girth. As his size increased he became even more clumsy. His
eyesight was also worsening and his mother got him heavy-rimmed glasses which further contributed to his already old fashioned look.

Every area of Luke’s life was going wrong. Mary Anne now worried so much about cash that she refused to allow him to leave scraps of food on his plate. Once he threw some leftovers in the bin and she pulled them out and made him eat them. Like many such parents, she seemed unable to put herself in her son’s place, to recognise that he needed love and respect. His life consisted of church with his mother and of being home alone or with her there, nagging at him. He had no friends and no fun and was old before his time.

A photograph taken of him at age ten shows how unreasonably he was expected to dress. His hair is cut so short that it looks like he has the receding hairline of a fifty-year-old. He’s peering through the
previously
-described glasses and wearing a white jacket, shirt and tie. The fact that he’s several stones overweight adds to this impression of someone who is
prematurely
aged – and his tension is evident from the set of his mouth. It’s as if Mary Anne has subconsciously tried to turn him into the husband that she’d permanently lost. In the photograph he has his hand on her shoulder but she’s half turned away from him, her older son on her other side, smiling at something that the camera can’t see.

Mary Anne was very interested in Luke’s education but she showed it in an unhelpful way, going to the school if she thought that his grades weren’t good enough. If he got a B, she criticised him for not getting an A. With his IQ of 115, Luke was reasonably bright but was no genius.

Parents who put academic pressure on their children often find that the child’s grades slip – and Luke was no exception. Learning, which could have been an escape from the physical bullying of his schoolmates, had become a chore.

Mary Anne would nag Luke about his studies at night and would check his homework before taking him to school in the morning. She also nagged him about his diet, the state of his bedroom and his gardening chores. By now he was silently fighting back, saying that he’d cut the lawn then only cutting a little strip down the centre of the grass. Suburban gardening standards being high, the source of conflicts were endless, a creatively trimmed lawn starting the equivalent of World War Three. Neighbours were used to the shouting, but on at least one occasion they heard terrified screams coming from the house and informed the social services. But Mary Anne opened the door and insisted everything was fine so the authorities went away.

In fairness, her own life was increasingly under stress. Her part time teaching salary was too small to support herself and her sons so she’d switched to a full-time job as a receptionist. This meant starting work
early, so she had to take her sons to school even earlier. This was also difficult for Luke as it meant he was at school – a place he feared and hated – for well over an hour before his first class. To help pass the time, he would sit in the corridor reading a book and eating yet more snacks.

By the time he went to Pearl High School, Luke was almost two stone overweight, desperately shy and very different. Many of the children loved and revered sports but he hated games. Other children found their place in the hierarchy by being cool, but with his round face, short hair and old-fashioned clothes Luke simply didn’t fit the bill. The other teens often tripped him up as he walked along the corridor before start of class – and if he sat down outside the classroom in order to become a smaller target, they’d step on him. They called him Fatso and Snotball and made every day a physical and mental hell.

The hell would start when his mother took him right up to the school doors and insisted he kiss her on the cheek. The cooler kids would line up to watch and roar with laughter. The misery continued when he went into an extended daydream (something that abused children do to shut out the misery of their lives) and was picked on by the teachers for not paying attention. He tried ignoring them, tried answering back and at one stage even got into a physical fight
with one of the name callers. But it made no difference and the cruelty went on. Luke tried to find solace in food but the bullies stamped on his snacks until they were inedible.

Luke tried playing truant from school but his mum found out and yelled at him then grounded him. Not that the grounding made much difference as Luke had nowhere special to go. Desperate for a peer group – even a long dead one – he started to read the work of existential philosophers, identifying with the works of Nietzsche and Dostoievsky. Doubtless he identified with Dostoievsky’s Underground Man.

Luke was himself becoming an emotionally
underground
man. For years he’d tried to win his father’s and his mother’s love and had tried to act happy at school and at Sunday school. But now the years of
cruelty
were taking their toll. At age fourteen he wrote in his diary that he had been ‘always beaten, always hated.’ He also wrote that his brother sometimes punched him – and everyone could see that he was often pushed and stepped on in school.

But when he was fifteen, life briefly improved when a new girl arrived at his school. Christine Menefree was pretty and kind and soon befriended him. She
encouraged
him to grow his hair longer so that he looked more modern. The teens both loved animals so they had something to talk about.

Luke asked Christine out and she said yes. To his horror, his mother stipulated she had to drive them to the cinema. She was also waiting for them in her car when they left. On another occasion she insisted on coming with him to Christine’s house and mocked the fact that the young couple sat close to each other. She was still treating him like a child.

Unfortunately, Luke was becoming as regimented as his mum and demanded that Christine be home at certain times to take his phone calls. Within a few weeks she’d had enough and finished with him.

All of Luke’s feelings of love now transmogrified into hatred – and into self-hatred. He told Christine’s friends that he was going to use his father’s old rifle to take his own life. They took the threat seriously and successfully talked him out of it but Luke’s hatred
didn’t
go away. Instead, he made up enraged posters for his room that said ‘America is dead’ and ‘Fucked Forever.’ It’s unclear what his mother made of these communications during her tidiness inspection sprees.

But again Luke’s spirits lifted slightly when he heard of a fantasy role-playing game at school that had
openings
for new players. Grant Boyette, the leader of the
game, was from a deeply religious family so believed in Satan. He told friends he prayed to him for
influence
. Some of the older boys were also religious and prayed to God. They found Grant’s belief system
unacceptable
so they drifted away from the group – at which stage Luke was allowed to join in.

The group was called The Kroth and it involved mock fights to the death between characters
representing
good and evil. It gave the teens a focus for their meetings and a chance to talk about their various embryonic philosophies. Grant, for some reason known only to himself, admired Hitler and always took the most malignant roles. But Luke found the youth, who was two years older than him, unusual and enigmatic and the two soon became close.

Luke had been suffering from insomnia and intense loneliness since Christine finished with him so was very glad of Grant’s esoteric company. Grant would come to his house and the teenagers would listen to heavy metal music. They also read voraciously and, like most people who haven’t acquired any power, were particularly interested in a book of spells. He and Grant ostensibly put a spell on someone – and that
person’s
friend died in a road accident. This was enough to make the impressionable Luke believe that Grant had special powers.

In this Luke was gullible – but he was bright enough to recognise that he was living in a world which values sporting achievement and fashion sense over creativity and intellect. If he’d bided his time until he became an adult, he could have left home and put his various
insights to good use. He might simply have been a late developer – for many children who do badly at school go on to live successful and fulfilling lifes. But, like most children raised in hypercritical and over-protective households, Luke didn’t have the confidence to believe that he could live on his own. His home, unpleasant as it was, was the only refuge from the school bullies that he’d ever known.