Mad, Bad or Victims of Circumstance

In recent years, there have been several high profile cases of murders committed by children yet, as this book will illustrate, murder by children is by no means a modern phenomenon. In 1748 a ten-year-old boy killed a five-year-old girl because she was sulky, had a habit of fouling the bed they shared in the workhouse but most of all because he didn't like her. In 1835, thirteen-year-old William Wild of Derbyshire drowned two of his employers' children out of spite, while sixteen-year-old Fred Cook killed his younger brother with a hatchet in 1893, hoping to be hanged for his crime. In Cambridgeshire, fifteen-year-old Frank Rodgers shot his mother in 1904, in order to spare his beloved younger sister the ordeal of growing up with an alcoholic mother. In this collection of true accounts of historical murders - all perpetrated by children aged sixteen or younger - were the killers mad, bad, or simply victims of circumstance? Now, as then, we struggle to comprehend, searching our society for the reasons why.