Adopted Serial Killers

(Listed alphabetically, with age at time of crime if known.)

• Albright, Charles, ("Eyeball Killer")

  Born in Amarillo Texas, adopted as the only child of Fred and Delle Albright, may be innocent of killing one or two of his serial killings of females. Source: http://TheChosenChildren.com, & http://www.radford.edu/~maamodt/Psyc%20405/serial%20killers/Albright,%20Charles.htm

• Barone, Cesar Francesco, 31, (aka Adolph James Rode)

  Born 12-4-60 as Adolph James "Jimmy" Rode Jr., and adopted as "Barone," he was convicted of sexually assaulting & killing 4 women in the Portland area in the 1990s & sentenced to Death in 1995. Source: Washington County Corrections web-site.

• Bartsch, Guergen

  "Between 1962 and 1966, four schoolboys were abused, tortured and killed in Germany's Ruhr District. Their tormentor, Juergen Bartsch, was fifteen at the time of his first crime; nineteen when he was caught. His mesmerizing confession, which frames the re-enactment of his crimes and the circumstances through which they came about, forms the heart of this journey into the dark reaches of a troubled mind. Bartsch's cold and severe adopters, his terror-filled years at a Catholic boarding school, the discovery of his sexual attraction to boys, his desperate longing to never have to grow up."

  Source: http://TheChosenChildren.com, & "The Child I Never Was" - http://www.scoops.be/movies/moviedetail.asp?movid=6260

• Benefiel Jr., Bill J.

  Executed 4-21-05 in Indiana, for the Feb. 7, 1987 murder of Delores Wells, 18, of Vigo County. Wells was kept in Benefiel’s home for several days. She was sexually abused & tortured before Benefiel killed her. Benefiel also kept another victim in his home who survived [after he repeatedly raped her] & testified against him. Court-appointed experts testified during the guilt phase of the trial that Benefiel suffered from schizophrenic personality disorder, & from a mental disease or defect. As a baby, Benefiel’s "birth" mother gave him to an unfit mother in exchange for having a place to live. Benefiel endured a traumatic childhood including abandonment & sexual abuse by his adoptive mother’s boyfriend. During trial, Benefiel was reluctant to disclose the details of abuse he suffered & also reluctant to discuss the crimes he had committed. He suffered an emotional breakdown during the trial, refusing to go back into the courtroom after a recess. The trial court, however, ruled that Benefiel was not mentally ill... In 1991, the Supreme Court of Indiana stated that Benefiel’s “impairment suffered as a result of mental disease is entitled to substantial mitigating weight .” However, the court maintained that this mental illness issue as mitigation was diminished because Benefiel exhibited both periods of non-violent behavior and control and because of the way in which the crimes were carried out. There is strong evidence to support the argument that Benefiel suffers from mental illness. The execution of persons with mental illness is a clear violation of international human rights standards as violating the 1964 and 1989 U.N. Economic & Social Council Resolution and the U.N. Human Rights Commission Resolution. Source: http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/ncadp/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=528

• Berkowitz, David, ("Son of Sam " & "The 44-Caliber Killer")

  Born 6-1-53, adopted by Nathan & Pearl Berkowitz, there was no pre-adoption abuse to blame for his outcome; he grew up believing his mother died giving birth to him, so grew up feeling intense anger & guilt, also feeling rejected & scorned about being adopted & He killed 6 people, wounded several others. Source: http://crime.about.com/od/murder/p/sonofsam.htm

• Bianchi, Kenneth, ("The Hillside Stranglers")

  ...Alleged to have killed 25 women, Bianchi (adopted as an infant) & his adoptive cousin Buono, were sentenced to life in prison for the rapes & murders of 10 women.

  Source: http://courttv.com/news/flashback/January.html

• Bowles, Gary Ray, ("Florida Gay Bar Murders")

  On Death Row at Union Correctional Institute, Raiford, Florida, awaiting execution on 3 counts of first degree murder. Bowles was born on 1-25-62, in Clifton Forge, Virginia, the 2nd son of Frances Carole Price Bowles. His was a stepparent adoption. His father, William Frank Bowles, died in 1961 before he was born. Frances remarried several times. At age of 7 or 8, Gary began to suffer from abuse by his 1st stepfather & later by subsequent stepfathers. Around the age 10, Gary began to sniff glue & paint, as well as experiment with other drugs in an attempt to escape his unhappy situation. Eventually, Gary dropped out of school during the eighth grade. When he was 13 or 14, Gary and his brother ganged up on their stepfather and severely beat him, then left home to live on the streets. Throughout his youth and adulthood he was able to provide for himself financially by prostituting his body to men & remained homeless for a majority of his teenage years & adulthood. He was not gay but was violent in his relationships with women. Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/gary_bowles

• Brady, Ian, 23

  Together with his obedient girlfriend, Myra Hindley, they "killed for kicks." Brady was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the "illegitimate" son of a waitress and never knew who his father was. He was raised by foster parents.

  Source: Serial Killers, http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/

• Bridewell, Sandra Camille, ("The Black Widow")

  ...The few facts are that Sandra Powers was born on April 5, 1944, in Sedalia, Missouri, and adopted as an infant by Arthur Powers, owner and manager of the local Dr Pepper bottling plant. When Sandra was 3, her adoptive mother, Camille, was killed in a car accident. Three years later, the family moved to a small house in Oak Cliff, and her father worked as a cemetery-plot salesman for Laurel Land. Her father had remarried, but Sandra didn't get along with her stepmother. Sandra painted Doris Powers as evil, a stepmother who shut her in a closet and failed to send out invitations to her birthday party, telling her that no one wanted her. Somewhere, however, between high school graduation in 1962 and 1967, she remade herself, inventing stories about colleges attended, boys dated — reportedly telling friends she dated a West Point cadet who later committed suicide — and adopting the persona of a helpless-but-seductive Southern belle looking for Mr. Right to rescue her and provide a world of materialistic bliss..... Writer, Glenna Whitley, who over the years has closely followed Powers, reported in the Dallas Observor that the aspiring socialite used the same story many times over the next 15 years.... including stories about her several marriages and suspicious deaths of her husbands that resulted in headlnes referrng to Bidewell as "The Black Widow." For extensive destails see SOURCE: (newsstories by Glenna Witley for Dallas Observor) : "Return of the Black Widow," 1-22-04; "Seductress of the Saints," 12-9-04; "Black Widow Pleads Guilty," 2-27-08;

• Bundy, Ted, ("Florida Co-ed Murders"; "Lady Killer")

  Born out of wedlock & told his mother was his sister to coverup his in-family informal adoption by his grandmother, Bundy was executed in FL for serial killings of at least 28 women. http://www.CourtTV.com/news/flashbacks/January.html

• Buono, Angelo, ("The Hillside Stranglers")

  ...Alleged to have killed 25 women, Bianchi (adopted as an infant) & his adoptive cousin Buono, were sentenced to life in prison for the rapes & murders of 10 women.

  Source: http://courttv.com/news/flashback/January.html

• Coleman, Alton

  sentenced to 112 years for killing his adoptive mother and other adoptive relatives....sentenced to death in 3 states for a 1984 killing spree & executed in Ohio... http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/morg9707.html

• Conde, Rory, ("The Tamiani Killer")

  "Born in Colombia in 1965, his mother died of tetanus when he was 6 months old and informally adopted by his paternal grandmother...Sentenced to death for one murder, he pled guilty to murdering 5 prostitutes as part of a plea agreement to instead serve 5 consecutive life terms without parole" Source: http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/condo.html

• Desalvo, Albert, ("The Boston Strangler")

  Born 1937 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, as one of six children in his family, he grew up with a warped view of both sex and violence, mainly as a result of his alcoholic father, Frank, who beat both his children and his wife. When he waS 12, his parents divorced & his father sold him and two of his sisters as slaves to a farmer in Maine who paid $9 for them all [black market adoption]. He was sentenced to Life for sexual assault & robbery in a plea bargain, despite formerly admitting to having killed at least 13 women. He was stabbed to death in prison. Source: Harold Schecter & David Everett, "A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers," p. 293; & http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/caseclosed/strangler.shtml

• Dugas, Gaetan

  Adoptee & Canadian airline steward who brought AIDS to the U.S., intentionaly infecting/killing hundreds of men in San Francisco's gay community. Resented his mother whom he never knew but fantasized about throughout his life. Source: "And The Band Played On," book by journalist Randy Shiltz

• Francis, Rodney Cameron, 19

  "at age 10, he attempted to strangle a young girl and an elderly lady. By this stage, his adoptive parents had completely rejected him.....In 1974 at age 19, he raped and urdered a nurse....[In later years] he confessed to murder of 8 victims (Kidd 1999)."

• Georges, Guy, ("Beast of the Bastille")

  Born in Paris, the son of a French woman & an American soldier who abandoned him as a small child, he was raised by a foster family but by adulthood had already racked up sexual offenses & his first killing in 1991. When arrested in 1998, he confessed to 4 rape-murders & us suspected of other murders. In 2001, he was sentenced to a light term of 22 years & has threatened suicide.

• Graham, Harrison T., 29, (Marty)

  Born 9-9-59, a mildly mentally retarded Black man in Philadelphia who entertained children with a Cookie Monster puppet. On 8-9-87 upon being evicted from his aprtment, police found the corpses of 7 women in his apartment. He was sentenced to one Life term & 7 electrocutions. Source: http://www.geocities.com/verbal_plainfield/a-h/grahamharrison.html

• Gunning, James, 28

  James D. Gunning was born in Korea and adopted by American parents and raised in Feasterville had lived in an Oakwood Drive apartment with his wife for 6 months. A Pennsylvania auto mechanic, he was was charged with the 1997 slaying of Dawn McCary, a sex worker, with attempting to murder 3 other prostitutes in Camden, N.J. Police suspect he might also be responsible for the murder of Caroline Ann Brader, 29, an Allentown area prostitute whose body was found on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He ws arrested 5-2-99 in Hamilton Township, NJ when a woman in her underwear jumoed out of his parked truck and ran toward police crying that "he tried to strangle me." Gunning was suspect in 3 killings in NY, 2 in PA, nd 5 in NJ. and charged with attempting to murder 3 New Jersey women and is a suspect in the strangulation of 10 alleged prostitutes in 3 states (according to Angelo J. Onofri, Assistant Prosecutor in Mercer County, NJ).

• Hale, Bill, ("The Osage Killer")

  Adopted by Ernest Burkheart & his wife, Hale was suspected of killing 8 people, including his natural father (1925) from whom he stood to inherit his "headright," & also killed his father's attorney to whom Bugheart may have confided that the Osage Killer was his son. SOURCE: Michael Newton, "Serial Slaughter: What's Behind America's Murder Epidemic?"

• Kallinger, Joseph, 25, ("The Philadelphia Shoemaker")

  "...adopted by sadistic Catholic parents....[his adoptive] mother forced him to hold his hand over an open flame, beating him if he cried. Kallinger grew up taking extreme pleasure in torturing others...[& slowly drowned his 13 year old son]...After beheading his [adoptive] mom ....he raped her headless body..." A cobbler by trade, he torturd and murdered young boys and women. After his capture, he was diagnosed paranoid & schizophrenic. In prison, Joe expressed repeatedly hi desire to kil every person on earth including himself & set fire to his own cell in a suicide attempt. In later years, Kalinger expressed remorse, refused to eat & attempted suicide again. He died of a seizure at age 59 on March 26, 1996.

  http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/tick/abuse_3.html?sect=1

• Katlin, Steven

  ...given up for adoption as an infant... Source: "Serial Slaughter: What's behind America's Murder Epidemic," book by Michael Newton

• Kip, Martin James, ("Dr. Crazy")

  ...Rape-slayer, child of a prostitute, given up for adoption at an early age. ("Attachment & Loss: Separation - Anger & Anxiety" book by John Bowlby)

• Kondro, Joseph

  " ....total lack of remorse for murdering two little girls. The burly former Longview millworker ...father of six saved himself from the death penalty in 1999 by pleading guilty to the murder of a 12-year-old and admitting to the older unsolved killing of an 8-year-old. They were the daughters of Kondro's closest friends. Police questioned Kondro, who had a prior child-rape conviction, about more than 70 other killings and disappearances. He remains a suspect in some cases. ...the self-described psychopath is serving a 55-year prison term for the murders. It's outrageous, he says, that someone as cold-blooded as him could cut a deal." Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/33915_kondro07.shtml

  ...Born Don Lee Durant, both his parents, whom he never got to meet, and his adopters, are deceased; he requests contact from other biological relatives. Source: Kondro's 2/18/05 letter to Lori Carangelo/AmFOR (re his parents & adopters)

• Krebs, Rex Allan, 17

  A severely abused child, Rex Allan Krebs got into trouble as a youth in Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1984 & served 18 months in jail for a felony grand theft conviction for stealing a car & some cassettes; he also was sentenced to a boot camp program. & completed 8 months probation before moving to Grover Beach, California. His problems seemed to mount after he moved to California where his mother had moved after remarrying. Although Rex never returned to Idaho, his father, Allan Krebs, visited him at least once in California before his father was arrested for drug trafficking in Montana; one of his brothers was murdered in Vancouver, Washington & his sister was murdered in Spokane. By age 21, Rex had been arrested as a suspect in 3 burglaries & 2 violent rape-sodomy attacks & also a misdemeanor sex offense, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in 1987 but paroled in 10 years, in 1997, registered as a sex offender & was chased out of town. On 11-12-98, in San Luis Obispo, he attacked college student Rachel Newhouse, beating her unconscious with his fists, raped her & left her hog-tied to strangle to death. In 1999, at age 33, in the same town, he beat, raped, tortured & killed college student Aundria Crawford, 20. Upon arrest, the alcoholic sex-and-slaughter addict confessed, saying "If I am not a monster, then what am I?" In 2001, he was sentenced to death. Source: The Tribune, 4-24-99, http://members.tripod.com/~mcali/krebs2.html

• Lee, Bruce

  Killer, arsonist, child of a prostitute given up for adoption at an early age. ("Attachment & Loss: Separation - Anger & Anxiety" book by John Bowlby)

• Lindh, Aaron, 19

  Aaron, who is Black, was adopted by Mary Ann Lindh into her White family....He was confused about his identity as an interracial child & the prosecutor & psychiatrist testified at his trial that his impaired logic perceives problems as rejections; events even before the shootings (when he opened fire on police inside Madison Wisconsin Detective Bureau in 1/15/85) were seen as a series of abandonments. Source: Ghost Dancer web-site by Kay Russell, quoting from Capital Times & Wisconsin State Journal.

• Munro, James, 18, (The "Freeway Murders")

  Born 6/17/61 to Anna Marie Massow in Furth Byron, Germany, & adopted in 1983 by Evon Charron & Leigh Munro, Michigan. Although he admitted to participating in at least one of the "Freeway Murders"--serial killings of male prostitutes -- they were actually committed by William Bonin (who was executed). Munro, who has a low IQ, claims Bonin abducted him & forced him to participate by restraining one of the victims. Source: Munro's letters to AmFOR & http://www.amfor.net/prisoners/

• Oken, Steven Howard, 25 (in 1987)

  Convicted in 1991 & executed in 6/17/04 in Maryland. In 1987 he murdered 3 women within 2 weeks: Dawn Marie Garvin, Antoine Hirt (his wife's older sister whom he also sexually assaulted), & Lori Elizabeth Ward (whom he also sexually assaulted). See http://amfor.net/prisoners/ for detailing.

• Payne, Eric, 18

  Born Eric Hollie, 1-7-73, in Roanoake VA, his father killed his mother & committe suicide when he was 4 months old. His aunt adopted him but kept him as "her son" for 6 years; he went through a series of foster homes & at age 8 was again adopted, this time by Gerald Payne & his wife who decided when he was 14 they didn't want him because of his lying & "failure to respond," and was imprisoned in 1991 at age 18 for 6 years for possession of LSD. When release in 1997, he went on a rampage of hammer beatings killing 2 women; a 3rd & her son survived his attacks; he was sentenced to death. Kay Russell, "Serial Killers" , Ghost Dancer's Anti-Adoption Pages, http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/9950

• Ramirez, Richard Leyva, ("The Nightstalker")

  His was a stepparent adoption. He was convicted in Texas of 12 Satanic-motivate murders & a few dozen lesser crimes including rape & burglary, that he committed 1984-1985. Some of his victims included children, some he left alive which is how he was caught & sent to San Quentin's Death Row.

• Rifkin, Joel, 34

  Son of unwed teenage parents who gave him up for adoption 3 days after birth, adopted by Ben & Jeanne Rifkin & murdered at least 17 women, mostly prostitutes. He pleaded "Adopted Child Syndrome" as a mitigating factor, as he grew up believing his mother was a prostitute who couldn't afford and abortion. Source: "Dark Son," book by Denise Lang; & New York Times story, "A Novel Insanity Defense for Joel Rifkin" by John T. McQuistin, 9-25-94

• Rogers, Dayton Leroy, 22, ("Molalla Forest Killer"

  Born in 1954 in Idaho & adopted & raised in Oregon, along with another boy & 2 girls by Ortis & Jasparelle Rogers, devout Seventh Day Adventists who told their adopted children they had "an evil entity inside their bodies." Dayton beat his male adopter to death, stabbed a girl who rejected his advances, committed several rapes & & was convicted of 6 stabbing/mutilation murders of young women; sentenced to Death in Oregon. Source: "Shedding Light on the Dark Side of Adoption," book by Marsha Riben; & Dayton Leroy Rogers web-site; & "Serial KIllers A-Z", http://www.geocities.com/verbal_plainfield/q-z/rogers.html

• Sells, Tommy Lynn, 16, (Admitted to 70+ Murders)

  Sells and his twin sister, Tammy Jean, contracted meningitis when they were 18 months old. Sells had a high fever but survived, while his sister died. Shortly thereafter, Sells was sent to live with his aunt, Bonnie Woodall, in Holcomb, Missouri, until he was 5. At age 8, Sells began spending time with Willis Clark who would later be identified as a child molester. Homeless, Sells started travelling to find work by hitching rides, hopping trains & at one point stole a car. He held various menial labor jobs. He claims he committed his first murder at age 16. While working at as a carny in MO in summer 1985, he met 29 year old Ena Cordt who, Sells claimed, invited him to her home where they had consensual sex. The bodies of Cordt & her 4-year-old son were found 3 days later. Other murders he is suspected of comitting are those of Suzanne Korczin New York (May 1987), a family in Illinois (Nov. 1987), & a co-worker in Texas (April 1998). On December 31, 1999 near Rio, Texas, Sells fatally stabbed 13-year old Katy Harris & slit the throat of 10-year-old Krystal Surles. Surles survived & Sells was apprehended from a sketch resulting from the victim's description. According to Columbia University forensic psychiatrist & personality expert, Dr. Michael J. Stone. (in Discovery Channel's "Most Evil"), Sells claimed to have murdered upwards of 70 people. SOURCE: Crime Library - "Tommy Lynn Sells, Serial Killer" & "Predator, Travels the U.S. Murdering"

• Speck, Richard

  Born 12-6-41 in Kirkwood, Illinois, the 7ths of 8 children, he adored his father who died when Richard was 6. His religious Catholic mother then married Carl Lindberg; his stepfather took out his drunken violent rages on Richard who, in his teen years, began boozing, fighting & whoring his way through life. Richard married and raped his wife who said he needed sex 4-5 times a day. Sixmonths after she filed for divorce, he murdered 6 nurses. Sources: http://www.mugshots.com/Historical/Richard+Speck.htm ; http://www.prairiehosts.com/speck.html

• Stano, Gerald Eugene, 27

  Born in 1951 at Daytona Beach, FL, taken from his mother at age 6 months & adopted. Murdered an estimated 80 young women (41 were prostitutes, runaways, hitchhiking teenagers, youngest was age 12) from PA to FL before his arrest at age 27 in 1980. He said "Adopted kids like me, I now know, seek out rejection, believe on some level that no one will keep them." Prior to killing he has sought help from 3 psychiatrists who never raised the issue of adoption and so didn't treat him. Executed 3/23/98. Source: "Dark Son," book by Denise Lang

• Toppan, Jane, 31, ("Angel of Death")

  Born as Nora Kelly, in 1854 in Boston, she was adopted as an infant when her mother died & her father was institutionalized, for 2 decades worked as a nurse in New England, confessed to killing at least 31 people with morphine & atrophine, & is believed to have actually killed more people than any man or woman who has ever lived.

  Source: Kay Russell, Ghost Dancer's Anti-Adoption Pages, http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/9950

• Waldon, Billy Ray

  He scarcely knew his mother & apparently didn't know his father, having been raised from age 5 in 1957 by his grandmother "as her own" (informal adoption). Upon his grandmother's death in 1985, he began a killing spree. Source: "Serial Killers Live Here" http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/waldon.htm

• Wilken, Stewart

  Born 11-11-66, in Boksburg. He killed prostitutes. Article speculates "Perhaps it was anger at his biological mother for deserting him, his adoptive mother for not being the mother he wanted." When he was about 6 months old, he & his 2-year-old sister were left in a phone booth, where they were later found by a domestic worker, who took them to the home of her employer known only as "Doep," who subjected the boy to terrible abuse....burned him with cigarettes on his genitals.... engaged in acts of bestiality with his dogs, a made him lick his penis afterwards. At some point, his sister disappeared & he did not know what happened to her. When he was 2 years old, the neighbors, Mr and Mrs Wilken, adopted him out of compassion, named him Stewart Wilken, although he called himself "Boetie Boer." ...He failed the 3rd grade three times, was mocked by his peers because he was adopted, & when his teacher didn not intervene on his behalf, but instead had incited the others further, he assaulted the teacher & was severely beaten by the principal in front of the other children. He often bit his adoptive mother as well as other children.... At age 8, he started smoking marijuana. At 9, a deacon sodomized him; the same year, Stewart's adoptive father died. Stewart's adoptive mother felt overwhelmed by the difficult boy & sent him to a reformatory where he was locked up without clothes as punishment, & the older boys sodomized him. In later life he was accused of sodomizing his own sons.

  Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/stewart_wilken/7.html?sect=2

• Woodcock, Peter (aka David Micheal Krueger), Allegedly murdered 100 children

  Hospital records show Peter Woodcock was born March 5, 1939 in Toronto, Canada. Depending on wich forms you read, Woodcock's mother, Wanita Woodcock, was either a 17-year old fctory worker or a 19-year old prostitute who got pregnant in 1938...His father was alleged to be a 19-year old soldier. WWII started when Peter was 6 months old. Four years later, Wanita gave birth to a girl who was adpted out & reportedly had a "normal" life while The Childre's Aid social worker allowed Peter's mother to keep him for a month to breastfeed him; he was then sent from one foster home to another; some foster families were uncaring & brutal. He ended up with a wisted neck as result of a beating. "When I was put up for adoption, I was bounced around from place to place, ignored for long periods of time, left to lie in darkness," he explained. When he was 3, Franck & Susan Maynard decided to keep him & raised him in their middle cass neighborhood. Fom age 7 to 12, Peter was treated for behavior problems at the Hospital for Sick Children. In 1982 he legally changed his name to David Micheal Krueger. When transferred to a mdium securty institution, he sexually assauled & murdered Dennis Kerr & was sent back ro Oak Ridge where he murdered Wayne Mallette (age 7), Gary Morris (age 9), Carole Voyce. Although it was estimated he actually murdered 100 children, he was prosecuted only for killing Crole Voyce & acquitted by reason of insanity. His following coment is noteworthy: "I ofen wondered wha happened in my own pre-irth, whether my natural mothr wanted me..."

• Wuornos, Aileen Carol Pittman

  Illegally adopted in infancy, in 1960, along with her older brother Keith, by her maternal grandparents, Lauri & Britta Wurornos, abandoned at birth by her alcoholic mother, reportedly sexually abused by her father (a convicted child molester who committed suicide in prison), Aileen was pregnant at 14 by her brother Keith, & delivered and gave up her baby for adoption at a Detroiit Maternity Home; Aileen was also legally adopted as an adult by 44-year old born-again Christian Arlene Pralle & Pralle's husband. One of only 10 female murderers in the US to be executed, Aileen was executed in FL, 10-9-02, for murdering 6 FL truckers while working as a prostitute; she first claimed self-defense, later asked for death. Most detailed site on Wuornos is at http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/wuornos805.htm

• Yates, Robert Lee, 23, (Spokane Serial Killer)

  Yates grew up on Whidbey Island, Washington, where his mother died while he was still in high school. Records show that he was allegedly repeatedly sexually abused by an older neighbor boy when he was approximately 6 years old. A father of 5 children and retired from the Army; in exchnage for his life he pled guilty to murdering 13 female prostitutes, from 1975 to 1996 and was sentened to death in 2002. Curiously, when the story was aired on "48 Hours" tv series, thre was mention that his grandmother murdered his grandfather with an axe and was sent to an insane asylum, but no mention of who raised him nor of his being sexually abused at age 6...only that his wife and the victims' families didn't have an answer as to "why" he killed the prostitutes. Source: "Serial Killers A-Z," http://www.geocities.com/verbal_plainfield/q-z/yates.html and "Kill and Kill Again," 48 Hours, 4-11-09.

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Adoptees Who Killed Their Adopters or Adoptive Relatives

(Listed alphabetically, with age at time of crime if known.)

Note: Alton Coleman & Joseph Kallinger, listed above as Adopted Serial Killers, also killed their adopters; and some adopter killers, below, killed another adoptive family member or other person, but can't be classified as Serial Killer, due not only to too few killed but also to primarily targeting adopters.

• ABLE, Melissa Fuss Erives, (Charged with Murder/ Plea Conviction for Robbery)

  Melissa Fuss Able Erives was adopted by Inez "Jackie" Fuss who reportedly abused her. Her 2 adoptive brothers, also adopted by Jackie, are: Charles Allen Fuss (convicted of Jackie's 1996 murder but who may be innocent) & David Fuss (whose wife was murdered in 1999 & for which Melissa's biological brother, Joel Domingues, was convicted & sentenced to Life, although he is innocent); Melissa & Margaret Branch, Melissa's adoptive sister & Jackie's biological daughter, were initially charged with the 1999 murder but plea-bargained for lesser sentences -- Melissa is serving 10 years for Robbery; Margaret got 10 years for Involuntary Murder. Melissa's biological mother, Sandra Race Cano (Domingues)accuses Melissa of framing her siblings for both murders, stating that Melissa has also attempted to kill her & threatens to do so when she is released from prison. Newspaper reports cite the motive for both slayings was money & that the siblings by birth & adoption arguing over Jackie's estate. For details on Melissa, Charles, Joel & Margaret, all incarcerated in Georgia, & for detailing on their complex biological & adoptive relationships that connect the 2 murders, go to their individual web pages at http://www.amfor.net/prisoners/ (Scroll down GEORGIA listings & Click on each name or photo). Source: Gayle White, Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Georgia Dept. of Corrections Prisoner Locator website; direct interviews with family members, one of their attorneys & others.

• Andrews, Charles D., 14

  In December 1981, Andrews murdered his adoptive father and stepmother in Anchorage, Alaska. He was adjudged a delinquent minor and was committed to the custody of the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. Andrews turned 20 in October 1987, & so he was released from juvenile custody, & soon thereafter began a series of robberies & convictions. Source: Andrews vs. State [of Alaska], Appeal Opinion, http://touchngo/ap/html/ap-1611.htm

• Atkins, Charles, 23, and
• Atkins, Joseph, 27

  Joseph & his adoptive brother, Charles, who was 4 years younger, were adopted by a White family; Joseph was adopted as a toddler, his racial heritage unknown--possibly Native American, African American, or Puerto Rican. Joseph shot to death his adoptive father & 13-year-old neighbor while on parole for killing Charles--after Charles stabbed Joseph. His lawyers suggested Joseph, a veteran, was having a Nam flashback during the 1985 killings. According to trial testimony he got drunk and broke into the neighbor's house armed with a machete, a shotgun and a revolver. He shot Karen Patterson with the sawed-off shotgun while she was in bed. Then he chased her mother back to his house where he shot his adoptive father. Five years earlier, the older Atkins had convinced parole officials to release his 27 year old adopted son from prison where he was serving a life sentence for killing his 23-year-old adoptive brother, Charles; 15 years later, he killed the man who adopted him & a 13-year old neighbor in Charleston, NC, 10-27-85. He was executed at age 51 in Columbia, S.C. 1-22-99. Source: APB Online, & The Denver Post & Courier.

• Bamber, Jeremy, 40

  Described by his adoptive relatives as a "physcopath," & convicted of the shooting deaths of both of his wealthy adopters, Neville & June Bamber (who adopted Jeremy at age 6 weeks), his adoptive sister, Sheila Caffell, & her 6 year old twin sons, Nicolas & Daniel (Tolleshunt, D'Arcy, Essex, England; August 1985), & sentenced to 5 life terms. Jeremy claims he was wrongly convicted & that his adoptive sister, a schizophrenic, actually killed their adopters, her children & then committed suicide. After he was incarcerated, he attempted to connect with his natural parents but they made it clear they wanted nothing to do with him due to the verdict of the court that he killed 5 members of his adoptive family. Source: http://innocent.org.uk/cases/jeremybamber/

• Barnett, David M.

  Sentenced to death for the 2-4-96 stabbing deaths & robbery of his adoptive paternal grandparents in their Glendale, Missouri home + 2 consecutive life sentences on armed criminal action & robbery. Barnett claims, among other things, that his attorney failed to investigate & provide an expert witness to testify as to his "birth" family's extensive history of alcohol & other substance abuse, depression & other mental illnesses & his mother's lack of prenatal care the jury was never informed of his traumatic & painful life experiences, the prosecutor used religious (scripture) references & matters outside the record & the adopters' family's wish that he not be executed was ignored. The State contended that there is no right to effective assistance of post-conviction counsel. Source: State of Missour v. David Barnett, St. Louis County, Death Penalty; http://www.courts.mo.gov/SUP/index.nsf/0/0b5191e7fbb19c2286256c950057e?OpenDocument

• Boggess, Clifford Holt, 21

  Adoptee, executed at age 33, 6-11-98, in Texas for 2 homicides in 1986, including his adopter's father who actually raised him. He was the 10th child born to Mary Elizabeth Mann, one of several children not by her husband. Mary abused drugs, alcohol & her kids--3 died a violent death. ["The search for his biological mother & what she might reveal came too late--She had been dead for 20 years."] Clifford was at first left in the care of his 9-year old sister & to a brother later imprisoned for child molestation; then he was placed in an orphanage, 2 years later adopted by Steve & Shirley Boggess in Alabama. One of his adoptive brothers was jailed for child molestation. When he was 4, his adopters divorced & he was sent to Texas live with his adopter's father who subjected him to beatings until he murdered him. Source: Frontline PBS Transcript "The Execution" - 2-9-99 - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/execution; & Chosen Children, http://TheChosenChildren.com

• Bourgeois-Greer, Michael, 17

  A Black child, adopted at age 17 in Ohio, by Terry Smith, 50, his wife Lucy Smith, 51. He shot & brutally stabbed both his adopters to death with accomplice Landon May, 19--both charged with first degree murder.

  Source: "The Truth at Last ," http://thetruthatlast.com/newspapers/440_p05_interacial_adoption/

• Campbell, Patrick, 20

  Killed his adopters, Kenneth & Anna May Campbell, with a hatchet & sledgehammer & claimed that anguish over his adoption as a small child in Michigan by a Farmington Hills couple in CT contributed to his insanity.

  Source: "Adoption Called Key To Killing" Detroit Free Press, 4-22-88

• Carter, Sean, 18

  Born 3/9/79, taken from his mother in 1981 & adopted at age 10 by Evelyn Prince Carter who threw him out of her house. He then lived with his adoptive grandmother until 1997 when he was incarcerated for theft, & killed her by stabbing her 18 times after sodomizing her & [His execution was stayed]. http://caselaw.findlaw.com/data2/indianastatecases/app/02190103.msn.doc Sean Carter confessed that he "went off" during an argument with 68-year-old Veader Prince after she told him to move out of her home in West Farmington, Ohio, according to documents filed with the court. Source: State vs. Carter, 98-921.

• Catlin, Steven

  Adopted as an infant in 1944, by Glenn & Martha Rose Catlin, of Fresno, California. His first arrest was at age 19 for forgery & theft & he had been drug addicted. Over several years' time, he murdered both his adopters & 2 of his 6 wives, Joyce Adeline Catlin 5-6-76, Glenda Kay Catlin with Paraquat poison. Because he had their bodies quickly cremated, it was undiscovered. Convicted on a single murder count, he drew a term of life imprisonment . In Bakersfield, where other charges waited, prosecutors hoped to see him executed. http://www.crimezzz.net/serialkillers/e/CHARD_WILLIAMS_ada.htm

• Chase, Jeffrey, 17

  "Jeffrey Chase was adopted at 4 months in 1958, when adoption privacy was paramount and no information on biological parents was released. Jeffrey began exhibiting personality problems when he was 2 years old. Through the preschool, elementary, and high school years he displayed increasingly severe behavioral disorders. At 17, he assaulted a 4-year-old girl, choking and traumatizing her. He was tried for attempted murder, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. After serving 21 troubled years, he was released. Within 6 weeks he shot and killed his adoptive parents." Source: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/9830/articulo15.htm

• Clark, James B., 39

  Gloria Jean Morden was shot to death by her ex-partner, who also killed his adoptive parents at the same time, Gore Bay, OIntario, Canada (August 1996)...while on parole from 22-years served for kidnapping a 16 year old girl. He had asked NOT to be paroled saying he could not cope with release (to his adopters). Sources: Ontario Women's Justice Network Archive, Nov. 1998 at http://www.owjn.org/archive/gender2.htm & Kay Russell, Ghost Dancer's Anti-Adoption Pages, http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/9950

• Clayton, Hugo, 14, (Guatemalan adoptee)

  The Lexington County (South Carolina)teenager was sentenced to 10 years in prison after admitting to stabbing his adoptive mother to death.... Debra Clayton was stabbed in her home in Red Bank in 2003. Investigators say the knife was found under the boy’s bed. Hugo Clayton will be kept in a juvenile facility until he turns 17 in May & then will be transferred to an adult prison. The boy was adopted from Guatemala. Prosecutor Dayton Riddle says the boy killed his [adopter] after being required to speak only English on the day of her death. Riddle says the boy had also been punished for—not—getting up to go to work with his father. The youngest daughter of Keith and Debi Clayton celebrated her 5th birthday without her mother or older brother. Keith Clayton says his faith has helped him forgive the (then 14-year old), who they adopted from Guatemala (when he was 13). While police are pushing for the boy to be tried as an adult, Clayton says he wants his son treated as a child. He says his son deserves to be punished, but doesn’t need to spend his life in prison. Source: AP, July 20, 2005 -http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archive/2005/07/boy_sentenced_f.php

• Cooke, Joshua, 19

  Sentenced to 112 years-to-life for killing both his adopters, Paul Cooke, 51, & Margaret Cooke, 51, at their Oakton, Virginia home, with a shotgun, after a series of rejections. During the entire 90-minute interrogation, Joshua offered only one detail suggesting any conflict with his [adoptive] parents...Joshua said they had always refused to give them [him & his adoptive sister] any information about their birth parents. Later, he revealed the physical & emotional abuse by his adoptive mother who had never known her own father. In 1984, when Joshua was age 1 & his sister Tiffany was a newborn, they were removed frm their parents. In 1986, the Cookes adopted Joshua at age 3, Tiffany, 2, not knowing that both children had been physically abused (beaten) in foster care. Joshua doesn't remember his parents who had been declared unfit & neglectful & his father, a male prostitute who repeatedly beat Joshua's mother who was also a prostitute had been diagnosed paranoid schizophenic, according to their Ohio adoption records. Also in his adoption file was a photo & letter from his mother who had kept track of him, saying she loved him & asking him to forgive her. By the time he got to trial, Joshua had been diagnosed as schizophrenic without utward signs due to being "detached from the self." Source: "I Don't Think They Deserved It," by Peter Pearl, Washinton Post, http://WashingtonPost.com , 11-30-03, p. W-16.

• Corne, James, 29

  [Auburn, WA] A severely depressed & schzophrenic drug user, Corne took a butcher knife, slipped behind his 54 year old female adopter, Peggy Corne, and, as horrified family members watched, stabbed her to death. Corne told police she was "pushing his buttons" and making him angry. Source: "Man Gets 22 Years for Killing Mother," by Nancy Bartley, Seattle Times, 3-24-01.

• Coulson, Robert Otis, 24

  "Executed 6-26-02 by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas for the murder of both his adopters and three other family members when he was 24..... Robert Bennett, Robin and Robert Coulson's natural father, said he is opposed to his son's execution - although his son was convicted of murdering his other natural daughter. He is facing an ugly decision: He has one child that was convicted of killing the other and now the state say that child must die.....[In] a letter he wrote to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles..... he asks that his son be spared from execution. He also told of the 'guilt' he has felt over the years for allowing his children to be put up for adoption, blaming Texas for pushing him to do so." - Excerpted from "The Death House," online source of death penalty news, by Robert Anthony Phillips

• Cox, Johnnie

  Executed 2-16-99 in Arkansas for 3 murders including his adoptive grandmother, Marie Sellers, 68, Margaret Brown, 36, & Billy Brown, 32. They had been shot, stabbed & strangled before Cox set their home afire.

  Source: http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/Pending/99/feb_execlist.html

• D'Aoust, Heather Marie, 17

  Heather D'Aoust was 14 when she attacked her adoptive mother with a claw hammer in their Scripps Ranch home May 25, 2008. During the attack, she struck her mother Rebecca D'Aoust, a school teacher and counselor, at least 25 times. The victim died the next day of head injuries sustained during the assault. D'Aoust, who has a history of mental illness, professes to not knowing why she did it and said as much during Wednesday's sentencing for the crime in San Diego County Superior Court. Now 16, she was sentenced to 16 years-to-life in state prison for second-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon. She pleaded guilty in December 2009. San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis called it a "tragic case for everyone involved." When her adoptive father came to his wife's aid, she attacked him too. Though the defendant professed not knowing why she killed to her sentencing judge, Superior Court Judge Michael Wellington, she told a San Diego County Probation Officer that she had planned to kill the whole family that morning, including her sister and the sister’s boyfriend. “Hopefully, Heather will get the mental health treatment she needs while serving her sentence,” Dumanis said. D'Aoust will be eligible for a parole hearing after serving 16 years. Source: Scripps Ranch Teen Girl Sentenced in Claw Hammer Attack on Adoptive Mother by Steve Perez, San Diego Examiner (1-27-10)

• Degelleke, Patrick, 14

  Admitted that he set fire to his adopters' house. His adoptive mother died [that day] but his father survived for 10 days before he died. Prosecuted for murder, he disclosed that before being adopted at age 6, he had lived with his mother in Ohio for the first 3 years of his life; his mother had turned to prostitution to keep food on the table & was gone from the house for long periods. His adopters treated adoption with a sense of denial. Patrick said he never intended for anyone to be hurt but wanted people to think he died in the fire...so he could hop a train back to Ohio, find his mother & live happily ever after. He had an absence of feelings about his adopters. He served 9 years, is now out & living with one of his adoptive sisters. Source: "Violence in Adoption," a talk by Donald Humphrey, adoptee & attorney, at 9-23-92 conference of The American Adoption Congress.

• Diaz, Monica, 16

  Born 10-31-83, Monica was adopted by Richard Angel Flores, 42. Together with her high school boyfriend, she fatally stabbed Flores, his wife Sylvia, 3 adoptive siblings, & wounded her female adopter, Sylvia Flores, allegedly because her adopters disapproved of her boyfriend whom she had dated for a year; students who knew them said her adopters were too strict.

  Source: Beth & Joe Matthews, Los Angeles Times, 7-27-00; & LA County District Attorney; http://www.cybersleuths.com/news/00__2000news/04112000.2141.htm

• Domingues, Joel Lee, 33, (Wrongfully Convicted !!!)

  SEE JOEL'S WEB PAGE at http://www.amfor.net/prisoners/ (Scroll down to GEORGIA listings & Click on his name or photo). The complex family relationships by birth & by adoption, detailed on Joel's page, connect 2 Murders -- the 1996 murder of Melissa Fuss' adopter, Inez "Jackie" Fuss (GA)for which her adoptive son, Charles Fuss (whose web page is at www.amfor.net/prisoners/ under GEORGIA also) may have been wrongly convicted, & the 1999 murder of Kelley Fuss, wife of David Fuss who ws also the adoptive son of Inez "Jackie Fuss" -- Joel Domingues is wrongly convicted for the 1990 murder,framed by his sister, Melissa according to their mother & others -- Her web page is at www.amfor.net/prisoners/ under GEORGIA also for the 1999 murder. Joel and his sisters were adopted separately. He writes: "I'm tired of being locked up for a crime I didn't commit. If the judge would only read my trial transcripts, I'm sure I would be released, but I see that isn't going to happen and I don't have any friends left -- They abandoned me as soon as they found out I got Life...and life is hell alone in prison where I get suckered into fights because of my large size." Born 5-16-66, as "Joel Lee Bensing," he was abused in foster homes, & in 2 failed adoptions, & was subsequently re-adopted by his own mother, Sandra Race Cano (Domingues), aka "Mary Doe" in "Doe v. Bolton," a Georgia abortion case heard by the US Supreme Court on the same day as the better-known "Roe v. Wade" case. See Joel's web page for the incredible details. Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives, 1-22-03, "Roe v. Wade" role Just a Page in Rocky Life"; direct interviews with Joel's attorney, mother, & others involved with Joel & who state he is innocent.

• Dreyer, Henry Lee, 17

  His mother left him with his grandparents who put him up for adoption; he was adopted at age 7 by recently-divorced Carol Dreyer. On 1-29-88 when he was 17, he & killed her & her boyfriend, Gary Engleman, in their sleep. He & his adopter argued a lot & he had run away from home several times. He criticized media for referring to Carol Dreyer as "his mother" stating that Dreyer & Englemam were not his parents. Source: San Diego Tribune, 1-30-98

• Duff-Smith, Markum, 28

  Convicted & executed by lethal injection in TX for contract killing of his female adopter Gertrude Duff-Smith Zabolio.

• Foell, David

  Native American, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, adopted as a child by the Singletons, sexually abused by his adoptive father. Convicted of killing his 69 year old adoptive grandmother, Marian Atkinson, by stabbing her 16 times (2-19-91, Iowa). Source: http://www.judicial.state.ia.us/appeals/opinions/20011228/00-1536.asp

• Fuss, Charles Allen, 36, (Possibly Innocent/Framed!)

  Born 12-16-65, Charles, was convicted & sentenced to Life Without Parole for the murder of Inez "Jackie" Fuss with an axe, in 1996 (GA), allegedly after a quarrel over an $1,800 phone sex bill. He & his adoptive sisters, Melissa Fuss Able & Margaret Branch, were adopted by Jackie who reportedly abused them. His adoptive sister, Margaret Branch, was Jackie's biological daughter. Melissa's biological mother, Sandra Race Cano (Domingues) accuses Melissa of that murder & a subsequent murder. At some point after the 1996 murder, Charles Fuss was diagnosed as "schizophrenic." Jackie died without a will; but the division of her property among her children after her death precipitated a 3-year property fight among her heirs that the DeKalb County police now believe also led to the 1999 slaying of Kelly Lindsey Fuss, wife of Inez' adopted son, David. The complex biological and adoptive family relationships & abuse connect the 2 murders, are detailed on Charles Fuss' web page at http://www.amfor.net/prisoners/ (Scroll down to GEORGIA listings & Click on Charles' name or photo to access his page, & also web pages for Joel Valadez Domingues (wrongly convicted of the 1999 murder), Melissa Fuss Able, & Margaret Branch, also under GEORGIA. Source: Atlanta Journal-Consitution archives, 6-17-99 "Estate Dispute Led to Slaying, Police Say"; & direct interviews with family members, Joel's attorney, & others.

• Garner, Joseph

  In 1995 in Indiana, he killed his adoptive father, Paul Garner, by beating, cutting, stabbing him with a knife, drove a dowel rod through his head, ate part of his brain, then skinned part of his body post mortem. He struggled with alcoholism & his adoptive mother, Charlotte Garner, said Joseph had stalked her & beat her after the couple divorced in 1988. Joseph claimed his adoptive father sodomized him as a child. Source: Detroit Free Press, 1-28-95, & http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?courts=in&vol=121801.rts&invol=o2

• Gebauer, John Frank, 15

  Charged as an adult for murder and rape of his adopter Allison Gebauer. Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/regionstate/20020219gebauer0219pb.asp

• Goodman, Sierra, 17

  Born March 1984, Sierra was legally adopted by Melvin & Audry Goodman but never bonded with them. She had endured a "history of parental abandonment," numerous foster & pre-adoptive placements. Termed a "victim of system abuse," Sierra, together with Darryl Headbird, 14, stabbed Gene & Carol Campbell, Sierra's former foster parents who had tried to adopt her in 1992, after headbird had murdered his father. Source: Native American Press/Ojibwe News, 9-14-01; http://www.maquah.net/clara/Press-ON/01-09-14.html

• Hamlin, (first name withheld), 10

  Arrested & charged as a juvenile in Humboldt, Kansas, for the 4/25/05 shotgun slaying of his adoptive father, Robert Hamlin, 42, & threatening to kill his adoptive mother who escaped with 2 of the boy's 4 siblings (the other 2 sibs were found in the house, unharmed). News reports commented that the boy was "fairly calm," was concerned only that "They're going to spank me hard," & could be held until age 23 if convicted. Sources: Chanda Brown, "Child Shoots Father," KSN News, 4-26-05, a http://www.ksn.com/new/stories/7640676.html, "Boy, 10, Is Charged with Murder in Shotgun Slaying of His Father," 4-28-05, http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/local/11507267.htm, "Kansas Town Shocked, Boy May Have Shot Dad," Carl Manning, Associated Press Writer, Kansas City Star, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20504028/ap_on_re_us/child_charged%3b_

• Harper Jr., Edward ("Eddie") Lee

  Shot both of his adopters to death (12-19-92) & executed 5-25-00, Kentucky. Source: Kentucky Herald-Leader & Rick Halperin; http://www.erroloys/AbouttheAuthor.htm & AfroCentric News; http://www.afrocentricnews.com/html/execute.html

• Harries, Thomas Ronald Lewis, 24

  (Wales, UK) Neighbors, in the small Carmarthenshire farming community, did not take long to notice the unmilked cows in the field in October 1953. It was an unusual occurrence as 63-year-old John Harries was a most diligent farmer. Ronald Harries, 24-years-old and adopted nephew of John Harries, told people that his uncle and, 54-year-old, aunt, Pheobe, had gone to London for a holiday and left him in charge of their farm in Cadno where they lived. Local police were not satisfied with the answers that he gave them and called in Scotland Yard. They discovered that a cheque made out to Ronald from his uncle had been altered from £9 to £909. Detectives suspected that Harries had disposed of his elderly relations but it was too large a farm to search manually. They tied lengths of cotton across gateways and gaps in hedges. They then set about making as much noise as possible to put the wind up Harries. The plan worked. Harries couldn't resist checking to see if the burial site was still intact and broke one of the threads. Detectives, checking the threads at dawn, found the broken thread and soon discovered the graves of the couple. Harries was charged with the double murder. Harries came up for trial at Carmarthen Assizes in March 1954. The circumstantial evidence was strong and he was found guilty. He was hanged at Swansea Prison [at ahe 25]. SOURCE: http://www.real-crime.co.uk/Murder1/doch.htm#Harries,%20Thomas%20Ronald%20Lewis

• Harvey, Holly, 15

  Holly stabbed to death her [adoptive] grandparents, Carl & Sarah Collier, with whom she had been living since her mother went to prison... ...The Colliers so loved children that when they could not have their own, they adopted two babies to raise in their new home north of Fayetteville, Ga. More than 30 years later, they looked with pride upon their adopted son, Kevin, who is active in his church & followed his father's footsteps in working for Delta Air Lines. When it came to their adopted daughter, the Colliers had reason to seek group prayer for Carla Harvey, a known trouble maker who had two daughters fathered by two different men. Carla, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for possession of marijuana, left her parents to care for her 15-year-old daughter, Holly. Holly's father, a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair after an accident, could not raise her himself, so the Colliers took on the task of trying to straighten out the young girl's life despite her repeated attempts to run away from home. "They found her and brought her back and they were trying to help her," Gaskins told 11Alive's Jon Shirek. In return for their help, police say, Holly and a friend [Sandy Ketchum, 15] stabbed her grandparents to death Monday night inside the home they built 35 years ago. Carl's body was found in the kitchen while his wife was slain in the basement. Kevin Collier was informed of his parents' deaths while practicing in the orchestra at the First Baptist Church of Atlanta. "Kevin said that she (Holly) said last Saturday that she was going to kill them so I guess she did," said neighbor Ivelyn Hanie. SOURCE: WXIA-TV, Atlanta, GA, 4-14-05 - http://www.wxia.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=61707 & -storyid=50033

• Heater, Naomi KImberly

  Jury faces question of intent in slaying: Did woman mean to kill her mother? Six years ago, Naomi Kimberly Heater saved her mother's life by donating a kidney for a transplant operation. Source: Sacramento Bee - http://www.cybersleuths.com/news/00-1999news/110/1999.htm

• Heikkila, Matthew, 20

  Shot & killed his adopters, Richard & Dawn Heikkila, 1-29-91. On the shotgun shells he had written "Mom" & "Dad." There didn't seem to be anyone with whom Dawn was acquainted who hadn't listened to her complaint about the boy she adopted. Richard Heikkila felt compelled to "cure" what he considered to be Matthew's "biological defects". Psychotherapist David Kirschner's analysis of Heikkila's "Adopted Child Syndrome" saved the youth from the Death Penalty & he may be eligible for parole at age 60. Source: Los Angeles Times, 4-27-93; FOX-tv "A Current Affair" 6-30-9; Laurence Arnold, "Woman Said She Aborted Heikkila Child", Courier News(NJ) 1-12-93; http://www.amfor.net/prisoners/

• Helm, Roger Scott, 14

  Tried in adult court, he is serving a life sentence for killing both of his adopters & 16-yr. old adoptive sister in their sleep, when he was 14 & high on LSD. Source: Helm's letters to Lori Carangelo/AmFOR

• Hittle, Daniel Joe

  Killed his adopters in Minnesota, he served 11 years in prison before parole in 1984. In 1989 after a feud with his drug dealer & his wife, he begand shooting at police, killing an officer before surrendering. He was executed 12-6-00 at Huntsville, TX. Source: David Carson, December Press,12-13-00; & http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/us/hittle679.htm

• Hoskins, Robert, 15

  Murdered his adopters & brother with multiple stab wounds, 5/83, in Mineral Springs, WI, after discovering the year before that he was adopted & told that his parents "didn't want him," that his mother was a "whore" & other degrading statements about her which bothered him so he began to resent his adopters. His male adopter, a boxer, often hit him in the face, stomach & ribs. Source: The Capital Times, Madison, WI, 8-12-83

• Howard, Aaron, 19

  OTTAWA - An Ottawa man was found guilty Wednesday of second-degree murder in connection with the brutal slaying of his [adoptive] mother in their west-end home. Aaron Howard was originally charged with first-degree murder in the June, 2007, death of Deborah Frankel Howard, his adoptive mother. The Crown was not able to prove the murder was premeditated and Justice Lynn Ratushny found the man, who was 19 at the time of the incident, guilty on a second-degree murder charge. The young man sat expressionless in the courtroom and did not react much when the guilty plea was entered. On June 15, 2007, Frankel-Howard, a 61-year-old who had worked many years for Health Canada, was found dead inside her home after family and neighbours noticed they had not seen her in several days. Howard had argued with his mother often. Apparently in a rage one day, he bludgeoned her with a lead pipe, court heard. He then carried her body to a cold storage room in the basement and left her there for a week with the air-conditioning running. When his girlfriend, Laurie Vidler, came over, she observed stains on the carpet leading to the basement, according to a statement she gave police.Howard told her the family dog had killed an animal and had dragged it into the basement. Also during this time, Howard began what he described as "an orgy of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," according to an excerpt from his diary that was part of a statement of facts submitted to the court. Howard revealed in his diary that "in a fit of anger and insanity I brutally murdered my mother." SOURCE: Tony Lofaro, Ottawa News, DOSE.ca [AmFOR Note: Aaron (African American) is shown with his [Caucasian] adopter in photo, above.

• Jenkins, Joshua, 15

  In 1996, using a hammer, knife & axe, he killed 5 members of his adoptive family -- his adopters, their parents, & another child in their Las Vegas home, during a visit to his grandparents' condominium in San Diego County because he was unhappy about being sent to the Vista del Mar boarding school for troubled youths in West Los Angeles. On 2-2-96, his family -- who lived in Las Vegas -- picked him up from school and took him to his grandparent's condominium in the exclusive community of The Terraces to spend the weekend. There, after an argument with his [adoptive] mother, he bludgeoned his [adoptive] parents & grandparents to death with a hammer. Inexplicably, somehow he kept his 10-year-old sister Megan from discovering the carnage. He then cleaned the murder weapons, took a shower, changed his clothes, set the place on fire & left. He had always wanted to know about his parents but was never told. His adopters said they had a letter from his mother but refused to show it to him because of their desire to replace his parents. When placed in [Vista del Mar], he felt his adopters had abandoned him. For years, he had been hostile toward his adopters. He said he thought his “parents” had abandoned him. Did he mean his adopters, or was he expressing the pain of losing his real parents? Four psychiatrists agreed that the boy suffered from chronic depression. Initially Josh pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Although all psychologist and psychiatrist who have examined the troubled youth agree that he is mentally ill, some do not consider him insane. On 4-16-97, a day before his trail was set to begin, Josh changed his plea to guilty. Jenkins' defense lawyer, Jack Campbell, said the plea change was in the teenager's best interest but was unusual because neither the judge nor the prosecutors made concessions. If found insane, he could be sentenced to a state hospital. If found sane, he faces a maximum of 140 years in prison. Source: Las Vegas Review Journal, 4-17-97; & Adopted Serial Killers- http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/9950/adoption_serialkillers.html

• Johnson, Lamont S., 21

  Said to have a history of psychological problems, he bludgeoned his male adopter, Bracey C. Johnson, to death with an axe. Source: Katie Thorne, The Augusta Chronicle, 6-1-01

• Jones, Timothy Jason, 29

  A Monroeville [AL] man awaiting execution for the 2004 bludgeoning of his [adoptive] parents, Nancy and Dr. Tim Jones, took his own life on Holman Prison’s death row Saturday, according to several officials. Monroe County District Attorney Tommy Chapman said prison officials contacted him late Saturday to report that Timothy Jason Jones, 31, died late Saturday after slashing himself with a blade... Jason Jones was arrested after co-workers reported Dr. Tim Jones was late to work on Jan. 29, 2004. Neighbors and police who arrived at the Jones home found a horrific scene. Tim Jones had been beaten and repeatedly stabbed in the carport of the house and Nancy Jones lay battered beyond recognition in her bed. Jason Jones was caught later that day driving his mother’s car in north Alabama. He crashed the car after fleeing from police. Neighbors said the young man had spent years in and out of various rehabilitation clinics for drug addictions. His [adoptive]parents had recently taken a family-owned sports utility vehicle from Jason Jones, refusing to return it when he demanded to use it the night before their deaths. According to trial testimony, police called to the home during the night said he was belligerent and brandishing a knife in the Jones’ yard at one point. Police took him across town and dropped off at a telephone booth as his [adoptive] parents requested. Later in the night, he returned to the Jones’ home, but his father locked him in a basement room at his grandparents’ home. He later broke out of the vacant home, walked back to his parents’ house and attacked his father as he left for work in the early morning. Jason Jones then attacked his [adoptive] mother with a weapon he told police he fashioned from pipe and other objects at his [adopti] grandparents’ house. She was beaten so savagely that parts of her jaw and teeth were found scattered across the room. Jones told police in taped statements he took money from her purse and bought crack cocaine, smoking it in the house before fleeing. Jones was convicted of capital murder by a Jefferson County jury last year and sentenced to death. In his last statement to the jury, Jones said, “I am a monster. I have no remorse for what I did. I deserve to die.” Monroe County Sheriff Tom Tate said Sunday he was not surprised by Jason Jones’ apparent suicide. “If a person is intent on killing himself, he will find a way,” Tate said. “He used a piece of metal grating broken from our jail to cut himself in the neck while he was in our custody,” Tate said... SOURCE: Connie Baggett, Mobile Register (AL), 9-3-06 [AmFOR Note: Timothy Jason Jones, prisoner # Z71104117 (DOB 6-23-75) had regsitered on Prisoner Life.com seeking penpal. Another website stated his attorney. John Wiley, had never provided him with his requested trial transcripts, never informed him of court decisions, never returned his calls. Yet another website sttes the Prosecutor at his trial told the jury he was a "monster." No photo of Timothy is available]

• Kasten, Daniel

  Killed his adopters, Edith & Joseph Kasten, using a rifle, in Ronkonkoma, NY. Source: Carolyn Cowell, Newsday

• Kislov, Yaroslav, 12

  Hired 2 "hit men," ages 18 & 19, to kill his adopters in Volgograd, Russian, home to thousands of orphans. Source: The Observer, 5-26-02

• Komisarjevsky, Joshua, 26

  CHESHIRE, Connecticut -- The younger of two men facing a number of charges in the deaths of a prominent doctor's family was adopted by a religious couple from whom he grew estranged, according to a relative. On Monday, police arrested Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, of Cheshire, and Steve Hayes, 44, of Winsted in connection with the deaths of the wife and two daughters of Dr. William Petit Jr. State police first announced on Tuesday the charges filed against Komisarjevsky and added charges of capital felony murder on Thursday.... Komisarjevsky's criminal record indicates he first entered the system on March 11, 2002, when he was 21 years old and was arrested on charges linked to 10 burglaries in Bristol. In addition to the 10 Bristol charges. On Jan. 3, 2003, Komisarjevsky was sentenced to nine years in prison for second-degree burglary. He was released, after serving half his sentence, to a halfway house on June 6, 2006, and was granted parole by the Board of Pardons and Parole on April 10... According to New Britain court records, Komisarjevsky has a 5-year-old daughter. Records show that Komisarjevsky was awarded sole custody of his daughter about a month before police said he and Hayes broke into the Petit home. Source: WFSB Channel 3 yewitness News, WFSB.com, 7-27-07

• Koslow, Kristi, 17

  Murdered her male adopter's wife (her stepmother), oil heiress Caren Koslow, & attempted to murder her male adopter, Jack Koslow. Source: "Teen Gets Life Term," Pittsburgh Post, 7-1-94.

• Lascola, Dr. Raymond

  Killed his wealthy female adopter. Source: Boston Globe/AP, 10-8-80

• Lisker, Bruce, 17, (Wrongly Convicted?)

  The evidence seemed overwhelming 20 years ago when Bruce Lisker was convicted of killing his adopter, Dorka Lisker,66, in a fit of rage. But new investigation reveals previously ignored evidence, investigator's lies, and alleged false confessions by Lisker ... He had a drug problem and a history of fighting with adopter...In recent months, new information had shaken faith in the fairness of the verdict: A bloody footprint found at the scene did not match Lisker's shoes. A mysterious phone call made around the time of the murder raised further questions. Whatever the truth, it's this writer's opinion that Bruce Lisker was "wrongly convicted." For details of this story & more photos, see "Adoptees Wrongly Convicted?" at http://AmFOR.net/WronglyConvicted Excerpted from Source: "A CASE OF DOUBT - New Light on a Distant Verdict" by Scott Glover and Matt Lait, LA Times Staff Writers http://www.latimes.com/lisker, 5-22-05 (see also http://www.freebruce.org)

• Little Jr., Charlie

  Born Alexander Julian Morgan, he killed his adopters, Arlene & Charles Little Sr., with a shotgun & covered it up as a burglary. Source: Iowa v. Alxander Julian Morgan, 1986

• Long, Justin Ryan, 15

  Stabbed to death his adoptive father, Hoyt Long, after suffering horrific physical & sexual abuse resulting in mental illness. Sentenced to Life without Parole. Source: http://www.pscn.ne/appication/osch/deliverdocument.asp?citeID=437217

• Losicco, Richard, 28, and
• Losicco, Terrence, 20

  Richard murdered his male adopter, Pasquale Losicco & critically wounded his female adopter, Anna Losicco. Richard's adoptive brother, Terrence, was then serving a life sentence for the 1980 murder of Helen Prou. Source: "Shedding Light on the Dark Side of Adoption," book by Marsha Riben.

• Marks, Taylor Melissa Mary, 20

  "Prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty against a former Copley Township woman accused of plotting with friends to have her mother killed. Taylor Marks, 20, and her friend, Troy Purdie II, 19, have been indicted for aggravated murder by a Summit County grand jury. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Marks and Purdie under the state's murder-for-hire statute.... Police said Marks offered Purdie $5,000 to kill her mother, businesswoman Kristie Marks, 58, who operated a Visiting Angels home health-care business. Police said the plot was designed so that Taylor Marks could inherit her mother's wealth....Within four hours, based on inconsist-encies in their stories, police obtained confessions in the alleged plot. [Taylor Marks] was living with Smith and his mother in an Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority apartment..... She was adopted as a young child by Kristie Marks and her husband, Bruce, who died in 2002." (Excerpted from “Prosecutors to Seek Death Penalty in Murder for Hire Plot” by Phil Trexler, Ohio Beacon Journal 11-5-09)

• McMullen, Jonathan, 14

  Killed his adopter, Kristina McMullen, by shooting her 5 times; wounded his male adopter Andrew McMullen & adoptive brother, Jack McMullen, on 9-6-01 at Elgin, AZ. Source: AZ Daily Wildcat, 9-14-01; Charisma News Service Update, "Widowed Man Forgives Adoptive Son for Attack," 9-14-01. The teen pleaded guilty to manslaughter, gave up his right to a jury trial, and has been locked up for years, but he was never formally sentenced. On 7-7-05, the Arizona Court of Appeals is deciding who should sentence McMullen, the judge he confessed to, or a jury. Frank Leto, a Public Defender, says, "We are dealing with a brain-damaged 14-year-old who suffers from impulse control, slightly retarded." Depending on the court's ruling, McMullen could be released as soon as December of this year, or he could face 8 more years in prison. Attorneys expect the court to rule in a few weeks, but the controversy isn't likely to end there. The side that loses is expected to continue to appeal. Source: KVOA-Tuscon, 7-7-05: http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=34450168&nav=HMO6aoAz

• Miller, George, 18

  Honor student who beat his female adopter to death with a baseball bat in an argument over grades. Source: Marsha Riben, New York Post, 1-12-85,page 5

• Moorman, Robert Henry, 36

  Born 6-4-48. While serving 9 years-to-Life at Arizona State Prison in Florence, Moorman was given a 72-hour compassionate furlough to visit with his 73-year-old adoptive mother. The two stayed at the Blue Mist Motel in Florence. On 1-3-84, Moorman bound & gagged her & then strangled & stabbed her, chopped the body into many parts & disposed of them in dumpsters throughout Florence. He was then sentenced to Death based on Aggravating Circumstances, Prior conviction punishable by life imprisonment, Pecuniary gain, Especially heinous/cruel/depraved & no Mitigating Circumstances sufficient to call for leniency Source: http://www.supreme.state.az.us/courtserv/CrtProj/capsentguid/page50.html & http://azcentral.com/specials/special32/articles/0904moorman-ON.html

• Mox, Gregory Richard, 21

  Incarcerated in Michigan for murdering bludgeoning his adopters to death & setting the home on fire. His adopters & Catholic Services refused to provide him even non-identifying information about his parents, despite that other incarcerated Michigan adoptees who killed were provided such information. Source: AmFOR's direct contacts with Mox & Catholic Services, & Detroit FreePress archived newsclips - http://freep.com

• Niiranen, Patrick, 37

  Born 6-2-59 in Portland, OR, & immediately taken home by Henry & Mercedes Niiranean who adopted him. Mrs. Niiranean physically & emotionally abused him; her husband once hit him with a baseball bat. By teenage, he was livng in foster homes, shelters, the street, adicted to cocaine. He bludgeoned his adopters to death with a 3-lb. sledgehammer in a rage, then spent all the cash in his adopter's wallet on a 9-day drug binge. In 1980 he hired a PI to find his mother but the PI abandoned him. Since imprisonment, he filed a request for his original birth certificate in Oregon, insisting his mother has nothing to fear "I just want to tell her I love her." Source: Seamus McGraw, APB News.com, 6-2-00.

• O'Connell, Brenda & Katherine, both 17

  From "Trial Begins for Teen Girls Who Killed Adoptive Mother" (by Andria Simmons, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 10-8-08). No one disputes that Muriel O’Connell did a noble thing by bringing two teenage girls from a Guatemalan orphanage into her home. No one disputes that the adopted daughters killed her, either. But on the first day of the trial Wednesday for 17-year-olds, Catherine and Brenda O’Connell, prosecutors and defense attorneys painted a different picture of the events leading to Muriel O’Connell’s death on Aug. 6, 2006. Defense attorneys say the girls killed O’Connell in self defense after she attacked Brenda with a knife. They plan to argue that O’Connell, 57, was abusive “physically and emotionally” to the girls. “On the outside things looked great,” said Hillary Krepistman, who represents Catherine O’Connell. “Things on the inside that nobody saw were not so good.” Prosecutors dispute the self-defense claim. They point out that it would be very difficult for the two then 15-year-old girls, both under 5 feet tall and less than 100 pounds, to overpower a 5’10”, 188-pound O’Connell. Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney Dawn Taylor said the evidence will show the girls actually strangled O’Connell while she was asleep in her bed. And it wasn’t the first time they had tried to kill her, Taylor said. A few weeks earlier, the girls poisoned her vodka with a chemical solvent used in engine starter fluid, Taylor said. ...O’Connell, a two-time divorcee with no children of her own, adopted Catherine at age 11. Three years later she adopted Brenda, a girl of the same age. The two girls are not blood relatives, but they lived together in the same orphanage in Guatemala prior to their separate adoptions.

• Ortiz, Jeffrey R., 14

  On 7-30-97, in Indiana, he strangled & bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer his adopter, Rebecca Ortiz. He then spent the day driving freinds around in her car on a shopiing spree with his adopter's credit cards to purchase a car, CD player, flowers, lunch & movie tickets for the group. Although he told police that he had argued with his adopter over a $1,000 bill he had run up on 1-900 sex phone calls, and he had stolen money from her, forgered her checks & taken her car without permission previously, the night before the murder, his adopter ordered him out of the house by the end of that week & that likely triggered the murder. Source: http://www.in.gov/judiciary/opinions/archive/09109901.trb.html

• Pelley, Robert Jeffrey, 17, (stepparent adption)

  Robert ["Bob"] Jeffrey Pelley was found guilty of murdering his father, the Rev. Robert Pelley, 38; stepmother Dawn, 32; and stepsisters Janel, 8, and Jolene, 6, at the parsonage of Olive Branch Church of the United Brethren, about 10 miles south of South Bend. Investigators said Pelley was angry because his father had grounded him for stealing and would allow him to attend only his prom dance, missing other prom activities. Prosecutors alleged that during a 20-minute span on April 28, 1989, Pelley shot his family members, disposed of the shotgun and shells, took a shower, put his clothes in the washer and left for the LaVille High School prom. The defense argued there wasn't enough time for him to have done all that and still make it to the dance. They also said no one could commit such a gruesome attack and still act "normal" during the prom events, as his friends testified during the trial. Authorities at the time questioned the 17-year-old high school senior. However, he was not charged until August 2002, when authorities reinterpreted evidence. After charges were filed, the state subpoenaed the Family and Children's Center seeking all Pelley family counseling records for three years leading up to the murders. The center refused, arguing they were protected information under counselor/client privilege, an argument the state Supreme Court rejected in June 2005. Pelley asked that the case be dismissed under the speedy trial law [and his conviction was overturned]. Read the Indiana Court of Appeals' opinion. (.pdf) Indiana Supreme Court affirms Pelley murder convictions. In a decision published [February 20, 2009], the Supreme Court affirmed the 2006 murder convictions of Robert Jeffrey Pelley, who is serving a 160-year prison sentence. It came after the Indiana Court of Appeals threw out his convictions, ruling Pelley's right to a speedy trial had been violated. SOURCES: Associated Press (AP), "Pelley's Quadruple Murder Conviction Overturned," http://www.wsbt.com/news/local/17391919.html and South Bend Tribune "Pelley Conviction Upheld," 2-20-09

• Peterson, Angel

  Threw a firebomb through their window while they slept, trapping & killing the couple who adopted her 8 years prior. Source: "Fatal Bombing Was Vengeance for Beatings Prosecutor Says," Detroit Free Press, 11-8-94

• Prink, Timothy, 20

  Convicted of shotgun slayings of 4 adoptive family members after an argument with his adoptive sister, Holly Prink, who had been calling him names and putting him down; she escaped being killed when his shotgun misfired. Source: The Desert Sun (Palm Springs), 10-4-97.

• R., Marika, 21

  Marika is in the delinquency system in San Joaquin County, California, for second-degree murder & use of a firearm -- She shot & killed her male adopter who had molested her & her siblings for years. The following lines are excerpted from a poem she wrote: "Do you think you know me; Do you know what makes me who I am... A man I once called Daddy; A man I learned hated me; A man who haunts my dreams...Will he ever let me rest; Will he ever let my pain stop...How many times must I kill him before he dies." Source: www.courtinfo.ca.gov/programs/ cfcc/pdffiles/PoetryBook2004.pdf

• Reynolds, Jacquiline "Nikki", 17

  Adopted as at age 3 months, Jacquiline "Nikki" Reynolds never denied plunging a 14-inch blade into her 49 year old adopter, Billie Jean Reynolds, more than 25 times, she claims she was insane when she committed the May 14, 1997 murder.... According to prosecutors, Nikki, then 17, was so distraught over the breakup with her boyfriend, Carlos Infante, that she plotted to kill him. But when her parents unknowingly got in the way of her plans, Nikki also plotted their murders.... Robert Reynolds, a commercial truck enforcement officer, said their relationship with their daughter seemed fine until her high school years. Robert claims Nikki's relationship with her mother began to deteriorate, & the teen-ager exhibited mood swings. The concerned parents sought counseling for Nikki from a church minister. By early 1997, Nikki was dating fellow student Carlos Infante... Fearing she may be pregnant, Nikki told her parents she had been raped by a stranger. .. But after police determined that the story was fabricated, Nikki eventually confessed to her mother that she had made it up. ... Each time the two would break up, Nikki would tell Infante that she was pregnant in hopes of getting him back. Prosecutors say Infante again ended his relationship with Nikki — but this time, Nikki began planning to murder him...Nikki told police she decided to eliminate her parents so that she would keep her scheduled time to kill her boyfriend....While she was stabbing Billie Jean, Nikki apologized & asked Reynolds if she was "dying yet." When Reynolds was able to answer that she was dying, Nikki stabbed her several more times. Nikki called 911 & confessed to the slaying. The Defense attempted to prove that Nikki inherited severe depression & psychological problems from her biological mother, Katrina Ramos. Ramos said she thought she was doing the right thing by giving her up for adoption...& still loves her daughter. Source: The Sun Sentinel & Miami Herald, 1997; & Court TV, 6-8-05, http://www.courttv.com/trials/taped/reynolds.html

• Rodriguez, Ricky, 29

  Adopted as "Davito" by "Family International/Children of God" cult leader, Karen "MAria David" Zerby & David Berg, he was sexually abused since infancy by cult members & killed one of his abusers before committing suicide, in Blythe, CA. Source: "After My Mother, All I Need is One Bullet for Myself," TimesOnline, 2-9-05; http://timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-147423,00.html & San Francisco Chronicle, 1-17-05

• Savin, Ionut Silviu, 15

  “A 15-year old boy by the name of Ionut Silviu Savin killed his adoptive mother by stabbing her 17 times with a knife before leaving his home to play Counter-Strike at a local internet café for four hours. The murder... was headline news in Romania. Ionut was said to be ‘dependant’ to video games, which caused his mother to terminate his access to the internet, a decision which lead to her murder. ...Ionut turned himself in to police custody, taking full responsibility for his actions. According to his father and witness accounts in the Romanian news, Ionut is reported to have given up his studies and social life for the violent game, and missed over 200 classes in the past year. When interviewed, the supervisor of the Internet café that Ionut frequented stated that the boy would spend most of his time alone playing Counter-Strike, wearing a hood over his head. She also noted that the boy had a calm demeanor, never swearing when he lost matches, or displaying an ounce of anger. He rarely interacted with the café’s other patrons. His high school teacher, who was shocked by the boy’s actions, said that he had a ‘quiet and introverted’ personality.” Source: “Video Game Addict Stabs Mother To Death, Plays More Counter-Strike,” by Sol Invictus (1-18-10), http://hellforge.gameriot.com/

• Sellers, Sean, 16

  On 3-5-86, he shot & killed his mother, Vonda Bellefatto & his adoptive father, Lee Bellefatto, while they slept. Previously (9-8-85), he had killed a convenience store clerk; he said he did is "just to see what it feels like to kill someone" & that he is a victim of "multiple personality disorders." Source: http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/Pending/99/feb_execlist.html

• Sherman, Timothy Scott, 19

  DOB: 8/24/69. Shot his mother & adoptive father to death as they slept (Maryland, 1988) & was sentenced to 2 consecutive life terms. Source: "Young Killers," http://karisable.com/youngmurder.htm

• Singleton, James Joseph, 23

  On 8-18-02, he killed both his adopters, Ralph Singleton, 55, & Sherida Singleton, 53, by stabbing them more than 50 times with a Chinese Militia sword, in their Rylie, Texas home. Sentenced to life in prison. Upon providing his confession, he said "I don't know why it should have happened." Asked "Why?" by his adoptive uncle, he reportedly replied "When you see an opportunity you take it. Source: KHOU (TX)/AP, 2-4-05, http://wwwKHOU.com/cgi-bin/bi/gold_print.cgi

• Smullen, Bruno Lorenzo, 16

  Stabbed to death his male adopter, Warren Smullen, 57. Appealed his conviction unsuccessfully, claiming Battered Child Sydrome. "On the morning of Saturday, May 6, 2000, while several of his adopted siblings remained asleep upstairs in the family home, Bruno Smullen stabbed and cut his adopted father twenty two times with a large kitchen knife. He then proceeded to attack and threaten his adopted siblings when they investigated the noises they were hearing downstairs. After all three siblings escaped from their attacker, Smullen fled the scene. Upon finding Smullen sitting on a street curb, the police read him Miranda rights, and interrogated him at a nearby hospital. Smullen admitted to the events of that morning, at which point police recorded a formal confession. He claimed that he was trying to kill his [adopter] before his [adopter] killed him. Smullen claimed the father was abusive in that he said threatening things to him, and had hit him in the chest with a piece of wood." Baltimore Sun reported: "The carnage inside the tidy, gray-shingled bungalow stunned even seasoned police investigators. Not one room, they say, was left without some trace of blood. For friends at St. James African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the horror of the stabbing death of 57-year-old Warren Smullen was magnified when they learned that Smullen's son, a teen-ager who spent much of his time at worship or in youth group activities, had been charged in a slashing rampage." Source: Baltimore Sun, 5-10-00; and Amicus brief filed in Maryland Court - http://www.courts.state.md.us/publications/amicus4_04.html

• Soni, Gita

  Hired someone to kill her 73 year old male adopter, Adi Ardeshir Cursetjee, in Gamvedia, India. Source: 6-2-03 report, http://www.mid-day.com/news/city/2003/june/54631.htm)

• Stoddard, Daniel Paul, 19

  Adopted in infancy by Patricia & Tom Stoddard, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic & bipolar & sentenced to life for the multiple-stabbing death of his adoptive father. Prior to the murder, his adopters had sought treatment for him & he spent several years in & out of institutions. Daniel had told friends he was tired of his adopters "throwing him around like a rag doll," that he was going to live with his bilogical mother in Virginia. Before the murder, he asked a friend for a place to stay but was told there was "no room." Source: Kootenai County News, 4-2-01, & ICDVVA News Database 8-31-02; & http://www.state.id.us/crimevictim/news/news.cfm?category=7&chapter=65&article=368

• Struebing, Kurt Alan, 20

  In April 1986 when he was 20, a guitarist for his black metal band & on drugs, Kurt Struebing killed his adopter, Dalee Struebing, 53, with a hatchet & pair of scissors. He was sentenced to 12 years for 2nd Degree Murder; released in 1994, reformed his band, "NME," gained international fame, became a trusting friend & doting father of one son, & was killed at age 39 on 3-11-05 when he drove his car through 2 barriers & plunged 50 feet off the opening of a span bridge. Police investigators & motorists who saw the crash were puzzled why Struebing drove off the bridge. Friends said he didn't like to talk about his past & for most it didn't matter; Kurt's mission in life was to help others; "his humility was endearing" & "everybody respected the hell out of him." Source: http://seattlepi.com/local/215517_kurt11.html & http://www.seattlemetal.com/news.php

• Sturgel, Timothy, 26

  COLERAIN TOWNSHIP – A man who struggled for years to raise his troubled adopted son died Saturday morning after police say the young man shot him just before setting the house on fire. Jerry Sturgel, 51, didn't die alone. When police finally made it into the house in the Colerain Township neighborhood of Northbrook, they found two other victims: Sturgel's wife, Mary, 40, and Mary's daughter, Emily Hurst. Emily had a faint pulse when authorities pulled her from the smoldering house, but despite their efforts, she died at the hospital from her gunshot wounds. She was 13. ... When Timmy saw police, he raced around to the side of the house and slid inside the door as police surrounded the single-story ranch-style home. After a few minutes, he popped out the back door, pointed the weapon toward deputies and then quickly stepped back inside again. Moments later, the back door opened again; this time Timmy left behind the weapon and held his hands in the air. He had surrendered. That's when police noticed smoke....it appears Timmy set the fire. Emergency workers moved the bodies out of the house and put out the fire, as police cut off access to the neighborhood in all directions. Timmy reportedly heard voices. Sometimes the voice told him to do bad things, said his father's cousin Cindy Smith. Smith said Timmy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Hamilton County court documents show Timmy has been ordered to undergo psychiatric care and treatment at least four times since he was 20. Jerry Sturgel had three adopted children and was also a foster father, though not at the time of the homicides, Smith said. But Jerry Sturgel's patience with his son Timmy was wearing. Timmy had recently moved back into the house. His whole life, he had been in and out of mental institutions, Smith said. "Jerry said he was about to put him out on his A-S-S," Smith said. "Jerry never cursed, so for him to even spell it was a shocker." Timothy is charged with three counts of murder and is being held at the Hamilton County Justice Center... SOURCE: "Son Charged with Murder in Family Killings," by Carrie Whitaker, Alex Coolidge, & Eileen Kelley. Enquirer.com, 1-24

• Swartz, Larry, 17

  On 1-16-84, at Cape St. Clair, MD, days after his adopter, Kathryn Swartz, had Social Services case workers remove his 15-year old adoptive brother, Michael, from their home, Kathryn threatened to do the same to Larry. Larry then struck Kathryn on her head with a wood maul & stabbed her 7 times with a kitchen knife, then turned on Robert Swartz, killing both his adopters. Michael was convicted in 1990 of murdering a Crownsville man over a jar of coins and is still serving time in the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown. Larry was tried as a juvenile, convicted for the murders & released after serving his sentence; he was well liked by the community, had married, had a son, and had finally found happiness when he suffered a massive heart attack and died at age 38, 12-29-04. His compelling story is detailed in "The Second Life of Larry Swartz: Friends Remember Murderer as 'God's Gift to Life'", by MarylandMissing, Websleuths forum at: http://websleuths.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-18711

• Swofford, Jerry, (Mental age of 10)

  Described as a "mentally retarded youth," Swofford stabbed his 68-year-old adoptive father, Oren Swofford, 6 times with a butcher knife while the victim lay sleeping, on 12-26-83. The youth was home on Christmas furlough from a mental health facility. Source: "Fulton Jury Awards Retarded Youth $50,000; Released Mental Patient Killed His Adoptive Father," Atlanta Journal & Atlanta Constitution, 6-17-88.

• Tankleff, Martin "Marty", 18

  Having maintained that his confession was coerced, Marty is seeking a new trial with support from some members of his adoptive family. Their website provides recent court rulings, newsclips, & a petition with public commentary invited, at http://www.MartyTankleff.org. Interestingly, in 1988, the Maury Povich Show sensationalized the case of Marty Tankleff, referring to him as an "adoptee" accused of killing his "adoptive parents." But since pressure on media to censor adoption language, the 3-13-2005 CBS-TV's "48 Hours" segments ("Second Chance," & "Prime Suspect") investigated Marty Tankleff's possible innocence in the killing of his "parents" (avoiding thje term "adoptive" parents). The print & video downloads of these segments are at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/ 2005/03/11/48hours/main679576.shtml On 7-9-05 Marty Tankleff wrote AmFOR: "Thank you for your letter and article...Let me make something very clear, I do not consider myself 'adopted', not does my family. While 'legally' that may correct, I find it offensive when people find a need to use that term in relating to my family. I don't have 'adopted' parents. My parents are my parents, and my 'birth' mother is just that--a woman who brought me into the world. I know the name of my 'birth' mother and what her profession was. So, if I wanted to find her I could. Since I was born in Brooklyn and the adoption was handled by an attorney that was a family friend, I could obtain records if I wanted, but I have more important things to handle right now. Thank you for your support.--Marty" [AmFOR Note: With his adoptive family now supporting his bid for freedom, as well as holding his adoption file, Marty's denial of his adoptive status sounds like he's in the typical Catch-22 between adoptive family loyalties and the normal need to know firsthand, rather than from a secondhand version from an adoptive relative or file folder. Many adoptees have discovered that, regardless whether their adoption file info is true, biased, untrue, and regardless of their mother's past or present situation, the more important issue is that their right to know should not be mired in a conflict of interests. Professional profilers in the Bruce Lisker case see that conflict as giving rise to behaviors which make them vulnerable to being easily coerced into confessions of crimes--whether or not they are guilty of such crimes.]

• Terhune, Cameron Richard, 24

  MAN PLEADS NOT GUILTY IN MODESTO KILLINGS Modesto Bee, 1-20-09, & KCRA-Channel 3, 1-21-09

  MODESTO, Calif. -- A 24-year-old man accused of killing his adoptive parents pleaded not guilty Tuesday to murder charges. Cameron Richard Terhune, 24, was taken into custody Thursday evening, several hours after a SWAT team found the bodies inside a home near Del Rio Country Club. Deputy Rajinda Singh of the Stanislau County Sheriff's Department said the victims were Terhunes adoptive parents. The pair was identified in a criminal complaint as Ken and Diane Terhune. Cameron Terhune has been charged with two counts of murder and several enhancements. The complaint alleges that Cameron Terhune used a firearm. So far, authorities aren't giving a possible motive in the killings.

• Thornton, Jamie Grant, 16

  Shot his male adopter, Gerald Thornton, with his high powered rifle at his home. Source: Daily Times, Watertown, 8-1-94

• Tomassoni, Kathryn Marie, 15, and
• Tomassoni, Tammie Marie, 11

  Shot to death their abusive adopter, Lydia Tomassoni, in the head, after Child Protectciv Services & school authorities ignored their several pleas for help in Sun Lakes, AZ.

• Turner, Carlton, 33

  From the AP in The Dallas News, Huntsville, TX, 7-10-08 A very apologetic Carlton Turner was exceuted (7-10-08) for the slayings of his adoptive parents a decade ago at their Dallas home. ....Turner, who was adopted as an infant, said he shot his father, 43-year-old Carlton Turner, Sr., in self defense after repeated instances of abuse. "I felt my mother couldn't live without my father," he said, explaining why he killed his mother, Tonya, 40. ...He was convicted by an all-White jury... Turner had a disciplinary problem as a juvenile and at age 14 sexually assaulted an 8-year-old boy [AmFOR Note: Profiles of sex abusers have shown that they have usually been similarly abused] ...His [adopters] were retired from the Air Force...

• Van Duyne, Arnell, 16

  Born 4/4/85 to Blendell Van Duyne & Purnell Parson (who was slain while working as a security guard), Arnell was adopted at age 12 from foster care, Arnell is serving "Life" (30 years before eligible for parole)"plus 21 years for related crimes," in New Mexico, for killing his female adopter, Norma Young, in Clovis, CA. Blendell Van Duyne says she "never abandoned" Arnell but had given temporary custody of Arnell & his older brother to his aunt & uncle. He ended up in foster care after reportedly sexually abusing a younger sibling, & where he was described as as "a walking time bomb." The Youngs were never advised of his behaviors from emotional trauma of feeling abandoned. Investigators wanted to also charge Arnell with raping Young but never could figure out whether the sexual attack came before or after Young was dead. One during a conversation, Young's husband learned that Arnell missed his biological mother with whom he has maintained contact off & on since incarceration. Source: Tom Archluleta, Albuquerque Tribune Reporter, The State of Our Children, http://web.abqtrib.com/news/kids/021402_news_age16.shtml

• Villareal, Juan Alberto, 44

  Murdered his female adopter, Hilma Villareal, in Falfurrias - Brooks County, Texas; Juan is described as having "no remorse." Source: Corpus Christi Caller Times, 8-21-03

• Wallace, Marcus, 38

  CHAMBERSBURG, PA. — A central Pennsylvania man is charged with murder in the home-invasion beating death of his adopted mother. Police say 38-year-old Marcus Wallace broke into Consuella Wallace's Chambersburg apartment and attacked her December 10, leaving her in a coma. Marcus Wallace was charged with murder Tuesday following his mother's death on Feb. 9. Source: “Police: Central PA Man Killed Adopted Mother,” Associated Press (AP), 2-17-10. http://www.centredaily.com/2010/02/17/1798991/police-central-pa-man-killed-adopted.html#ixzz0gnZONL05

• Weaver, Keith Chul, 14

  Admitted to stabbing murder of his adopters, Anna May Weaver & Raymond Clair Weaver, & his adoptive sister Kimberly, & raped a teenage adoptive relative. Keith was one of 2 Korean orphans adopted by the (White) couple whose biological son described Keith as a "self centered, callous, juvenile delinquent." Weaver's feeling of rejection became a festering mental illness. Source: "Psychologist: 'Weaver's Mind Snapped,'" Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, PA), 3-12-92; & "Lawyer Wants Teen Accused of 3 Murders Tried as Juvenile; 9/7/91; & "Weaver Tried as Adult", 6/23/93.

• Welche, Lee, 15

  Shot & killed his female adopter, Brenda Welche, 6-15-92, during an argument over household chores. He first shot her in the chest & then reloaded the shotgun & shot her once in the side & once at close range in the head. Welche showed no remorse; psychiatrists attributeed the outbursts to a history of abuse, but the Judge, John T. Hammond, said there was no excuse for killing even if his "mother" was abusive. He reunited with his biological mother after imprisonment. Source: "Teen Son Sentenced as Adult in Slaying," South Bend Tribune, 5-1-92,page B-2.

• Wheeler, Codee, 17

  From: "BIRTH MOM HELPS GIRL RUN AWAY BEFORE ADOPTIVE DAD KILLED" (Pittsburgh Channel, Indiana, PA, http://thepittsburghchannel.com/news/13762990/detail.html) "The day after a teenager was accused of setting a fire that killed her adoptive father, the child's biological mother faced charges in connection with her alleged actions before the fatal blaze. Charged as an adult with Homicide and Arson, Codee Wheeler spent her 17th birthday in the Indiana County Prison on Thursday. State police said she torched the Blairsville home of William and Sue Wheeler, killing William in the process..... Codee Wheeler's birth mother, Georgiann Palmer, is being charged with felony interference with custody of children...... police said Palmer helped the girl run away from home and paid for her to stay 18 days at Scott's Motel in Indiana, Pa., earlier this year. .."She (Palmer) was well aware of where the daughter was the entire time. She was in charge of hiding her away from the police and the adoptive parents," state police Trooper John Fisanch said......William Wheeler was found dead in the house when firefighters arrived.... Palmer and Codee Wheeler didn't have much contact until the girl's teenage years, when Palmer moved from North Carolina to Blairsville, Miele reported. Not long after Palmer's move, some accusations were made about William Wheeler's behavior, and prompted an investigation by the county Department of Children and Youth Services. According to court papers, William Wheeler was alleged to have a habit of walking around the house in his underwear and walking into the bathroom while Codee Wheeler was in the shower. Investigators eventually cleared William Wheeler, and that's when Codee Wheeler ran away -- allegedly with the help of her biological mother, police said. Codee Wheeler's page on MySpace.com said she got along with her adoptive parents only sometimes...A state police Fire Marshal said burn patterns suggest the fatal fire was deliberately set in the middle of the Wheelers' family room, according to an affidavit of probable cause. In March, Sue Wheeler disagreed with that assessment, telling WTAE Channel 4 Action News, "It's not an Arson." And on Wednesday, she stood by Codee Wheeler's side as the girl was charged with her husband's murder."

  UPDATE: From "GIRL, 17, ACQUITTED IN FIRE THAT KILLED ADOPTIVE FATHER" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) "An Indiana County jury has acquitted a 17-year-old girl of charges that she set a fire that killed her adoptive father in March 2007. Codee Wheeler was charged with Homicide, Arson and related offenses...Wheeler set fire to her home while 57-year-old William Wheeler, a former township supervisor,... "

• Williams, Tavares Eugene, 21

  Serving Life imprisonment in Florida on 1st Degree Premeditated Murder for beating his adopter, Barbara Roth, to death with a baseball bat on 1-24-02 in Gainesville, FL. She was a former social worker who had been assigned who Williams' family when he was a child & adoptd him in 1998. http://www.alligator.org/pt2/050124williams.php

• Wolmarans, Frederik, 20

  Adopted at age 2 weeks, he was charged with stabbing/strangling deaths of his affluent adopters, Koos & Erna Wolmarans, in Durban, South Africa. Source: Dispatch Online 3-14-00 - http://www.dispatch.co.za/2000/04/11/southafrica/CHARGED.HTM

• Wright, Mitchell, 18

  An altar boy, adopted by Donald & Delphine Wright, set up his 15 year old sister, Donette, to be raped & beaten by a friend & then left to die under a log. Donette was half Mexican & the Wrights say MIcthell became hostile toward Blacks & Hispanics after learning his natural mother had given birth to a Black baby & keot that child after putting Mitchell up for adoption. Source: Marsha Riben, The News Journal (NJ), 4/85

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Adoptees Who Killed Their Biological Parents

(Listed alphabetically, with age at time of crime if known.)

• Hendricks, Billy Lynn, 40, bio-mother murder

  According to Court documents, on 12-8-01, Billy Lynn strangled his biological mother to death at her Shreveport, Louisiana home, during an argument over money; she tried CPR unsuccessfully, then drove his mother's car to his adopters' home in Edmond, Oklahoma. The next day, his adoptive sister, Elizabeth Buck, contacted Edmond police. According to his Buck and their adopters, Billy has told them that he & his mother had been drinking when he choked his mother & passed out. Billy was convicted of 2nd degree murder & sentenced to Life imprisonment at hard labor without parole. Although non-adoptees have killed their biological mothers, it is extremely rare that an adoptee has killed his known biological mother & this is the first we've heard of and may be updated if Billy, who is in correspondence with AmFOR, is willing to provide further information, subject to his pending appeals. Source: Louisiana 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals 9-22-04 Judgment- (See also Hendricks' web page at http://www.amfor.net/prisoners/).

• Waddell, Nakisha, 15, stepfather adoption; bio-mother murder

  A 15-year-old Wythe County girl pleaded guilty yesterday to stabbing her mother [Vaughne Roxanne Thomas, 42] to death in a fit of rage, then burying her in their backyard..... A prosecutor described how Waddell flew into a rage and attacked her mother with a hunting knife when the mother called her too "chicken" to do it.... "Something snapped," the daughter told one investigator.... tried to burn the body, but then doused the flames in a panic when smoke started seeping from some of the 43 stab wounds. ....Thomas was upset over phone calls Waddell had made to her real father. The arguing worsened Thursday and, according to Waddell's statement, her mother grew so angry she threw a small figurine at her, bruising her arm. "She would verbally abuse me every day and call me a screw-up," Waddell later told investigators. Source: Times-Dispatch, 12-15-04; http://www.timesdispatch.com/.../MGArticle/RTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031779684623

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Mass Murdering Adoptees

(Listed alphabetically, with age at time of crime if known.)

Throughout recorded history, mass-murdering, genocidal villains have been depicted as having been abandoned and/or abused, or felt rejected by one or both parents in childhood, including adoptees...

Even non-adopted, mass murdering children, are triggered by family rejection:

• Freund, William, 19

  In the weeks before he donned a cape & mask & went on a shooting rampage in his Aliso Viejo neighborhood, killing 3 people at random, he had reached out for help on Internet with more than a dozen messages at http://wrongplanet.net asking for a "real life" friend, threatening a "Terror Campaign" & his own suicide. Freund, an adoptee diagnosed with Asberger's (a variation of autism, a neurological disorder, origin unknown). He was described by his former employer as "incredibly smart (a deep thinker) but lacked social skills severely" & Freund described himself online as "the only child of adoptive parents, a student at ITT Technical Institute in Anaheim who enjoyed computers, role playing, fantasy, pugs, food, guns" and his prior suicide attempts, also stating "...my mind's sick with depression." Volunteers offered to contact his adopters but could not locate them. No mention of his "birth" parents nor of William's desire to know about them was mentioned. See "Adopted Child Syndrome--Its History & Relevance Today" at http://AmFor.net/acs Source of Freund story: Los Angeles Times, 11-1-05, Front Page story continued on A-12 (and http://latimes.com).

• Hamilton, Thomas, 43, (School Shooter-killed 16 children & himself)

  Informally adopted by his grandparents who raised him & made him believe they were his parents. The woman he was told was his sister was actually his mother. On 3-13-96 at age 43, dressed in black & wearing earmuffs to protect himself from the noise, he sprayed 105 bullets into a Dunblane, Scotland elementary school gym killed 16 first graders & their teacher & wounded 12 other children, before killing himself. Source: http://www.indystar.com/library/factfiles/crime/school_violence/school_shootings.html

• Knight, Julian

  Born March 1968 & adopted at 10 days old by an Army couple, his adopters moved frequently. At age 12, his adopters divorced. Girls with whom he had intimate relationships testified that not only was he upset & angry over his adopters divorce but also he felt "profound unhappiness about having been adopted." Both subjects reduced him to tears after heavy drinking.

  Source: http://www.massmurder.zyns.com/julian_knight_04/html

• Moses, (the first adoptee)

  Biblical Moses, the first adoptee, is a "victim's role model"--a child of two races, with physical handicaps and character flaws. He was born a Levite--one of the 12 tribes of Israel--nearly put to death in a purge, sent floating down the Nile in a basket by his mother, rescued by an Egyptian princess and raised in the royal court "as her own." The adult Moses is described as having speech problems, perhaps stuttering, his face was deformed after seeing God, and he ordered his legion to butcher the boys, massacre the mothers, and to rape the daughters...

• Perry, Michael James, 18, (Romeo)

  Jim & Gayle Perry adopted Michael when he was an infant. He was sentenced to Death for the 10-24-01 shooting death of Sandra Stotler, 50, & is suspected of also murdering Stotler's son Adam, 16, & Adam's friend Jeremy Richardson, 18. Diagnosed in 2nd grade with hyperactivity disorder, Michael's adopters admitted him to several inpatient psychiatric facilities & residential treatment programs for troubled teens.

  Source: http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~archives/ABOLISH/rick-halperin/apr03/0047.htm

• Privacky, Seth, 18

  He said in his confession that he was angry because his father threatened to kick him out of their Michigan home, just before he murdered his whole family in 1998.

• Ramsey, Evan, 16

  On 2-19-97, when Evan Ramsey was 16, he walked into his school in Bethel, Alaska, pulled out a .12 gauge shotgun & murdered two people. Then Evan put the gun under his chin. But he never fired the final shot. After a short standoff with police, he surrendered & was convicted of murder and assault. "My main objective of going into the high school was to check out," he says. "To commit suicide." Up to that point, Evan had had a difficult life. When he was 7, his father went to prison. His mother became an alcoholic, & Evan & his brothers were shipped off to a series of foster homes. In one of those homes, he suffered sexual abuse & humiliation, according to court testimony. Psychiatrist Dr. John Smith, who examined Evan a few months after the murders, found that Evan had attempted suicide at age 10. According to Dr. Smith, Evan was depressed from a young age. By the time Evan was using marijuana, getting poor grades and struggling to control an explosive temper. Evan was an outsider, someone who didn't fit in with the athletes and popular kids at school. He was sentenced to 200 years in prison & will be eligible for parole when he's 75. Source: CBS-60 Minutes, 3-7-01 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1999/08/17/6011/main58625.shtma

• Weise, Jeff, 16

  His father committed suicide 4 years prior; his mother is in a nursing home after an auto accident...His grandfather had been raising him. On 3-23-05, while on a megadose of Prozac for depression, Weise went on a rampage, shooting to death his grandfather & the grandfather's companion. Then, armed with 2 pistols & a shotgun, he killed 9 people & wounded 7 before shooting himself to death....at his school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. ... the nation's bloodiest school shooting since Columbine High in Colorado 6 years prior. http://www.antidepressantsfacts.com/casualties.htm

• Williams, Charles Andrew "Andy", 15, ("The Santee School Shooter")

  His parents divorced when he was 5; his mother stayed in South Carolina & his father brought him from Maryland to Santee, a suburb of San Diego, California in 2000. An older son, Michael lives in Atlanta, Georgia. According to neighbors who knew Andy in Knoxville, Andy seemed to prefer being away from his home. He slept overnight at friends' houses with inordinate frequency & half-jokingly called his friends' mothers "Mom." Kathleen Seek's mother, Mary Neiderlander, said Williams "always wanted a relationship with his mom." Her absence is a sore spot for Williams, according to friends in Maryland. "That's the only time I saw him get violent -- when somebody said something about his mom," said Scott Bryan, 15. In 2001, on a downward spiral of rejection, isolation & anger, Andy went on a shotting spree with a 22-caliber revolver, killing 2 classmates & wounding 13 people. Source: CNN.com/US, 3-16-01; & http://www.apfn.org/apfn/school.htm

• Woodham, Luke, 16

  Went on a shooting spree at a Mississippi school on 10-1-97 after killing his divorced mother, Mary, 50, by beating her with a baseball bat & slitting her throat. Sources: http://CNN.com/US/97101/02/miss.shooting.folo

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Adoptees Who Killed Strangers

(alphabetically, single incident killing of other than their adopters, with age at time of crime if known.)

• ABDELA, Daphne, 15

  Excerpted from “Drinking, And Death, After Dark,” by Brad Stone and Matt Bai, Newsweek, 6-9-97: “Daphne Abdela lived with her wealthy parents in a co-op on Central Park West, one of Manhattan's prime strips of real estate. Christopher Vasquez's home was a brownstone on the other side of the park, in a working-class neighborhood on the border of Spanish Harlem. At night, the two 15-year-olds liked to disappear among the park's sprawling fields and pathways, descending on inline skates into a shadowy world of drunks and stragglers.....That's where they apparently met up with Michael McMorrow, a single, 44-year-old real-estate agent with a history of alcoholism. They shared some beers - and something went wrong. The way police described it, Vasquez slit the man's throat with a four-inch folding knife and, while Abdela urged him on, hacked off his nose and most of one wrist. Then, after they cleaned out the dead man's wallet and burned his identification, they tried to gut the body and dumped it into a lake, hoping it would sink. Instead, cops found the corpse bobbing peacefully, under a full moon......No one who knew Abdela and Vasquez by day would have expected this from them. Abdela is the adopted daughter of a millionaire food-service executive; until recently she attended a Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side. But students at the school say she was defiant and aloof, and she was ultimately expelled. She reportedly has a drinking problem and told police she originally met the murder victim at an AA meeting...”

• Baer, Kenneth

  A graduate of Thomas University, Philadelphia, Baer killed his girlfriend, Marina, 45, whom he called "My lover, my mother." In his mind, he was killing his adopter. He said he hit his female adopter several times when he was between 12 & 15. "Shedding Light on the Dark Side of Adoption" book by Marsha Riben

• Beardslee, Donald

  A homeless man diagnosed as schizophrenic & convicted of murdering an elderly woman who was an exact "double" for the adopter he had come to hate. Beardslee was the child of an affair between a married White woman & an African American man. For the first year of his life, he had been locked in a back room of the woman's home as an object of shame, and then was given up for adoption. He was first spared execution & incarcerated in a state mental institution but because California re-instated the Death Penalty in 1978, he was executed by lethal injection on 1/14/05 at San Quentin Prison. Source: "Another Death in the Dark Hours" by Al Martinez, LATimes.com, 4/24/05, http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/ la-et-martinez24jan24,1,1952581.column? coll=la-mininav-columns&ctrack=3&cset=true

• Berner, Timothy, 33

  Featured on "America's Most Wanted" as one of the FBI's "15 Most Wanted," Berner, a crack cocaine user, killed himself as a SWAT Team was closing in. He committed suicide with the same gun he took from the police officer, Mark Sawyers, whom he killed after he allegedly robbed a bank. Source: "Suspect: Man Was Quiet, Not Violent, A Friend Says" 6-11-04, p.5B

• Cannon, Joseph John

  Executed in 1998 in Texas for the murder of Anne Walsh in 1977. At the age 4, he was hit by a truck & left hyperactive, with a head injury and a speech impediment. Unable to function in the classroom, he was expelled from school at age of 6 or 7 & received no other formal education. He turned to glue sniffing and other solvent abuse, & at age 10 he was diagnosed as suffering from organic brain damage. Suffering from severe depression, he attempted suicide at age 15. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and borderline mentally retarded. From the age 7 up to the time of the murder, he suffered repeated & severe sexual abuse from male relatives. So brutal & abusive was his upbringing that he thrived better on Death Row, where he learned to read & write, than he ever had in his home environment. By the time he was killed, Joseph Cannon had spent more than half his life on death row.

• Carter, Marcus, 23, (Korean/African-American adoptee)

  In 1991, Marcus was tried for first degree murder of Amelia Lewis in Wayne County, N.C. when he was 23 (The murder involved an attempted rape. Marcus had been identified as a suspect in a rape elsewhere the night of the murder & by association was implicated in the Lewis murder.) .... Carter's life up to his conviction was a mess. He was born in Korea in 1968. His father was a black soldier, his mother Korean. When his father abandoned her, she gave him up for adoption, partly becuase of teh stigma of the bi-racial affair. His adoptive parents, another soldier stationed in Korea and Shirley Hill, soon split up, and Hill came back to Goldsboro with Carter when he was 4. Carter saw his father on and off for several years after that, but when the father remarried and had other children, Carter started getting in trouble, and the father disowned him--a fact Hill didn't know until his trial. She believes the source of his troubles was trying, and failing, to win back the affections of his adoptive father. Marcus was sentenced to death; now his execution is halted & his sentence commuted to life without parole (11/21/00). Source: http://www.unc.edu/student/orgs/cedp/page26.html "Death Watch," http://indyweek.com/durham/2000-11-15news.html

• Cotton, Marcus, 23

  He had been on drugs since age 5 as result of his adopter being drug addicted & habitually abusing hime & his siblings. He was convicted in 1996 & executed for the shooting death of prosecutor Gil Epstein, 27, when he found Epstein's badge in his wallet while robbing him in a parking lot. Source: Houston Chronicle, 11-5-97

• Dalzell, Andrew, 20

  Charged with murder in the 11-30/12-1-97 disappearance of Deborah Key, 38, when he was 20. After two miscarriages, one stillbirth & seeing one child die at 2-1/2, Juanita Dalzell Mullen & Michael Dalzell, her husband at the time, adopted Andrew in 1977 when he was 7 weeks old; they brought him home to Chapel Hill when he was 10 months old. (George Mullen is his stepfather of 2 years.) By Mullen's own account, her son grew up to be a troubled young man. A bright, former special-education student with attention-deficit disorder, Dalzell bounced from school to school & class to class trying to find his niche. Early in his childhood, she said, he suffered from depression. Numerous visits to psychologists & various medications failed to lift his mood. At 18 in 1995, his adoptive father, Michael, died of pancreatic cancer, & Dalzell, who was active in The Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill, gave up on a God that he felt gave up on him. He dropped out of Northwood High School in Chatham County & later got his GED. Dalzell had few social skills, few friends and didn't get along with his mom. He spent much of the following decade in his mother's house visiting chatrooms on the Internet, with brief interruptions by short-lived attempts at finding work. He lived on his own for only five months, in an apartment where his adopter footed the bill. Juanita Mullen said officers had been out to get her son for years & forced him to make his confession. Source: http://groups.msn.com/PRISONLONGHOUSE/yourwebpage12.msnw

• Dowdell, Richard, 27

  His 16 year old mother put him up for adoption after his 19 year old father abandoned them. His Canadian adopters divorced when he was 4. Convicted in Wyoming of murdering Cpl. Wayne Martnez (June 1997), Dowdell said he got an adrenalin rush out of killing the officer & that given the chance he would try it again. He described the killing as "fun." Counsellors who had worked with him as a youth testified he was suicidal & defense attorney Mark Voss portrayed Dowell's life as "a series of rejections." Source: The Billings Gazette; http://venos.soci.niu.edu/~archived/ABOLISH/rick-halperin/july98/0501.html

• Eastlack, John Patrick

  Adopted from foster care at age 16-months by Katherine Norgard, Eastlack was not diagnosed until age 30 with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The FAS diagnosis is the reason that a Pima County, Arizona judge reduced his Death sentence to Life in Prison for the brutal 1989 murders of Kathryn & Leicester Sherrill in Tucson. In 1999, he was hopsitalized from numerous stab wounds inflicted by other inmates. Source: Tucson Citizen online, "A Ticking-Bomb Baby," April 1999 article, http://www.come-over.to/FAS/Citizen/part3_5.html

• Fears, Randall Alan

  Born 1963 as Gregory Inman, & adopted at birth, he was convicted of first degree murder & sentenced to "life without parole plus 3 life sentences." Source: Fears' own letters to AmFOR.

• Ford, Patrick Hunter

  Adopted at age 6 weeks by a St. Louis News Anchor & wife who dicorced, he was convicted for the 1991 burglary & rape/beating murder of Nora Lee Attaway. His attorney contacted his mother whom he never met; she spoke of her love for him but she has not had contact with him nor provided any information about his father who he never met. Source: Ford's own letters to AmFOR & St. Louis Post-Dispatch newsclips, 10/2809/92 & 3/94

• Forman, Joseph "Jay", 16

  Described as a boy who was eager to please but who constantly felt rejected since discovering at age 11 that he was adopted. Murdered Janice Graffone in New Jersey. Source: "Forman Labeled a Problem Child," Trenton Times (NJ), 5-26-82

• Gerlach, Clayton

  Born 6-7-78 in Washington, birth name Perkins. He was convicted for 2nd degree murder which he claims was accidental. Earliest release date is in 2009. Source: Gerlach's letters to AmFOR.

• Goodman, Spencer, 23

  Executed 1-12-00 for the stabbing death of Cecile Ham, 48. On August 7, 1991, Goodman was arrested driving & wrecking Ham's vehicle in Colorado after a high-speed chase. Goodman confessed to her murder, saying that the day he got out of jail, instead of going to his halfway house, he just started walking. Eventually he ended up in a Walgreens parking lot in Houston, and as Ham was getting into her Cadillac, he attacked her because his feet hurt and he wanted some transportation.... I don't know why I did it, but I know that I was lost. I then put her in the trunk of the car." Later, he dumped the body in a field. Goodman had prior convictions for Burglary in 1989 (2 years imprisonment), Auto Theft (5 years). He was released on parole, revoked, then again paroled on July 1, 1990, the day before the murder. Goodman 's adoptive father, Barnard Goodman Sr., 62, testified that his immediate family fears the defendant -- who, at his own request, remained outside the courtroom during his father's testimony. Under cross-examination by Goodman's attorney, Steven Rosen, the father said he placed the decision of life in prison or death in the jury's hands. "At this point, he's broken the heart of our family, and we would rather not be any further involved in this than we have to," he said. In a letter written earlier this year, the elder Goodman told his son the whole family loved him when he was taken in at age 1. "I tried so hard when you were young to turn you around," the letter read. "We couldn't turn you around and you continued to do things that were against our laws, God's laws and the laws of society." The father and other family members left the courtroom after his testimony. Assistant District Attorney Fred Felcman, in closing arguments, called the defendant "society's worst nightmare." ....Megan Goodman states: "When I was 19, I was living on my own and thinking a lot about my Uncle who was sitting on Death Row. His crime was not something that was talked about in my family and frankly he was never talked about either. I decided that I wanted to know the whole story about what he had done and who exactly he was. So, without telling anyone in my family, I wrote him a letter telling him that I wanted to talk to him. He wrote back and said that he would love to see me. I prepared myself to go and visit a monster. I was sure that that was what he was. I remember when I went to see him I was shaking as I walked down the row of cages full of people waiting to die. I sat down and talked to my Uncle for the first time since I was in third grade. We talked about his crime, about the rumours going around the family and about things that we used to do together. By the end of our two hour visit I had completely changed my opinion of him. I realized that he wasn't this monster that I needed to be scared of but he was still my Uncle who loved me and I still loved him. Over the next year and a half I visited with him on a regular basis and we became very close. He was like my older brother more than my Uncle. At the time of his execution I was closer to him than anyone else in my life. There is not a day that goes by that I don't miss him. He taught me so much about myself and life. The most important thing that he taught me was to search for my own truth, don't just take one persons point of view as truth, because the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. My Uncle did a horrible thing in his life but that doesn't mean that he was horrible. I believe that it was Ghandi that said, "If we all took an eye for an eye then the whole world would be blind." Source: http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/goodman605.htm

• Grant, Matthew, 19

  Adopted by Gail & David Grant in Raleigh, North Carolina, Abused & neglected & diagnosed with ADHD as a child, his mother died when he was 7." Convicted 12-2-04 for killing Sheriff's Deputy, Mark Tucker, with a shotgun to avoid being arrested for violating his probation on a prior conviction for breaking into cars. Relatives said "He almost never expressed any emotion. He has learned that from the time he was a child to keep it bottled up inside." Source: The News Observor, 12-2-04, http://NewsObservor.com

• Graves, Jennifer Irene, 30

  A child care worker, she shot a 21-year old mother, Ronnie Katrina Holton, in the head & kidnapped Holton's 6-month old son, Jeremiah, because Graves was obsessed with having a baby.

• Hagen, Marjorie

  Acquitted of 1979 murder of her female adopter, Marjorie (Caldwell) Hagen was arrest in Ajo, Arizona, in 1991. She was convicted of insurance fraud & attempted arson & was thought to be responsible for a rash of fires. In 1983 she was also convicted of arson in Mound, Minnesota, & is suspected of killing her third husband, Wally Hagen, in 1992 & before that Hagen’s first wife, Helen, in 1980. Source: http://www.x-communication.org/willextras.htm

• Hall, Edwin Ray, 26

  The suspect: Edwin Roy Hall, formerly of Emporia, was charged Thursday with premeditated first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Kelsey Smith. Long before Edwin R. Hall, 26, stood accused of murdering an Overland Park teenager, an Emporia couple adopted him into their family circle. They had hoped that love and attention would help heal the hurts that had gone before in his young life. Hall... [was] charged with first-degree murder in the death of Kelsey Smith and aggravated kidnapping in connection with her abduction... Hall reportedly now has a wife and a 4-year-old son of his own. In 1988, Hall was a child in the custody of what is now the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. About that time, Emporian Carol Hall read a newspaper article about children who were eligible for adoption and were available through SRS. [Carole] Hall and her husband, Don, had a good life together, she said. They already were parents of three daughters, whom they loved dearly, and they were ready and willing to bring in another child to love. The child they chose was 7-year-old Edwin Hall. “I felt like we could make a difference, help someone out,” she said in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon. “I love kids. ... We took him into our home with the intention of adopting him.” The Hall family asked to keep the specifics of Edwin Hall’s personal problems private... Edwin, at 7, had behavior problems that easily could be attributed to the turmoil he had experienced in his short lifetime; some of those problems were evident during the short time he lived in their home prior to the adoption. And the Halls carried through with the adoption plan. “You think you can give them love and all those things they didn’t get, like support ...,” she said. “It works with some, but with him, it didn’t.” Edwin seemed to care for his new family, but even with their love and support, the behavior problems could not be overcome. He continued to act out at home and at school. “Basically, it was he was just real defiant,” Carol Hall said. The victim: Kelsey Smith, 18, of Overland Park went missing on June 2. Her body was found Wednesday in a wooded area in Missouri. Behavior problems escalated instead of diminishing and by the time Edwin was 15, he initiated an incident that made it impossible for him to stay with his adopted family. Carol Hall did not want to reveal details of the episode. After the incident, she said, Edwin did not remember it happening. The Halls realized that the teenager had become a potential danger to other members of the family. They had exhausted all of their options, and decided they would have to give him up for the safety of all concerned. The Halls had no contact with Edwin after he was returned to SRS custody, until three or four years ago, Carol Hall said. Edwin Hall called the family and Carol Hall made arrangements to meet with him. She wanted to talk with him and see how he was doing. After the meeting, she felt satisfied that the young man had gotten control of his life. He seemed calm and in control of his life. ... Later, seeing a photograph after his arrest, she realized that the suspect in the Overland Park murder was her former adopted son...“We would never have dreamed in a million years that this would happen.” SOURCE: "Adoptive Family Remembers Defiant Child" by Bobbi Mlynar, Kansas City Times, 6-8-07

• Hargon, Ernest Lee

  "There was speculation that Hargon was angry at being written out of his adoptive father's will." Source: "Community Grieves Over Slayings", Picayune Times (MS), 3-3-04 - http://www.picayuneitem.com/articles/ 2004/03/03/news/11family.txt

• Harr, Bryan A.

  Serving Life sentence in Michigan. He only knows his birth name "Patrick Charles," and father's first name "Leon." Feelings of rejection over being given up for adoption may have resurfaced & triggered the murder of a girlfriend who rejected him. Source: Harr's correspondence with AmFOR.

• Hauser, Daniel Patrick, 25

  Born 7-24-70 in California, on 1-1-95, he strangeld to death Melanie Rodrigues, 21, in Florida. He stated he did it from "an urge to kill" Aliases: Dan Hanser/Haliser & Jonathan Tork. Although his adopters, a CA college teacher & a copier salesman visited him from Oregon on Florida's Death Row, they stated they "find the situation too painful to talk about....and apprently support his decision to be executed." His adopters stayed out of the legal fray but his biological mother, Zainna Fawnn Crawford, helped him obtain a temporary stay of execution. Hauser had been telling his mother & lawyers to 'butt out,' & his state funded lawyers called his 8-25-00 execution by lethal injection "simply suicide." Source: Daily News-NW Florida, Jeff Nevell, 8-23-00; & FL Dept. of Corrections web-site, http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/hauser661.htm

• Hedlund, Charles Michael, 27

  On 3-10-91, Hedlund and his half-brother, James Erin McKinney, brutally beat, stabbed & shot 40-year-old Christine Mertens in her home, during the commission of a burglary. On 3-23-91, Hedlund and McKinney burglarized the home of 65-year-old James McClain & shot him in the head while he was asleep in his bed. Hedlund was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Mr. McClain & was sentenced to death. He was convicted of second-degree murder for the killing of Mrs. Martens, two counts of burglary in the first degree, & one count of theft. During his appeals process, Hedlund questioned the lack of weight given to his mitigating circumstances. Specifically, testimony was given during the punishment phase of his trial about the physical abuse his "stepmother" inflicted upon him daily during his childhood. Although Hedlund never claimed this excused his actions, he pleaded with the court to allow these circumstances to lessen his punishment to life in prison. In Arizona, the trial judge is allowed to determine the significance of mitigating factors... While admitting that Hedlund's mother beat him & frequently reminded him of his "illegitimacy," the trial judge held that, "there was no evidence of a causal relationship between the abuse & the murders." Subsequently, Hedlund was sentenced to die by lethal injection. In spite of significant emotional and mental problems. On 2-20-02 his execution was stayed. Source: http://ncadp.org/debalertaz01.html

• Hoadley, Darrell, 21

  Sexually abused by his adoptive father. Darrell's lawyers said he developed emotionally only to the level of a 12-year old. He was taken away from his adoptive mother, Luella Eisenbarth, for about 3 years, due to her alcoholism & hitting him with a belt. Darrell was convicted for participation in the 3-13-00 beating/stabbing death of Chester Allan Poage, 19, along with Briley Piper, 21, & Elijah Page, 19, allegedly to rob Poage's mother's house, on 4-22-00. Source: Midwest News/Raid City, ND/AP, 5-19-01; http://www.pressanddakotan.com/stories/051901/new_0519010007.html

• Hungerford, Brandi Lynn

  South Korean adoptee, adopted in Michigan. She robbed & murdered Tempe, Arizona multi-millionaire Rick Chance, 2002

• King, John William, 24

  Convicted of dragging a Black man to death behind his pickup truck ...King was adopted at age 3 months...was age 15 when his adoptive mother died...."

• Knoller, Marjorie

  Knoller was adopted as an infant by a dentist & a homemaker who was a former beauty pageant queen. Knoller and her husband, Robert Noel, both lawyers, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, after a judge overturned the jury's verdict of 2nd degree murder in the dog mauling death of Diane Whipple. Described as "introverted," & "showing no remorse," the prosecutor cites 52 instances of Knoller lying in court. Knoller & Noel "adopted" Paul "Cornfed" Schneider, 39, a White Supremacist also serving a life sentence for murder. Source: 11-2-03 "An Eccentric Pain" at Court TV site, http://www.courttv.com/trials/dogmaul/background-c_defendants.html)

• Kreutzer, Paul W., 20

  Born 2-22-72 & executed 4-10-02, Missouri, for the 9-2-92 murder of his neighbor, Louise Hemphill, who he first sexually assaulted & strangled to death, then stabbed in the neck 3 times, & struck her on the head 3 times with a baseball bat. The state's psychologist, Richard Gowdy PhD, testified Kreutzer suffered from sexual identity disorder, post traumatic stress disorder & borderline personality disorder from past physical & emotional abuse. Kreutzer was living with his adopters at the time of the murder. Whenever the Kreutzers punished their adopted son, they would squeeze his fingers with a pair of pliers & place him in a wooden box for long periods of time. They frequently hit him with various objects, from fly swatters to wooden boards, punished him for bed wetting by drinking his own urine, & punished him for sexual preoccupation by making him have sex with the family cows. He ran away from home at age 14. Source: http://for.missouri.org/fornew/april2002/april2002.html

• Lagrand, Walter & Karl, 25 & 26, (Brother of Karl; neither is related to adopted killer Michael Legrand)

  Walter & Karl LaGrand together attempted an armed bank robbery in Marana, Arizona, on 7 January 1982. During the attempted robbery, Ken Hartsock, the bank manager, was murdered and Dawn Lopez, a bank employee, by slashing his throat & inflicting 23 other stab wounds. Karl was diagnosed with several mental disorders. Walter was executed in Arizona (2-99) according to his own choice of method -- in the gas chamber -- apparently as a protest again the death penalty. His brother, Karl had been executed by lethal injection the week before (2-24-99). It took 18 minutes for Walter to die. The brothers were born out of wedlock in Germany to a mother of German nationality, Emma LaGrand, & [different] fathers of U.S. nationality. Walter was born on 26 January 1962 & Karl on 10 October 1963. A 3rd U.S. citizen serviceman stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army, Masie LaGrand, subsequently married their mother & adopted Walter, Karl, & their half-sister. Masie LaGrand brought his German wife & three adopted children to the United States, to the Tucson, AZ area in February 1967. At that time, Walter was 5 years old & Karl almost 3-1/2. The brothers never returned to Germany except to live in a U.S. military housing complex associated with the U.S. Army base in Mannheim, Germany, for about five months in 1974. Thus, they were largely brought up in the United States after living in Germany in their early lives. ....There also is no substantial dispute that Walter & Karl LaGrand had difficult & deeply troubled lives. As children, they repeatedly experienced rejection by their mother & their adoptive father. During their early years in Germany, their care was at times turned over to institutions. After they moved to the United States at ages 5 & 3, this pattern continued. Their mother took little or no interest in the brothers & welcomed their placement in foster care. Their adoptive father apparently became abusive & eventually abandoned the brothers & their mother & sister. Arizona State records contain numerous details of how the brothers felt rejected by their mother, angry, and frustrated by their situation. Eventually the brothers drifted into anti-social and ultimately violent criminal behavior, culminating in the murder of 7 January 1982. Source: Source: http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/Pending/99/feb_execlist.html -- & International Court of Justice, "LaGand Case, Germany v. United States of America, 3-2-00," - http://www.icj-cij.org/www/idocket/iguspleadings/iGUS_ipleadingsCounter_Memorial_US_2000327.htm

• Lajos, Domingo y De la Cruz

  Lajos was convicted, along with Ronnie Cortes y Duano, for rape-homicide of Nonieta Lepitin, at Monreal, Province of Masbate, Phillipines, 9-17-90. Lepitin was repeatedly hacked to death with a machete. Source: http://www.lawphil.net/jvdjuris/juri1993/sep1993/glc_105010_1993.html

• Lang, Scott, 17

  Arrested for murder of Richard E. Hosking, 55, assaulting Hosking's daughter, & stealing his car. Source: St. Petersburg Times 5-26-01

• Lee, Eric, 18

  Convicted of 1st degree murder of a police officer & aggravated vehicular highjacking in Illinois. His adopters testified that he had problems as a child and his biological family testified as to their substance abuse; an expert testified as to his mental disorder; Illinois Case #87089, 2-16-01

• LEGRAND, Michael, 26, (not related to adopted killers Karl/Walter LeGrand)

  Born "Clarence Michael Myers" in 1973 while his drug-addicted American parents were in prison, he was taken by his mother's sister, Donna Legrand & her husband Paul Legrand, a Frenchman. In 1977 when his mother, Judith Myers, was released from prison, her son was returned to her. She divorced his father in 1980 & married his former cell mate, Jose Raiford. Raiford brutally beat & sexually abused the 9-year old Michael (according to his mother's & sister's testimony) & his mother abandoned him to state custody. Paul Legrand found the boy, after a 2 year search, in a state home for emotionally troubled children, his personality completely changed. "You couldn't touch him, you couldn't hug him," Legrand later testified. Still Legrand adopted him in 1986. By the time Michael was 15-16, he started using drugs, was hospitalized several times & was homeless on & off. On 5-17-99 in a suburb of New Orleans, Lousiaina, Michael killed his friend Rafael Santos, stabbing hom more than 40 times with a plastic knife, screwdriver & pencil. His attorney, Ben Cohen, said Michael should never have been charged with capital murder--"It was politically motivated--It allows [officials] to appear tough on crime," he said. Although Michael has never seen France, France's vice consul in New Orleans, Louisiana, asked France to recognize his claim to citizenship, providing Michael's adoption papers to a French Court to determine his citizenship, while his U.S. attorneys argued that he should receive a new trial for second-degree murder. If an execution date is set, principles of International Law may be involved. Source: AFP, New Orleans, 10-19-03, http://www.soulfulchemistry.com/adoption.html

• Longo, Christian, 27

  Longo was sentenced to death by lethal injection on 4-16-03 for killing his wife & 3 small children & dumping their bodies in 2 coastal bays in 2001. "He was previously an admitted forger, liar, con artist, thief, philanderer, rubber-check writer & more.." (Detroit News 3-20-03). In "Longo's Father Makes Public Statement," (http://kgw.com 4-16-03),"Joe Longo, adoptive father of Christian Longo....[said about Christian Longo] "There can be no explanation for his actions...Even when he pushed us away, we were there for him and his family when they needed us...He gave little back but lies and eventually abandoned us completely." Sounds like all was not well in this adoption. On 5-31-05 CBS "48 Hours" aired a detailed report about Christian Longo, the murders, and his conviction -- never once mentioning Longo's adoptive status nor why he rejected his adopter [in keeping with the new "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" media policy censoring the "A" word]. See also "Adopted Child Syndrome" at http://AmFOR.net/acs

• Mann, Warlito G.

  Sentenced to 50 years, in Indiana, for stabbing death of his girlfriend, Shelly Meriman (9-15-99) when she wanted to end their relationship. He pled guilty with mitigating circumstances of a "prior troubled life." The Judge noted his "lack of remorse." Source: http://www.state/in/us/judiciary/opinions/archive/02190103.msm.html

• Martinez, Alexander Rey, 16 & 25, (Also Attempted to Murder Adopter)

  He was 16 when he was imprisoned on a 7-year Attempted Murder sentence. He was 25 when he murdered prostitute Helen Joyce Oliveros & a week later, in 2001, attempted to murder his adopter, Velma Griffin, who raised him from age 15 months to 9 years, by cutting her throat in what was called an "unprovoked attack." However psychologist Carmen Petzold found Martinez suffered from "numerous disorders" possibly stemming from his hellish childhood. Born to a heroin addict, Martinez was placed for adoption with a family in which he was verbally, physically, and, he claimed, sexually abused by his new "mother." Martinez told officials he was "beaten every night until my mother's hands hurt and she had to stop." He halted all legal appeals & was executed at Huntsville, Texas, by lethal injection on 6-7-05. Source: http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/martinez972.htm

• Pierce, Darci

  Kidnapped and killed a pregnant woman, Cyndy Ray, by cutting her open and removing her unborn baby, at Kirkland AFB, New Mexico, 7-7-97. Described as "grandiose and deceptive, Pierce, who was adopted, was desperate to have a child of her own to 'prove' that she was a better mother than her adoptive and biological mothers," said Michael Stone, a specialist in forensic psychiatry at Columbia University who has tracked the case. [Note: In Y-2000, when adoptee, KATHALENA DRAPER reneged on her promise to let her aunt, ERIN KUHN, adopt Draper's expected baby, Kuhn suffocated Draper & cut out the fetus with a kitchen knife; the baby also died.]

• Pitts, Shayne J., 18

  Indicted on a first-degree murder charge for allegedly slaying his pregnant girlfriend in the home of the millionaire executive who adopted him after his biological father, a suspected drug dealer, vanished 14 years ago. In a bizarre, first-of-its kind case in Concord, New Hampshire, Shayne J. Pitts' lawyer said he intends to fight the murder charge on the grounds that 19-year-old Melody Derosia-Waters, of Concord, spiked Pitts' drink with LSD. Source: Bob Hohler, Staff Writer, Boston Globe, 4-19-91

• Ramos, Marcelino

  Shot a clerk during a robbery. "His adoptive mother called him "senso" or "idiot"...his IQ being between 62 and 75. He was given up at birth by his mother who had syphillis & bore 11 children while working as a prostitute & drinking heavily. When he was 5 his adoptive father died. His adoptive mother died when he was 14...Ramos & a half-brother struck out on their own, often selling bottles and their own blood to make money for food." Source: "A Third Reprieve" by Sara Catania, LA Weekly, http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=39918

• Reese, John Loveman, 27

  On 1-28-92, he strangled to death his girlfriend's best friend, Sharlene Austin & was convicted in 1993 in Florida of 1st Degree Murder, sexual battery & burglary. Born 3-29-65 & abandoned at an early age, he was adopted. At age 7, he witnessed his adoptive father murdered his adoptive mother; he never saw his adoptive father again & was raised by a maternal uncle until age 14 & then by another uncle 'til that uncle's death, caring for the aunt thereafter. He is on Florida's Death Row. Source: Reese v. Florida appeal.

• Reeves, Randolph, 23

  Taken from his Omaha Indian reservation 2-8-56 & adopted at age 3 by Don & Barbara Reeves who raised him as a Quaker. He was convicted of stabbing to death a pregnant family friend. Source: Omaha World-Herald, 1-1-99 front page

• Ross, Johnny, 12

  Born in 1965 of Native North American/Ojibway ancestry and first adopted by an alcoholic woman in Winnepeg, Manitoba, he was removed by Children's Aid Society of Winnepeg to 14 different foster homes, then adopted by a White family when he was 9. In 1977, after telling his female adopter that he "wanted out of the adoption," he first aborted his attempt to kill both adopters. Soon thereafter he attempted to kill his entire adoptive family but shot only his adopter's sister, panicked, phoned 911, & was sentenced with 2nd degree murder, released at legal age & returned to Canada at age 19 where he found his biological family. He writes that, after viewing AmFOR's web-site, he now understands his motivation for killing.

• S.L.D., 13

  Known only as "SLD," Australia's youngest killer abducted a 3 year old toddler from her bed (Jan. '02). He then placed her on the driveway, took off her diaper, stabbed her in the chest & threw her body down an embankment "because her parents were always telling him to keep off their grass." He was jailed for 20 years, eligible for parole in 10. His mother, a prostitute, was a heroin addict who physically abused him; he was in foster care from age 2, adopted in 1993, expelled from several schools & diagnosed as suffering from a chromosone abnormality. Intellectually impaired, he had indecently exposed himself several times & stolen women's underwear. The Judge said there was no evidence of remorse from the boy. Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 8-31-02; http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/30/103050812316.html

• Saunders, Peter, 16

  Born 1-17-67, he was adopted & felt again abandoned by his divorcing adopters. At age 16, he raped an 84-year old woman but charges were dropped; at age 22 for he was convicted of raping & killing Elisa Totoni, 65. In 1995, he sent a threatening letter & bomb-like device to US District Judge Blanche Manning who had dismissed his suit against prison officials 3 weeks earlier; 50 years was added to his life sentence. Source: Chicago Tribune, http://www.ChicagoTribune.com, 12-13-89 & 3-2-05

• Sawdon, John, 16

  Sawdon, an adoptee with low IQ, had previously been involved in minor crimes & was sent to a probation service charity for teenagers. There, he met Rebecca Peeters,16, who abused alcohol, was violent & had run away from home several times. Sawdon & Peeters, together with Jermaine James, 16, who had been thrown out of his home by his violent father, all pled guilty to the beating murder of teenager Terry Hurst--a kind-hearted foster kid who had a speech impediment & mental age of a boy 4 years younger. Both James & Peeters had been seen "taking white pills" at the time of the murder. The only motive offered was that Sawdon resented Hurst because Hurst had dated his girlfriend. He had made several death threats against him. He had become so violent at home that his adoptive mother wondered if he was suffering from a mental illness or if he was on drugs. The 3 teens were each sentenced to 15 years' detention. Source: http://SheffieldToday.co.uk

• Severson, Karen

  Adoptee, serving 15 years to life, at Frontera, California,for killing a high school friend by drowning her in a creek.

• SHARE, Catherine "Gypsy", 27, (One of the "Manson Family Girls")

  Catherine Louise Share was born on December 10, 1942 in Paris, France. The oldest of the "Manson girls," she also came from the most interesting (and perhaps most tragic) background. Her Hungarian father and German mother were members of an underground resistance movement against the Nazis during World War II. Before the war ended, though, they killed themselves in an act of revolutionary suicide. Young Catherine was sent to an orphanage until she was adopted out by an American psychologist and his wife at the age of eight. By all appearances her life for the next several years was relatively uneventful; she attended Hollywood High School (where fellow Mansonite, Nancy Pitman, would later go before dropping out) and became an accomplished violinist, as had been her biological father. This all changed, though, when her adoptive mother, afflicted with cancer, committed suicide during Catherine's teen years. Cathy, as she was called in high school, was then left to care for her blind adoptive father until he remarried. It is not surprising that she then began to drift. Having nearly completed a degree in music, she dropped out of college, married, divorced, and wandered around California, picking up bit film roles here and there. ...It was through one of those roles that Cathy Share met Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil. ... Cathy, Bobby, and Bobby's wife Gail lived together as a threesome; when Bobby introduced Share to Manson, though, it was love at first sight. Now dubbed "Gypsy" by Manson, she came to live at the Spahn Ranch in the summer of 1968. She quickly became one of Charlie's most loyal fans, using her keen intelligence and storytelling abilities to bring others into the fold, including Leslie Van Houten and Linda Kasabian.... Though she has said in recent years that she knew nothing of the murders at the time, it is widely believed that she helped bury the remains of Manson victim Donald Shea and abandoned his car on a side street in the LA neighborhood of Canoga Park. Gypsy had her son Phoenix on January 5, 1971; she has said that fellow Family ember Steven Grogan was the father. She bounced back from the birth just in time to perjure former friend Linda Kasabian on the witness stand, saying that Linda was the orchestrator of the Tate murders and not her beloved Charlie. In a 1994 interview with prosecutor Bugliosi, Share said that she had only said what fellow cult members told her to say after dragging her behind a truck as a threat. Whether that statement is true or not, Gypsy did not exactly stay on the side of law and order following the trial. In the summer of 1971, Share and associates ... were all arrested for shooting at cops after attempting to rob a gun store in Hawthorne, California. Share was released after serving five years and eventually became a born-again Christian in the style of former cohort Susan Atkins. Today she is married to her third husband and lives under an assumed name in Texas. Source: http://charliesfamily.tripod.com/gypsy.html

• Shellman, Jimmy, 11

  Killed a 9-year old girl near Afton, OK, in 1958, from rage upon learning his adopter was actually his aunt; he confessed to the crime 45 years later.

• Smith, Eric, 13

  Adopted by his stepfather. His redheaded looks, & his age, were so completely at odds with his horrific crime that he almost got away with murder. In 1994, Smith was convicted of choking & battering the life out of 4-year-old Derrick Robie. A jury unanimously found Smith guilty of murder in the 2nd degree. He would be sentenced to the maximum sentence, nine years to life in prison. Smith’s bright red hair & freckles made him a target at school for years. And as a teenager, he was seen pedaling around town for hours on end--alone. Eric sodomized Derrick with a small stick that he had found.... then arranged Derrick's body: "The left sneaker had been removed and was lying near Derrick's right hand. And his right sneaker had been removed and was lying near Derrick's left hand. It almost looked like the body had been posed in that position." The jury heard that as a toddler, Smith threw temper tantrums and banged his head on the floor. He had speech problems, he was held back at school, and he was relentlessly bullied. When he asked for help with his anger, his adoptive father did not seem equipped to give it to him. Defense psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Herman diagnosed Smith with intermittent explosive disorder, uncontrollable rage. "Literally deadly rage and anger," said Herman. "After the episodic rage, the child may appear to be normal." Smith's mother, Tammy, said she took a drug to control her epilepsy while she was pregnant with Eric. Herman says he's not suggesting that the drug would have caused Eric to be violent, but he does believe the drug caused Smith's ears to be low set & caused his developmental delays, which profoundly affected his self-esteem. He says Smith's pain & rage overwhelmed him. She believes that Smith should be released. "The issue isn't what kind of disturbed child was he then," says Betzjitomir. "The question now is what kind of young man is he now? Because that's the question the parole board faces." She credits the enormous change she sees in Smith to the intensive counseling he received during the 6 years he was held at Brookwood Juvenile Detention Center. Smith was transferred to Clinton Correctional Facility, an adult prison, when he turned 21. Because of the sexual nature of his crime, the question of whether Smith was abused was repeatedly raised at trial, but repeatedly denied. However, there was testimony that Smith's older sister, Stacy, was sexually abused by their [adoptive]father. Eric Smith will be up for parole again in 18 months. His case will be reviewed every two years. Source: "Why Did Eric Kill?" (CBS 48 Hours, 12-10-04), http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/10/48hours/main660314.shtml

• Stein, Steven, 26

  His 16-year old mother lost him to adoption when he was born 3-6-68 in New Jersey. Steve was first placed in 3 foster homes during his first year before his adoption by the Steins who raised him in Phoenix, Arizona. Convicted for a death that occurred during a robbery, he has been on Florida's Death Row since 1994. Source: Florida Dept. of Corrections web-site & AmFOR

• Steinlicht, Mark Ernie, 50

  Shot his 44 year old adoptive brother dead; both men were adopted as babies, 6 years apart. Steinlicht's adopter, Gladys May Steinlicht, indicated that both her adopted sons "had not got along well...I think this has been pending for awhile." Source: http://bend.com/news/ar_view%5e3Far_id%5e3D226.htm, 8-23-00

• Steinman, Garry

  His adoptive mother left when he was 7 & his adoptive father cared for him at Lake Michigan. At age 8 he stabbed to death another boy for kissing a girl he liked, & served 22-1/2 years in California, Nevada & New Jersey for Armed Robbery, Burglary, Receiving Stolen Weapons, & admitted to killings he was never convicted of due to killing the witnesses also. He is now a prison minister & activist for prisoners' rights. Source: "In Depth: Awakening," Las Vegas Review Journal, 6-3-03; http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Jun-08-Sun-2003/news/21490058.html

• Swartz, Michael

  Michael was adopted, along with Larry Swartz who murdered their adopters in 1984. Michael was convicted in 1990 of murdering a Crownsville, Maryland man over a jar of coins & is still serving time in the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown. The Swartz's had turned Michael back to Social Services when he was 15, and Larry, then 17, killed the Swartz's in the belief that he would be "returned to the pound next." Source: See "Larry Swartz" listing on this page under "Adoptees Who Killed Their Adopters" for linked source of both stories.

• Thomas, Douglas Christopher, 17

  Executed in VA (at age 27) for the 1-10-00 murders (at age 17), of James & Catherine Wiseman, his girlfriend's (Jessica Wiseman's) parents. He confessed without advice of counsel & while high on drugs & alcohol. Like many child & juvenile offenders, Thomas had an extremely difficult childhood. His parents divorced before his 5-29-03 birth & at age 2 his mother left him to be adopted & raised by his grandparents. He never met his father until incarcerated. When he was 12, his life unraveled. Several close relatives, including his adopters, died suddenly. He was shuffled back to his mother, though the 2 of them did not get along. In 1989, at 16, Thomas attempted to take his own life.

  Around this time, he met Jessica Wiseman. Thomas said he was so desperate for love he would have done anything his new girlfriend told him to do. Wiseman's parents tried to break up the couple & her father threatened to kill him. "I wanted to be with my co-defendant," he said, "we were so much in love and her parents were trying to keep us apart. "Jessica just showed me that love I so desperately needed & wanted that I would have basically done anything to keep her around. But I was just a kid when I committed the crime... I still had the capacity to change, to grow, to learn, & I have." Thomas felt he should be given a chance to live. "I made the wrong decision. So I can't be angry at anyone but myself. But I don't feel the U.S. should execute juvenile offenders because it's basically saying that we have no chance to be rehabilitated. I can't see how at seventeen a court could say, 'Well, this juvenile doesn't have the capacity to learn & to grow & to mature."' Chris Thomas' execution means the United States was the first country in the world to execute a juvenile offender who claimed that such an execution violates international law & well established fundamental norms of international human rights. Source: http://www.clarkcountyprosecutor.org/html/death/us/thomas601.htm [Note: In 2005, the US Supreme Court abolished the Death Penalty for juveniles.]

• Thomas, Nigel

  Went to live with another family after complaining of abuse at the hands of his adoptive father & was one of 3 teenagers who pled guilty to manslaughter in juvenile court in connection with the stabbing death of Jason Robinson, 16. He was given a suspended sentence to be served under his adoptive father's supervision. Source: http://southcoasttoday.com/daily/06-95/06-10-95/o6/collettverdict.html

• Tombs, Jennifer, 16

  Adopted as a baby by unmarried Pastor Medeline Tombs, Jennifer shot childhood friend, Tanya Lavallais, in the head 5 times. Source: Crime Stories, CourtTV.com

• Triplett, Marvin Matthew, 25

  Born 4-7-64 in Aiken, South Carolina, raised in St. Louis, MO. Marvin has served the majority of his 12 year sentence. Marvin says he doesn't know where he was from originally.

• Troiano, James, 18

  Jimmy Troiano was adopted out of an orphanage at age four.... he's charged with aiding [Kasso] in murder of Gary Lauwer, 17.

• Van Dyken / Long Soldier, Fred Daniel, 26, (wrongly convicted?)

  Born 5-4-58 at Helena, Montana, to Native American parents named Long Soldier, he was later adopted by the Van Dyken family & grew up in Montana. Fred took his mother's name after being reunited with her & is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe. Convicted of the 1984 shooting death of Missoula Montana Sheiff's Deputy Allen Kimery at a traffic stop, he claims he was wrongly convicted & sentenced to Life Without Parole, but lost his last appeal. Source: The Missoulian, 1-22-85, p.5, & his own web-site at http://www.longsoldier-international.com/seite1.htm

• Van Strum, Jordan, 15

  Carol Strumm said her adopted, bi-racial son, Jordan, was mercilessly tormented with "nigger" by kids & adults in rural Oregon. At age 15, he killed a friend's grandfather & was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Source: Newsweek story, "When Teens Fall Apart," 3-99, p.43.

• White, Miriam, 11

  Stabbed to death Rosemarie White, a 55-year old hairdresser. At the time of the stabbing, she was living with a woman who hoped to adopt her. She said she ran away because she wanted to be in a juvenile home, and not with her adopters. Source: Philadelphia Inquirer.

• Woodruff, David Wayne

  His mother abandoned him at age 18 months & his father's girlfriend then gave him away to a customer at the coffee shop where she worked. There was evidence of cigarette burns on his legs & diaper area at the time. He & John Joseph Romano received the Death Penalty for first degree murder during an armed robbery. Source: http://www.ks.courts.org/ca10/cases/2001/02/99=6310.rtf

• Worley, Ron, 20

  Adopted by his biological grandmother, he was lied to about his parents' identities; beaten by stepfather; abused by adoptive brother, & killed Joyce Wroczynski on 4-8-01, afraid she would "tell others he was gay" & he would lose his family.

---

Attempted Murder by Adoptees

(Listed alphabetically, with age at time of crime if known.)

• Beange, Graham, 20

  In early April, police were called to Broadway Ave., near Hanna Rd., where they found a man, 59, and woman, 57 badly hurt. The couple's adopted son, who lived with them, was arrested. Graham Beange, 20, has been charged with two counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated assault. SOURCE: "Hammer Attack Kills Dad" by Jack Boland, Sun Media, Toronto, Canada [No photo available]

• Bennett Jr., Robert Lee, ("Handcuff Man," serial Torturer)

  Robert Lee Bennett Jr. was 22 months old when he was adopted. The childless couple who took him into their home was a successful attorney, Robert Bennett, and his homemaker wife, Annabelle Maxwell Bennett. Both parents appear to have loved him and were close to him.." For two decades, Robert Lee Bennett, Jr., operating variously in Atlanta, Georgia and Tampa, Florida, preyed upon gay male prostitutes and men he apparently thought were prostitutes. The attacks are believed to have started in 1968. [Bennett] paid the prostitute merely to take a drink of vodka, which must have seemed like an unusually easy way to earn a few dollars. Sometimes the well-spoken man told the prostitute that a study was being conducted on the effects of drinking a certain amount of alcohol and asked him to take part in this "research" for $50 or $100. Whatever the ruse, the drink was spiked and the prostitute quickly lost consciousness. He awoke to a horror. Often he found himself handcuffed and burned on his genitals or legs. Sometimes the attacker put cigarettes out on the victim, other times flammable liquids. Victims were reluctant to press charges. ...., they were prostitutes and didn't want to draw attention to their profession or homosexuality.... The Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a story naming Robert Lee Bennett Jr. as the suspected Handcuff Man. The next day, Tampa police requested information from their Atlanta counterparts, and they later charged Bennett with an attack on a Florida man, who had been doused in gasoline and lit on fire. The victim had survived, but the injuries were so severe that both of his legs had to be amputated. Young Bob is remembered as an outgoing teenager, involved in many organizations. Never an athlete, he was not among the most popular boys in school, but neither was he the victim of bullying. For his high school graduation, Bob's father gave him a picturesque $167,000 house located by Lake Wesauking. Bennett appeared to have grown into a bright and accomplished young man. He graduated from the University of Denver in 1969 and went on to earn a master's degree in political science from the University of Virginia. However, in 1971, while studying there, he was charged with indecent exposure. Records about this case have been expunged... In 1974 Bennett received his law degree from Atlanta's Emory University, took a job with his father's law firm of Davis, Murphy, and Bennett in Pennsylvania, and had another run-in with the law. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Bennett allegedly observed a "plainclothes Atlanta officer who was working undercover to catch male hustlers on Fifth Street near Cypress Street." ...Bennett mistook him for [a prostitute] and kidnapped him. The undercover cop was soon rescued, uninjured, by backup police. Kidnapping charges had been dropped by the time Bennett came to trial. His attorney cut an excellent deal by which Bob pleaded no contest to the relatively minor offense of simple battery. The millionaire lawyer got off with a meager $75 fine. In 1976, Bob had another legal difficulty,.. A young New Yorker was traveling in Pennsylvania when, police believe, he met up with Bob Bennett. The attorney paid the man to drink, and the two had sex in Bennett's car. They then headed for the lakeside cottage that had been the Bennett's high school graduation gift. For some reason, the man from New York got scared. He grabbed Bennett's keys, jumped in his car, and drove off. But he quickly crashed. The man refused to cooperate with police. Apparently, like so many of Bennett's victims, he wanted to keep his dealings with Bennett private. ...Robert Bennett Sr. "held a seat on the Civil Service Board, which reviews police promotions." Another investigator seconded that opinion. "Nobody wanted to press charges against him because of the influence of his father," the investigator said. "His father was gold." Guy Notte, an Atlanta lawyer who would eventually handle both divorce and criminal matters for Bob Bennett Jr., recalled a conversation he once had with a saddened Bennett Sr. about his son. "He is my cross to bear," the father said. "My wife loves him dearly and I love my wife and that's the only reason I put up with him." The Towanda police were, however, able to persuade Bennett Jr. that it would be best for him if he left the area. He moved to Atlanta. During roughly this time period, Bennett at age 29 began dating a female secretary, Sandra Powell, who worked at the law firm....She agreed to marry him despite his honest admission to her that they would not be husband and wife in the complete sense. Bennett told her that he was impotent. "The marriage was one of convenience for both parties. They enjoyed each other's company and he treated her like a princess," said Bennett's lawyer Guy Notte. According to Sandra Powell ... The situation "was very stressful," she recalled, but she "kept it inside and tried not to let it affect the relationship." Despite their troubles, they discussed adopting a child, but never followed through on their plans. In September 1982.... Bob Bennett Jr. was arrested and charged with the murder of 24-year-old James Lee Johnson, a dishwasher who had been shot. His body was found with his wallet missing. Although the charges were dropped two months later because of insufficient evidence, Sandra Bennett did not return to her husband. He [unsuccessfully] contested her suit for divorce. Three gay male prostitutes testified at the divorce trial that they believed Bennett to be the notorious Handcuff Man... Free on $300,000 bail, Bennett resided, as he had in the past, with his disabled mother, Annabelle Bennett. Despite objections, the deal went through. On February 24, 1992, Bennett appeared in an Atlanta courtroom and pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated assault. The sentence was 17 years in prison to run concurrently with the 17-year sentence that he was to serve in Florida for the attempted murder of Gary Clapp. The 44-year-old lawyer was also ordered to pay $65,000 in restitution for the medical bills of the two Atlanta victims, was banned for life from ever being in Fulton County, and was ordered to see a psychiatrist. After breaking his agreement, the notorious Handcuff Man was initially put into solitary confinement, partly because he feared other prisoners. While the Handcuff Man's sexual dysfunction may explain his choice of victims, it does not explain his barbaric cruelty. After all, there are millions of men who suffer from impotence, and very few of them become violent. There is no evidence that Bennett reached an orgasm while he was torturing his victims. Still, it cannot be ruled out, since his victims were usually unconscious. It is possible that, like a minority of other sex offenders who are described as generally impotent in non-violent situations, Bennett could only get erections or climaxes through criminal acts. He is not known to have expressed remorse for his crimes or any concern for the damage done to his victims. . He never would in so many words admit doing these things although he pled guilty." Once during his imprisonment, he appears to have been inoffensive as a prisoner. He did, however, break with Notte. Bennett attempted to bring an "ineffective assistance of counsel" claim against the lawyer because, according to Notte, "he believed that we had told him he would get out in two or three years." No attorney would take Bennett's case but he did find a lawyer who filed a suit against Notte to get Bennett's fee back. That lawsuit was still pending when Bennett died of a stroke on April Fool's Day 1998. He took the reasons for his hatred of male prostitutes, and the genesis of his extraordinary cruelty, with him to his grave. SOURCE: (for the full story on Robert Lee Bennet, Jr,) - Denise Noe, "Handcuffed and Helpless" for Crime Library http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/weird/handcuff/1.html

• Bocook, Charles, 16, and
• Bocook, Gladys, 14

  Teenagers, Charles (aka Justin Workman/Justin Smith), & Gladys (aka Sarah), waited for the Bocooks to fall asleep before igniting the house afire & fleeing in their adopters' car. Their adopters were injured in the fire but managed to escape through a window of their mobile home in Sardinia near Cincinnati, OH. The adoptees were tried as adults. Source: "Siblings To Be Sentenced for Attempted Murder of Adoptive Parents," Associated Press, 11-14-00

• Devlin, Michael, 40

  WEBSTER GROVES, MO. -- Curiosity about [Michael] Devlin's behavior and background has been running high since the stunning Jan. 12 discovery of 15-year-old Shawn Hornbeck and 13-year-old Ben Ownby inside Devlin's apartment in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood...Devlin, 41, has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping Ben, and his arraignment in Shawn's case is set for Wednesday. Adopted as an infant, Devlin knew no other family than the one James and Joyce Devlin carefully nurtured in this middle-American, progressive community....Joyce and James Devlin, a stay-at-home mom and an insurance executive, used their ample resources to provide a happy life for their kids. The couple even became foster parents and adopted 5-year-old Brian, who recalled family vacations at the Devlins' Lake Michigan cottage as the happiest times of his life... The Webster-Kirkwood Times would later honor the Devlins for their 50 years of marriage and involvement with children. Brian Devlin... estranged from his adoptive family, said he couldn't have asked for better parents...Brian Devlin said he has no memory of his brother Michael behaving badly at home. Brian said he, not Michael, was the problem child, hanging out with the wrong crowd in his early teens, drinking and using drugs and putting their parents "through a whole lot of grief, though nothing near what they're going through now."Brian Devlin left home at 17. A series of arrests for drunken driving eventually led to 18 months in a Missouri prison, but a fall in 2001 that nearly killed him forced changes in his life, and he said he has been sober since...He described his younger brother, Michael, as a normal kid, "a quiet dude," who was somewhat big for his age, who had no friends aside from his siblings. Michael attended both Catholic and public schools and graduated from Webster High. Brian Devlin said he can't believe, and doesn't want to believe, that the younger brother he once played Army men and fixed bikes with kidnapped Shawn and Ben and used a gun to kidnap Shawn, as alleged by the Washington County prosecutor. "We never used guns; there were no guns in the house," Brian Devlin said. "We were a very Catholic, very Christian family. They were great people, well-respected. Everything came from their heart, which is why they adopted kids. ..."I'm trying to come up with some reason why," Brian Devlin said. "I'm trying to give Michael the benefit of the doubt." None of the Devlins has visited Michael Devlin, according to visitor records at the Franklin County jail. Even Brian Devlin said he has nothing to say to his brother. SOURCE: "Devlin Brother Recalls Warm, Loving Family" by Cheryl Wittenauer, Dsert News/AP, 1-28-07

• Helder, Lucas (Luke) John, 20, ("The Smiley Face Mail Bomber")

  On 5-9-02, CNN let it slip that Luke is adopted with the single reference to "the young man's adoptive father" -- the only such clue, out of CNN's dozens of archived news posts about him at the time of his arrest. Later, a headline reads "Helder's Adoption Not Relevant" & the Omaha World-Herald speculates that Luke may "never be ready for trial...which will effectively prevent the outside world from understanding why the smiling, clean cut, quiet, polite University of Wisconsin art major who turned 21 following his confession, planted 24 pipe bombs in rural post boxes in 5 midwestern states, injuring 6 people & which he had hoped would form a 3,000 mile "smiley face." Some of the bombs were accompanied by his rambling notes about death "not existing" but being "the way to go to another life". If you don't know he's adopted, you'd have even less of a clue that many adoptees view life & death as inconsequential non-events--especially adoptees who kill. After all, adoptees are "legal fictions" with no true record of birth or origins; most have never seen biological relatives; most know nothing of their pre-adoption pasts beyond fantasy. It was reported that Luke's adopters & authorities were "baffled by the disparity between Luke & someone accused of domestic terrorism." Letters accompanying some of his bombs that were letters full of anti-government rhetoric also explained, "In avoiding death, you are forced to conform, you suffer mentally & physically." And to his classmates he wrote "I'm dismissing a few individuals from reality, to change all of you for the better, surely you can understand my logic." If you're adopted, denying reality of one's own true identity is expected of the adoptee who is "well adjusted" to the abnormal status of being adopted. U.S. District Judge Robert McQuaid said he believes Luke "suffers from some apparent mental health problems" and sent him to a federal prison hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, for psychiatric treatment which typically is permitted for up to 2 years while doctors mix "treatment and/or drugs" to make the person competent for trial and/or execution. One has only to listen to the words of Luke's music written for his rock band "Apathy" to understand what he was feeling--for example, in his recording, "Conformity" he says: "It's a story how I'm supposed to feel...because you told me so." And in his recording, "Back & Black" he asks: "Can we feel the pain?" Is providing adoptees with "psychiatric treatment & drugs" an acceptable substitute for being allowed to confront the reality of who they are, where they came from? Source: CNN.com & other online newsclips, May 2002 to 2004.

• James, (teenage juvenile, so first name was not published)

  Gladys Joyce James, 68, told officers that her adopted teenage son stabbed her at her home. He was charged with second degree attempted murder. Source: Ashland City Times online, 9-4-03. Response from Ashland City Times Editor about this story: "I've checked our old papers, and this was the only information published after the incident. I haven’t been able to find a follow-up on it, and given the boy’s age, I doubt we would have published it at the time...Thanks!" Gary W. Burton, Editor, The Ashland City Times, Ashland City, TN 37015, www.ashlandcitytimes.com

• McCray, Alvario S., 17

  Slashed the throat of a female store owner during a robbery; she survived. His female adopter commented "He is troubled by being given up by his [birth] mother & desperately wants to find her." Alvario stated "I love my adoptive mom with all my heart but there is something inside me that wants to find out where I come from." Source: News Herald, 7-17-97

• Monks, Christopher, 25, Contracted to kill his Adopters

  The parents of an Asperger’s [Autism]sufferer who tried to have them killed saw their son sentenced to an indefinite hospital order today, despite their pleas for leniency. Christopher Monks, 25, persuaded 20-year-old Shaun Skarnes, whom he had met online three months earlier, to stab the couple while they were asleep at their home in Chorley, Lancashire. The plan failed when Monks’s father, [Christopher Sr.], woke to find Skarnes in his bedroom with a large kitchen knife and managed to disarm him. Monks was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order yesterday and Skarnes, of Ellesmere Port, Merseyside, will serve an indeterminate term for public protection and cannot be considered for parole for at least three and a half years. The pair were convicted despite the fact that Monks’s father, [Christopher Sr.], and his wife Elizabeth have fully supported their son, who was adopted at the age of 10 months. They argued that his condition meant he was unable to separate fantasy from reality and that he had never intended to have them murdered. Monks had met Skarnes online in November 2008 and told him that he wanted his parents dead because they were over-protective and treated him like a child. The trial, in July, heard that Skarnes had gone to the house Monks shared with his parents in February last year to play computer games. He left, telling Mr and Mrs Monks he was going to catch a train home, but instead hid in a nearby park and returned late at night. The court heard he agreed to kill the parents in return for sexual favours, which would end in Monks allowing Skarnes to bite off his penis. Both men argued they were acting as part of role play but a jury at Preston Crown Court disagreed and found them guilty of conspiracy to murder after barely one hour of deliberation in July. Sentencing the pair at Preston Crown Court, Mr Justice McCombe said he felt for Monks’s parents. “No court could fail to be moved by the unstinting love they have for their son,” he said. “In their own words in a letter sent to me they say ‘Whatever sentence is passed, we will serve it with him’.” But he added both men continued to present a “significant” risk of harm to the public. “I recognise that Mr and Mrs Monks find this difficult to accept but the court has a duty to protect the public and ensure that they are not released into the community until that risk is eliminated.” Source: “Parents Stand by Son Who Tried to Have Them Killed,” by Mark Hughes, Crime Correspondent, (1-7-2010).

• Rogers, Anthony L.

  Convicted in Tennessee of Assault with Intent to Commit Second Degree Murder (1989). He testified that his biological parents were "a Dutch business man & a Saskatchewan Indian whore," that he was adopted at birth by the hospital delivery room nurse & a Marine, that his adoptive father physically abused him since age 5, that he was over-medicated & became an "amphetamine junkie." Source: http://www/tsc.state.tn.us/OPINIONS/tcca/PDF/021/rogersang/pdf

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Orphaned/Abandoned Killers

(including adoptive grandparents who also raised them)

(Listed alphabetically, with age at time of crime if known.)

• Acquin, Lorne J.

  A foster kid from Prospect, Connecticut who sexually molested 10 year old Sharon Beaudoin & then bludgeoned to death her entire family--the mother & 7 children -- and set their home afire to cover up the killings. Source, Brian Lane & Wilfred Gregg, "Encyclopedia of Mass Murder," Brockhampton Press, 1994

• Bell, Mary, ll

  Born in 1957 & jailed at age 11 in 1968 for killing 2 toddlers in the U.K. Abandoned by her father, she claimed she was subjected to sexual & physical abuse by her late mother, a prostitute, & by several men, leading up to her crime. Source: "Child Killer Bell: I Was Abused," BBC Online, 4-29-98.

• Black, Robert, ("Smelly Bob")

  Robert Black abducted, sexually molested & murdered little girls. He never knew his parents. When Jessie Hunter Black, a 24-year old unmarried factory worker, gave birth to her son on 4-21-47, she refused to put his father's name on the birth certificate. Within days of Robert's birth, Jessie decided to have him fostered & never had contact with her son again. He was fostered by Jack & Margaret Tulip, in their 50s; Jack died when he was 5 & Margaret died in 1958 when he was 11; he was once again deprived of a mother. In his 40s, Robert told psychologist Ray Wyre, "I don't know whether it was pressure from her parents or whether she just didn't want me. I don't know." Although a local couple offered to take him in, it was decided that Black would go to the Redding Children's Home near Falkirk, close to the place of his birth. Other children (and later adults) called him "Smelly Bob" because he smelled. His fascination with sex & the secret of birth, the hidden contents of the womb, was clearly exacerbated by the loss of the second mother. Sudden, mindless violence perpetrated against those physically less able than himself was typical of Black as a boy. At the age of 12, Black made his first inept attempt at rape. For at least a year, possibly 2 out of the 3 that Black was at the Red House, a male staff member regularly sexually abused him. Even before his time at the Red House, Black had associated sex with dominance & submission. Over 20 years later a little girl called Caroline Hogg was to be abducted from Portobello, & later murdered. Others followed from 1982 on until he was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/blackseasons_10.html

• Bonin, William, ("Freeway Killers")

  By 7 years old, Bonin was already on his way to being a lost cause. The child of an abusive, alcoholic father who once gambled away the family home, Bonin & his brother were often left by their mother, Alice Benton, with their grandfather despite the fact that she had grown up being sexually abused by the man, a well-known pedophile. At age 8, Bonin served his first stint behind bars, being jailed in juvenile hall for stealing license plates & became the sexual plaything to older boys, setting the stage for his own twisted understanding of sex. According to Connecticut medical records, Bonin had been approached for sex by an older boy & although young William was afraid of the attacker, agreed to participate, provided that he be restrained. William eventually returned to his home, where he began fondling his brother and other children in the area. William joined the U.S. Air Force & served as an aerial gunner in Vietnam, where his service record indicates he was a good soldier, winning a good conduct medal. It wasn’t until after he received his honorable discharge that the military learned Bonin had sexually assaulted two men in his outfit at gunpoint. He moved from his native Connecticut to Southern California, where he began the dark descent into savagery -- murdering make hitchhikers whom he sexually assaulted & abducting & recruiting accomplices (Munro, Butts, Miley) who say he had a hypnotic hold over them -- that would end in San Quentin twenty-one years later. See also James Munro (under Adopted Serial Killers). Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_kilers/predators/bonin/bibli_9.html

• Cannon, Joseph John, 17

  Was on Death Row for a crime committed when a teenager. Although he suffered serious head injuries after being hit by a truck when he was 4, subsequently spent years in an orphanage, & from age 7 to 17 was sexually abused regularly by a step-father & grandfather, & attempted suicide at age 15 by drinking insecticide, none of this information was presented to the jury in Cannon's case.

• Carignan, Harvey Louis, ("Want-Ad Killer")

  Born 5-18-27 in Fargo, North Dakota. His mother was around age 20 & single. He was sent to live with his aunt & uncle in Cavalier, ND, then to his grandmother in Williams, ND. Then sent to live with another aunt before running home to his mother. His mother attempted to place him in an orphanage & in 1939 he was sent to reform school in Mandan, ND for the next 7 years. During these years, Carignan claims female employees sexually abused him. He enlisted in the U.S. Army 1948. In 1949 at age 22, Carignan raped & killed Laura Showatler, 57, the first of several such murders. In 1950 he was convicted of 1st degree murder & sentenced to death by hanging. The Supreme Court ruled that Carignan’s confession was unlawfully elicited & overruled; he served 8 more years ar Alcatraz, was paroled in 1960--the first of several paroles, & subsequent rapes & murders. Sentenced in 1975 to 30 years for the sodomy & indicted on murder charges against Katherine Schultz; under Minnesota law he could serve no more than 40 years no matter how many years that total sentence was for. By pleading guilty he would avoid a life sentence & only serve 40 years.

• Dahmer, Jeffrey Lionel, ("Cannibal of Milwaukee")

  An intense fear of lonliness that goes back to his parents' divorce led Jeffrey Dahmer to kill homosexual men he lured to his aprtment where he kept their dismembered remains. Source: "Lonliness Cited in Mass Murder Case," Los Angeles Times, 8-4-91, p. A-22

• De Celeda, Fernando Alonzo, ("El Bandito")

  Calling himself Pedro Hechuage from Uruguay, he was actually born in Buesnos Aires, Argentina & little is known of his parents. Source: Art Crockett, "Serial Murderers."

• Fish, Albert Hamilton, ("The Moon Maniac")

  Born 1868 to a respeted family in Washington, DC, his father died when he was 5 & he was sent to an orphanage. He ran away frequently, began to suffer halluciantions & became obsessed with religious themes such as sin, sacrifice, atonement through pain, forcing his own children to paddle his buttocks til he bled. He inserted needles into his groin, scrotum & anus, ate fecal matter, inserted cotton balls doused with alcohol into his anus & set them aflame. Prosecutors are certain he molested nearly 400 children. In 1928 he killed 12 year old Grace Budd, dismembered her body & ate several pieces. Fish was found to be "sane" & guilty of premeditated murder, & sentenced to death. On 1-16-36 it took 2 jolts for the electric chair to kill him because he had left 29 needles in his body which short-circuited the chair.

• Franklin, Joseph Paul, 27, (aka James Clayton Vaughn; Racist Murderer)

  Born in 1950 as James Clayton Vaughn, in Mobile, Alabama, Franklin, a White racist, was the eldest son of an alcoholic drufter who abandoned his family for months & years at a stretch... & when his father was home he'd beat his children--Franklin absorbing the worst. As a youth, Franklin was into food fads & fringe religions, dropping out of high school after an accident severely impaired his eyesight. He married at age 18 in 1968 & beat his wife as his father had beaten him; after his mother's death in 1972, he joined the American Nazi Party & the Ku Klux Klan, changed his name & from 1977 to 1980, using 18 pseudonyms, he wandered the country killing people solely because they were Black or Jewish. He was charged and/or admitted to killing 20, severely wounding 6, & received 2 life sentences for murdering a Black 13 & 14 year old.

• Garrett, Johnny Frank, 17

  Executed in 1992 for rape-murder of a Catholic nun, Sister Tadea Benz, in 1981. As a child was beaten by a series of stepfathers & seated on a hot stove after being hit by a truck ; he was sodomized by a number of adult prisoners; was forced to perform pornographic acts on film, including having sex with a dog. Although he admitted to being high on LSD & breaking a convent window to steal a stereo, he never signed a confession & proclaimed his innocence to the end; in 2004, 12 years after his execution in Texas, Attorney Jesse Quackenbush says he has compelling evidence of Garrett's innocence. Source: PrisonLonghouse@groups.msn.com, 12-4-04.

• Gary, Carlton, ("The Stocking Strangler")

  Born 12-15-52 in Columbus, Georgia, as a child, he never felt truly bonded to his mother or anyone else. His father was a construction worker who wanted nothing to do with the son he had sired & saw Gary only once when the boy was 12. His impoverished mother lived a nomadic life, moving about from one address to another, & deposited the youngster with his relatives between Columbus, Georgia & various places in Florida into his mid teens. He was 16 when he came back to the Fort Myers, Florida, house where he had lived with his mother & found it empty. He learned that his mother was in Gainesville & followed her there. Then the frustrated, largely unguided teenager embarked on a criminal career, beginning whith breaking & entering. The young Black man was convicted on 9 counts of strangling murders of elderly white women & sentenced to death. Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/carlton_gary/1.html

• Gilmore, Gary

  Shortly after he was born, Gary's father, Frank Gilmore, a con man, gypsy, alcoholic, brutal autocrat & abusive husband, decided that Gary was "not his son," but the progeny of a son of his by a previous marriage whom his wife, Bessie, knew. It seemed a way for him to detach from him. When Frank's son's got older, before finally abandoning them, he would whip them with a belt;tTheir mother would not protect them & began to beat them as she was beaten. In 1976, just after being paroled, Gary killed 2 men on 2 consecutive nights & when convicted insisted there be no appeal & was executed. Source: Associated Press articles,"Forensic Files/Court VC" online, & Chosen Children at http://TheChosenChildren.com.

• Graham, Barbara, 30

  Born 1923 in Oakland, CA, Barbara's mother was sent her to a reformatory when she was only 2, then raised by neighbors & got little education. As a teenager Barabara was promiscuous & in trouble with the law & sent to the same reformatory where her mother had been an inmate, released in 1939, got married, enrolled in a busines college, had her first child, divorced by 1941, served a jail term in 1944 for prostitution, married a second time in 1951 & married Henry Graham in 1953 by whom she had another child, who was 2 at the time of his mother's execution at San Quentin, CA gas chamber, for killing an elderly widow, Mabel Monahan, while attempting to rob her. She never showed remorse. Two films were made about her, both called "I Want To Live"--One starred Susan Hayward & the other starred Lidsey Wagner. Source: http://www.richard.clark32.btinternet.co.uk/graham.html

• Greenwood, Vaughn, ("The Skid Row Slasher")

  He left his foster home in Pennsylvania for California in the 7th grade, earning a living as a migrant worker & began killing helpless male derelicts in Los Angeles in 1964 until convicted & sentenced to life in prison. Source: "Serial Killers A-Z," http://www.geocities.com/verbal_plainfield/a-h/greenwood.html

• Gufler, Max

  Deprived of contact with a parent. Source: "Serial Murderers, " Biography, A&E Cable TV series.

• Heidnik, Gary, 34

  Born May 24, 1945 to Michael & Elle Heidnik, he & his brither, Terrence, were raised in the Cleveland suburb of Eastlake, Ohio. His father was a violent man who regularly physically & sexually abused his wife; they divorced when Gary was 2 & then raised by their mother, until Gary was 6 & he & his brother were sent to live with their father & their father's new wife. He alegedly suffered beatings at the hands of both his father & stepmother & suffered a life-long problem of bed-wetting abou which his father would humiliate him. At school, he was bulied & but scored 148 on an IQ test in 5th grade. He dropped out of school in the 9th grade & joined the Army at age 17m serving for 13 months. In Germany, a doctor diagnosed him with schizoid personality disorder; he wa honorably discharged in 962, earned his GED & attended University of Pennsylvania. In 1985, he married Bett, raped & beat her until she left him 3 months later while pegnant. He was never known to have any kind of relationship with his son, Connor. By November, 1986, Gary had abducted 6 women & held them in a basement of his house in Philadelphia where the captives were sexually abused, beaten & tortured in front of each other. One of the women died & he dismembered her body, storing her arms & legs in the freezer, labeled as "dog food." On March 24, 987, one of his captives managed to convince Heidnik to let her out to find more captives whereupon she informed authorities. Convicted of 2 countgs of murder in 1988, Heidnik was sentenced to death & was executed by lethal injection July 6, 1999 at SCI Rockview (PA), the last person to be executed by the Commonealth of Pennsylvania. SOURCE: NY Times (3/3/87 ("STrange Portrait of Tirture Suspect"); Crime Library online, page 7 ("Guresome Evience"); Philadelphia Weekly ("Return to the House of Horrors", 3/13/02)

• Hitler, Adolph, ("The Furor")

  Born 4-20-1889, the 4th child of Alois Schickelgruber & Klara Hitler, his mother died when he was 14 & his father died when he was 16; he then lived in Vienna, an anti-semetic city, on an Orphan's Pension in a homeless shelter, was arrested for avoiding military draft but was declared unfit/too weak/unable to bear arms; later enlisted in the Bavarian Army, was wounded; served 9 months of a 5 year prison term during which he wrote Mein Kamp, an inflated autobiography, anti-semetic philosophy, history of Nazi party & primer on how to use propaganda & terrorism to build a political organization -- which he did upon the death of Hindenberg in 1934. As Dictator, he annihilated 2/3 of Europe's Jewish population; committed suicide with his mistress Eva Braun on 4-30-45. Source: http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.hitler.html

• Kemper, Edmund, ("The Co-ed Killer")

  Born in 1948 in Burbank, California, his parents fought constantly & divorced; he bounced around between each parent until finally living with his paternal grandparents on a farm in rural California. At age 10, he was moved to a dark, windowless basement; that's when his fantasies began; at age 14 he was sent to his father, ran away & went on a killing spree -- killed both grandparents, his mother with a claw hammer & decapitated her & raped her headless corpse, & did the same to his mother's friend who showed up unexpectedly. From 1970 to 1971, he roamned the streets of Santa Cruz, California, killing 6 co-eds from UC-Santa Cruz. In 1973 he was arraigned on 8 counts of murder & is serving a life sentence. SOURCE: "Modus Operandi Serial Killers" web-site; & "Serial Killers A-Z" -http://www.geocities.com/verbal_plainfield/i-p/kemper.html

• King, Alex, 12, and
• King, Derek, 13

  Abandoned by their parents to foster care & later returned to their father, the brothers, along with Ricky Marvin Chavis, a convicted child molester, were found guilty of 2nd Degree Murder of the boys' father, Terry King, 40, whom the boys bludgeoned to eath with a baseball bat before setting his house ablaze.

• Knighton, Robert Wesley

  Executed 5-27-03 at age 62 in Oklahoma for the 1-8-90 robbery-shooting deaths of Richard & Virginia Denney in Oklahoma & was suspected of killing 2 others in Missouri. The Dennys adopted Sue Norton when she was 2 or 3 & had a biological daughter, Maudie Nichols. The 2 sisters disagreed as to whether Knighton should be executed & Norton befriended & forgave him for murdering her adopters. She doesn’t condone what he has done, but she understands his background may have led to this tragedy. Knighton wouldn’t talk much about his childhood & said most of it he couldn’t remember. He was born 2-5-41 (Missouri) to a mother who had 8 husbands & many boyfriends. He can’t remember wanting to grow up to be anything. Knighton was emotionally and physically abused from an early age, Norton says. When he was 5 or 6 years old, he went to Thanksgiving dinner at his grandparent’s house & was forced to sit outside on the porch as the rest of the family celebrated inside--His only crime was that he looked too much like his father. He cried and banged on the door until neighbors called the police. Even they didn’t help Knighton, who was then called “Bobby.” One of Knighton’s mother’s boyfriends hit Bobby hard enough that the child ended up in the hospital. Bobby, who only stayed in school through the fourth grade, ended up in a boy’s reformatory when he was 12. He told Norton that boys who misbehaved were beaten or placed in a cellar for days at a time. He spent time in other juvenile facilities & landed in prison in Oklahoma as a young man. In 1974, he was in the Missouri State Penitentiary, sentenced to 40 years for manslaughter & kidnapping charges. In 1989, he was set free. “They told me to go home,” Knighton said...“They just didn’t tell me where home was. Everybody was gone. I had no one to talk to.I had nowhere to go.” He was then a drug addict. Source: http://www.cjonline.com/stories/051803/kan_execution.shtml

• Manson, Charles

  Born "No Name Maddox," 11-12-34, his 16-year old unwed mother, Kathleen Maddox, could not remember his birth date, so changed it to 11-11, Armistice Day. He was placed in several foster homes. Manson would say that his mother was a teenage prostitute but relatives said she was merely "loose." Source: Vincent Bugliosi, in "Helter Skelter, The True Story of the Manson Murders," p. 174.

• Massey, Jason

  Called a "bad seed," & a serial killer from an early age, Jason was physically abused by the father (who abandoned him & his mother when he was 2), & sexually abused by a babysitter at age 5, Jason was executed in Texas for 1993 Dallas murders of his adoptive sister Chrostina Benjamin, 13, who he stripped, raped, disemboweled & dismembered, & Brian King, 14. Since age 9, he tortured/killed animals & killed several other girls, ages 10 to 13, when they rejected him.

  Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/jason_massey/7?html?sect=2

• Nelson, Earle, 37, ("The Dark Strangler;" "The Gorilla Killer")

  Both of his parents died of syphillis in 1898 when he was 9 months old. He was raised by his widowed, distant, devoutly Pentacostal grandmother & became obsessed with the Bible. Nelson was officially linked to 22 murders, 1926-1927. Known as the Dark Strangler & Gorilla Killer.

  Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/history/earle_nelson/1.html

• Prudom, Mary

  Deprived of contact with a parent. Source: "Serial Murderers," Bibiograpy, A&E Cable TV series.

• Puente, Dorothea

  A poisoner who grew up in an orphanage. Source: "Attachment & Loss: Separation, Anger & Anxiety," a book by John Bowlby, England.

• Purdy, Patrick, 26, (Cleveland Elementary School Shooter)

  A "loner" raised in Stockton, Ohio, he had a criminal record for drug offenses, robbery, burlary; but it was not until he was sent away to live with relatives in Sandy, Oregon, that he returned to Stockton to shoot up Cleveland Elementary School with an AK-47, randomly shooting children scattered on the playground and at their desks. He then set fire to his car & shot himself in the head with a handgun after killing 5 children in 1-1/2 minutes, all Vietnamese & Cambodian refugees ages 6-9, & injuring 30 others. (see also Brenda Spencer) SOURCE: Brian Lane & Wilfred Gregg, "Encyclopedia of Mass Murder," Brockhampton Press, 1994; & Chosen Children, http://TheChosenChildren.com

• Ridgway, Gary, 33, ("The Green River Killer")

  Born 2-18-49 in Utah, avoided the death penalty by confessing to murders of 48 women prostitutes from 1982 to 1998. Source: http://www.crimelibrary/serialkillers/predators/greenriver/index_1.html

• Sithole, Moses

  He was born in 1964. His father, Simon Tangawira Sithole, his mother, Sophie, & his 5 siblings lived in Vosloorus, a historically black area just south of Germiston and Boksburg. While Moses was still a child, his father died & his mother was soon unable to manage financially & decided to leave her children at a police station. She made them understand in no uncertain terms that they were not to tell the police officers that she was their mother. The children were placed in an orphanage in Benoni, but the boys were soon transferred to the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Sithole claimed that they were mistreated & he ran away three years later. Thus, again we find the absent father figure identified by Robert Ressler as a frequent characteristic in the serial killer's childhood. In addition, the rejection by his mother undoubtedly left an indelible impression on the young Moses, & probably initiated his resentment towards and hatred of women.He found employment in a number of menial capacities, on farms and at the numerous gold mines surrounding Johannesburg. Like Bundy, Sithole apparently didn't lack female company, although his relationships tended to be fleeting. Sithole told some of his rape victims that a girlfriend had wronged him. Thus we have an absent father figure, a mother who deserted him & a woman who, whether real or imagined, mistreated him in some way. At his trial, Sithole, smiled as if the extinguished lives of 37 women & one child (all for which he was convicted)were all very amusing...which is indicative of the mindset of both the psychopath & the serial killer--—that other people are merely objects and props for them to use & abuse according to their whim. Source: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/moses_sithole/14.html?sect=2

• Smallwood, Dion Athanasius, 22

  Native American/Hispanic, his parents divorced when he was young & he was depressed over several rejections at the time he murdered is girlfriend's adopters in Oklahoma.

• Spencer, Brenda, 16, (Cleveland Elementary School Shooter)

  Brenda lived with her divorced father, who bought her the gun for Christmas that she used to shoot up the school. It was her reaction to her parents' separation. She had been involved with drugs & petty theft & was addicted to violent films. (See also Patrick Purdy) Source: Bian Lane & Wilfred Gregg, "Encyclopedia of Mass Murder," Brockhampton Press 1994, & Chosen Children, http://TheChosenChildren.com

• Tingler, Richard

  Deprived of a parent. Source: "Serial Murders," Biography, A&E Cable TV Series

• Unterweger, Jack, 25

  Son of an Austrian streetwalker & an American soldier, he received his first life sentence at age 25 when he strangled a prostitute with her bra because she reminded him of his mother: "I envisioned my mother in front of me, & I killed her." Hailed as a model for rehabilitation, Jack was granted parole in 1990. Within months of his release his success as a writer translated into expensive suits, fancy cars & regular appearances in local talk shows, but he kept up his old habit of strangling prostitutes for kicks, leaving at least 6 dead. In 1991 he was hired to write an article about prostitution in Los Angeles. While on assignment he got to travel in an LAPD patrol car & murdered 3 prostitutes before returning back to Vienna. By February, 1992, he was wanted for the murders of 8 women, but escaped with his 18-year-old girlfriend to Switzerland, Paris & New York, pausing to call newspapers & talk shows in Austria to proclaim his innocence. Unterweger was eventually deported back to Austria where he was indicted for the murders of 11 prostitutes, including 3 from Los Angeles. On 6-28-94 a jury in Graz, Austria, found him guilty of 9 of murders & acquitted him of 2 others. The next morning prison guards found him dead in his cell hanging from a pajama cord.

• Wesbecker, Joseph, 47

  Born in 1942, his father died when he was 1 year old; he had a "poor & difficult childhood," at first being raised partly by his mother, age 16, & partly by relatives, but ended up in an orphanage. Later, he took up a trade as a printer, had 2 failed marriages, & in 1988 & 1989 was prescribed Prozac for depression, began to talk about fantasized sexual abuse, & on 9-14-89, he went on a killing spree at his work place, the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Kentucky, killing 8 employees. Source: http://www.healyprozac.com/Trials/Fentress/background.htm

• Williams, Alex, 17

  Born to an 18 year old mother & father who lived separately, his mother would disappear without warning for days or weeks & on one occasion for a year. During such absences he lived with his maternal grandmother who would beat him with the heel of a glass slipper & tree branches. When his mother was home, she also (in her own words) "whipped him often" & he had head injuries from the beatings. Alex was sentenced to death for abductng, robbing, raping & shooting to death Aleta Carol, 16 (3-4-86) & was executed (8-24-00).

  Source: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR511212000?open&of=ENG-376

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