Little Murderers

When they found him dead in his bed, his face was discolored and swollen. An autopsy disclosed that his skull had been fractured and part of his brain reduced to a pulp. After careful investigation, the police established that there had been two murderers and identified them as brothers who lived in a neighboring apartment. The killers had dropped their victim repeatedly on the floor, struck him again and again with a woman's high-heeled shoe and bitten him several times. What was even more unusual, however, was the age of those involved in the case: the slayers were only five and two years old, and their victim was an eight-month-old infant.

This murder and four similar ones are described in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association by Pathologist Lester Adelson of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University. The phenomenon of the "battered child" who has been killed or maimed by his parents is well known (TIME, Nov. 7, 1969), but the existence of what Adelson calls the "battering child" has scarcely been recognized. To Adelson, the importance of his five cases "far transcends their number"; while death wishes in children are known to be common, very few adults are aware that a preschool child is actually capable of murder.

Adelson culled his examples from the records of the coroner's office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, during a period of 42 months. The victims ranged in age from seven weeks to eight months--their assailants, from two to eight years. Of the six little murderers, one was retarded, one was a "slow learner" and four were "apparently normal." Three of the young murderers assaulted relatives: a cousin, a brother and a nephew. One killed an unrelated infant his mother was caring for.

To allay any doubt that the murderers were really young children, Adelson reports that investigation "failed to raise even a scintilla of evidence of adult maltreatment." The motive in each case, according to Adelson, seems to have been intense jealousy. Each of the young killers wanted to get rid of a younger rival who threatened "his sense of security or place or priority in the household."

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