By Lauren Hasbrouck
Ask any true crime aficionado who the "youngest serial killer” is, and they’ll probably answer Mary Bell, the eleven-year-old English girl who murdered two young boys in 1968. But there is a lesser known, even younger, and more prolific killer than Mary: meet seven-year-old Amarjeet Sada, murderer of three other children in 2007.
Amarjeet was born in Bihar, India, 1998. His father, Balaram, was a laborer, and his mother, Parul, stayed home to raise Amarjeet. He was a temperamental boy who threw tantrums when his parents weren’t able to afford new toys. Still, he was their firstborn son, and his mother would pamper him, even placing a black dot on the side of his head daily while saying, “kisi ki nazar na lage,” a saying for the protection against evil. When his younger sister was born, the struggling family moved to Musahar, a village with a population of 2.5 million people, twice the population of Hawaii, in search of more opportunities.
Amarjeet was a quiet, reserved child who enjoyed solitary endeavors like playing with toys, climbing trees, and exploring the town around him. He sought to escape the drudgery of his daily life and find entertainment amidst the marginalized community, where many people didn’t even own homes and were forced to live in tents and makeshift shacks. They struggled to work long hours in the sweltering heat, all for the sake of their children. These children were the joy of the village, giving the exhausted adults a reprieve from their labor and a source of joy and light. They would often approach Amarjeet and ask him to play, but he would sulk and reject their friendly attempts, preferring his own company. For Amarjeet, life was likely equal parts dull and dismal, and the addition of his baby sister into his home at age seven stole even more of his exhausted parents’ attention from him.
A visit from Amarjeet’s aunt would prove to be the tipping point in his young life. Arriving to the area due to a new job as a maid, she left her six-year-old daughter in the care of Amarjeet’s family. One day, his mother had to go to the local market to purchase vegetables and left the children alone. Overburdened by this responsibility and no doubt resenting this new intrusion into his life, the young boy gazed at his cousin with dark thoughts brewing in his mind. He pinched and slapped her round cheeks, her wails filling him with glee. Either to cease her cries or his own desire for violence, Amarjeet wrapped his hands around the squealing girl’s throat and suffocated her. The child’s agonized tears and pedaling legs didn’t discourage him; they had the opposite effect on him, and he savored every moment of it. He dragged the body into the forest nearby and found a brick. He smashed it into the dead girl’s skull, pulverizing it, then buried the body beneath a shallow layer of leaves and grass.
When his mother returned home to discover the cousin missing, Amarjeet confessed what he’d done and took her to where he’d buried the body. A brick and a stick identified the grave. As she removed them, she dug up pieces of torn bone and flesh, but rather than report him to the authorities and tell the girl’s mother the truth, the family conspired to save face by concocting a story about an unfortunate “accident” to tell his aunt. His only immediate punishment was to be tied to a pole by his father and beaten. This mistake would further embolden the disturbed young boy, and ricochet in his family’s face.
One afternoon, Amarjeet’s exhausted mother sequestered herself for a nap and entrusted the care of his baby sister to Amarjeet. She drifted deep into the void of sleep until she was awakened by the distant, dwindling cries of her baby, but by the time she went to check on her, it was too late. Amarjeet’s mother lifted the limp body of her baby girl from her crib; the infant had been strangled by her brother. He’d tossed the baby’s body on her back and went back to playing with his toy car. The sobbing mother asked her son if he had done this; he smiled and said, “Yes.”
When his shocked father entered the room upon his wife’s urging, he slapped the boy and asked, “Why did you do it?”
“Just like that.”
After a moment, he asked a question of his own. “What wrong have I done in killing her?”
The boy clearly delighted in the act of violence and murder, perhaps finding some power over children who stole attention from him. And he didn’t see any moral issues with what he was doing, but even worse, his parents’ handling of the issue enabled his ongoing behavior.
This time, the news made it to some of their neighbors, who advised them to report the murder to the authorities. Again, the parents shielded their firstborn son, calling the grotesque murder a “family matter” and conveying to the boy no severe punishment would await his crimes. He started to consider these infanticides a “game.” But like all games, this too would soon come to an end.
Although rumors spread and Amarjeet’s behavior ostracized him from the other villagers, he remained oblivious and unbothered. He would strike again, this time outside his own family, and this time, things would be different.
Amarjeet was walking outside a primary school when he heard the cries of another infant. This must have sparked some primal urge in him, since he went searching for the child inside the school. He found six-month-old Kushboo swaddled in cloth, asleep inside a classroom. Her mother, Chunchun Devi, had left her there, thinking it was a safe place for her child while she ran some brief errands. But when she returned, her baby was nowhere to be found. Frantic, Chunchun ran around the village, asking if anyone had seen her child. Some of the villagers remembered seeing Amarjeet carrying the child, so Chunchun and the other villagers called the police. They brought Amarjeet in for questioning, at first thinking there was no way this young boy could’ve done such a horrible thing, and that he was boasting or playing a cruel prank.
The child remained calm and collected as he entered the station, not intimidated by the men in uniform like many of his peers. They led him into the interrogation room and sat across from him, looking into his cold, dark eyes while he stared back at them, emotionless.
“Did you kill Kushboo?” they asked.
“Give me a packet of biscuits, and I will tell you.” The boy’s detached demeanor made the interrogator’s blood boil, but they had no choice except to give in to his demands. He then confessed, “I hit her with a brick over and over and killed her.” Afterward, he led them to the mangrove forests outside the village where he’d laid her down, taken a brick to her head, and buried her beneath a pile of grass and leaves.
While in custody, the boy admitted to his other crimes. He smiled a lot but spoke little, perhaps reliving his memories of the murders and obtaining pride from them.
Tasked with diagnosing the enigmatic child, Panta-based psychoanalyst Shamshad Hussain claimed he was a “sadist who derived pleasure from inflicting injuries.” Another psychologist studying his case explained, “Such aggression may be hereditary and may be caused because of great chemical upheavals in the brain.” This chemical imbalance and other “conduct disorders” meant that the child couldn’t differentiate right from wrong, and they surmised he targeted babies because they couldn’t retaliate. There were some reports of abuse in his childhood, which possibly sent him seeking an outlet for something helpless to repeat this abuse on. The closest motive he ever gave was that he “was jealous of the attention the other children received.”
Ultimately, sadists and psychopaths are often a result of nature over nurture, but in this case, his parents’ protective behavior both enabled his misdeeds and encouraged his building resentment. In addition to his psychopathy, Amarjeet was a narcissist who felt like he wasn’t receiving the attention he deserved and acted out to obtain it. Adrift and powerless, living in a poor village without much attention or amenities, Amarjeet found entertainment, and an outlet, elsewhere. And to him, nobody’s feelings mattered but his own.
The police had enough evidence to convict Amarjeet and charge him with murder, but under Indian law, a child cannot be sent to prison. Instead, he was sent to a children’s home in Munger, a highly populated city in East India, where he remained in an isolated room until the age of eighteen. Now in his mid-twenties, rumors say he's changed his name to Samarjit. Others say he’s gone to Brampton, Canada, courtesy of a fake passport. No one can say if he will kill again, and if he does, we may not even knowhe was responsible. But without proper treatment and medication, it’s likely Amarjeet will experience the same urges he did as a child, and now he’s fully grown and more capable of covering up his crimes.
One can hope his parents will no longer protect him.
Anyone interested in Amarjeet’s case should study the aforementioned Mary Bell, if you haven’t heard of her. Ten-year-old Bell was the unwanted child of a prostitute who was later sexually abused by her mother’s clients. Mary housed extreme rage and likely killed her victims, two little boys younger and smaller than her, as an outlet for this anger. Sometimes overlooked is the fact that she had an accomplice, a young girl named Norma Bell (no relation) who was developmentally delayed and submissive, led astray by the clever and demanding Mary. Like Amarjeet, Mary was sent to live in a rehabilitation facility and released into the world at age 23. Now living under a pseudonym, Bell has a child and grandchild of her own.
Cayetano Santos Godino, also known as Petiso Orejudo (big-eared midget), was born to Italian immigrants in Argentina in 1896. He exhibited hallmark signs of psychopathy, including starting fires and animal abuse. He was also a compulsive masurbator. Before his first murder in 1906, he’d already beaten two other children. He committed his first murder at age ten, burying a young girl alive, and went on to murder three more victims and assault seven others across a span of six years. Arrested in 1912, he was first sent to a reformatory, but was then sent to a penitentiary because of his continuing violent behavior toward people and animals. He died there in 1944 under suspicious circumstances, though some surmise it was because of a rupture from an untreated illness.
Thirteen-year-old Ida Schell was a nurse for various families in Munich. In 1907, after several infants died under her care, the decision was made to exhume the bodies of the buried babies. Each skull was found to have a single hole in it. At first, Ida denied any involvement, saying she was far too gentle natured to harm the children. But under cross-examination, she confessed to killing six infants by sticking a sharp hairpin into the base of their soft skulls. She claimed to have done so because their crying “roused unconquerable revulsion,” and “excited her to such a degree she lost all control,” leading to her being willing to do anything to silence the babies. Schell was the child of a drunken laboror and often referred to as “dull-witted,” said by schoolmates to “laugh without reason.” She was transferred to an asylum for mental examination; her fate remains unknown.
Finally, we have Jesse Pomeroy, “the Boston Boy Fiend,” born in 1859 to a veteran of the US Civil War and his wife. He was often bullied because of his harelip and a medical condition leaving one eye with a white film over it. From 1871-1872, at age twelve, Pomeroy attacked several young boys with his fists, a belt, and a knife. He was arrested and later paroled to his mother, deemed “mentally deficient” but allowed to return to society. This was a major mistake, since Pomeroy committed his first murder a month later. He was convicted of beating and mutilating a young boy and young girl to death, and sentenced to death, later commuted to a life sentence. He often tried to escape from prison, exhibiting more cleverness than he had in his daily life before incarceration. He claimed he “was driven” to kill and didn’t know why, though rumors state a poor reaction to a childhood smallpox vaccine created chronic pain and stress and impacted his attachment to his mother. He died in solitary confinement at age 72.
There are many other cases of young murderers, whether they killed in several isolated incidents or a single mass killing event. So what do these other cases have in common with Amarjeet Sada’s?
Often, there’s a biological component, the psychopathic “lack of empathy”, but more often than not, these children are neglected or abused. Their kills are the result of seeking to find power or attention, or to entertain their curiosity or negate their boredom. The age-old adage of “nature or nurture” usually amounts to the answer being a combination of both, with a lack of nurture exacerbating an already present nature in these young children. Many children are unwanted or born into a situation where they’re competing for attention or resources, or they’re shipped off to foster or group homes. Many children who struggle in situations like these don’t go on to kill but exhibit troubling behavior, nonetheless. That makes “nature” the missing X factor in kids like Amarjeet, an innate psychopathy that goes on unchecked and untreated and is allowed to flourish.
If you or someone you know has a troubled child, take the time to talk to them and consider therapy, because intervention at the right time can improve their lives, and might save others.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. Amarjeet Sada has no entry in this archive's roster, and the reason matters: he was seven or eight years old, below the age of criminal responsibility in India, and he was never tried. What is on the record is his confession and his detention, not a conviction, and the article should be read with that held in mind throughout. The comparison cases do have entries. Mary Bell is carried here at two; she was ten at the first killing and eleven at the second, and was convicted of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. Cayetano Santos Godino is at four. Jesse Pomeroy and Ida Schell have no entries here, and Schell's case, a thirteen year old nursemaid in Munich in 1907, rests on a contemporary account whose sources this archive cannot check.