A child who kills presents the law with problems it has not solved neatly. Courts built for adults have had to decide, case by case, whether a 10-year-old can form an intent, whether a 14-year-old can be put to death, whether a 12-year-old can be locked away for life, and what to do with a teenager who has served his sentence and may kill again. Ten cases, spread across more than a century and two countries, show how those questions were answered, and how often the answers changed.
Only a few of these cases involve deaths in more than one separate attack. Jesse Pomeroy in Boston in 1874, Graham Young in Hertfordshire in 1971, Mary Bell in Newcastle in 1968 and Craig Price in Rhode Island in 1987 and 1989 belong to that small group, though in Bell’s case the verdicts were manslaughter and in Price’s there was no criminal conviction at all. The others killed once, alone or with a companion, or in a single outburst of violence. Their cases are included because they changed how the law treats the young, and because each was, in its day, the case people meant when they asked what a child could be capable of.
Jesse Harding Pomeroy was born on November 29, 1859, the son of Ruth Ann and Thomas Pomeroy. By the summer of 1872 his father had left the family. Between February and September of that year, six small boys, aged five to eight, were attacked and beaten in South Boston and Chelsea. On September 20, 1872, one of them identified Pomeroy at a Boston police station, and the others identified him too. The next day, before Judge William G. Forsaith, he confessed and was sentenced to six years at the House of Reformation at Westborough. He was 12.
He did not serve the six years. On February 6, 1874, he was released for good behavior, on the recommendation of a Boston police captain and an agent of the State Board of Charities, according to the City of Boston Archives, which holds a collection of records on the case.
Within weeks of his release a girl was missing. Katherine Mary Curran, known as Katie, was 10. She disappeared on March 18, 1874, after a visit to the newsstand that Pomeroy’s mother kept in South Boston. A reward poster issued from the mayor’s office asked for help in finding her, and the rumors around her disappearance were raised before the Board of Aldermen at the end of that month. Horace Millen was 4. He was killed on April 22, 1874. Pomeroy was arrested at about ten o’clock that night and taken to the Charles Street Jail. Katie Curran’s body was found on July 18, 1874, and two days later Pomeroy, then 14, confessed to her death.
His trial began on December 8, 1874. On December 11, according to the City Archives, he was found guilty of the murders of Horace Millen and Katherine Mary Curran, and the jury recommended mercy on account of his youth. He was sentenced to hang. The sentence hung over him for more than a year while Massachusetts argued over what to do with a boy that age. In 1876 the Governor’s Council commuted the sentence to life imprisonment in solitary confinement; WBUR, in a 2015 segment with the author Roseanne Montillo, named the governor as William Gaston.
Pomeroy was held at the Charles Street Jail until September 7, 1876, when he was moved to the State Prison at Charlestown. The jail’s own log book records at least three attempts to escape. WBUR, citing a 1929 Boston Daily Globe report on a prison transfer, wrote that he had been denied a glimpse of the world for 53 years and that he spent about half a century in solitary confinement. He died on September 29, 1932, at the Bridgewater hospital for the criminally insane.
Alcolu was a segregated mill town in South Carolina. In March 1944 two white girls were killed there: Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, who was 7 according to UPI and The Post and Courier and 8 according to The Christian Science Monitor. UPI reported that they were found dead in Alcolu on March 23, 1944. George Junius Stinney Jr., a Black boy of 14, was arrested soon afterward. He confessed, and later denied it.
What followed took 83 days from arrest to execution. The trial lasted a single day, jury selection and deliberation included, and the all-white jury returned its verdict in about 10 minutes. His court-appointed lawyer, a tax commissioner who had never represented a criminal defendant, called no defense witnesses and did not cross-examine the state’s, the Monitor reported. No appeal was filed. On June 16, 1944, Stinney was put to death in the electric chair at the state prison in Columbia. He was so small, UPI reported, that he sat on a Bible to be strapped into the chair. He was the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century.
His family left Alcolu. One of his sisters later said they fled to Pinewood and that she never saw her brother again. The family had been told to leave town or face lynching, UPI reported.
Seventy years later his surviving relatives and their lawyers went back to court. In January 2014, at the Sumter County Judicial Center, Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen heard a petition for a new trial. More than 100 spectators and reporters filled two courtrooms, The Post and Courier reported. A sister testified that her brother had been with her all day, tending the family cow, and that the two girls had passed by and asked about maypops before going on their way. "I would love his name to be cleared," she said. A brother testified by videotaped deposition that he had seen no bloody clothing at home. A forensic pathologist, Peter John Stephens, said in a deposition that the autopsy appeared to conflict with the confession, including on whether a 95-pound boy could have done what was described. A niece of Mary Emma Thames told the court her family believed the right person had been convicted.
The judge said she was not deciding guilt or innocence, only whether Stinney had received a fair trial. "No one here can justify a 14-year-old child being charged, tried and executed in 83 days," she said at the hearing. The evidence and the trial transcript had long since disappeared.
In December 2014 Mullen vacated the conviction under the rarely used writ of coram nobis, finding "fundamental, Constitutional violations of due process." She found that the confession was likely coerced, given the gulf in power between a 14-year-old Black boy and the white officers who questioned him. "I can think of no greater injustice than a violation of one’s constitutional rights," she wrote. The solicitor who had argued to keep the conviction in place, the Monitor noted, was himself the son of South Carolina’s first Black state Supreme Court justice since Reconstruction. The ruling did not say who killed the two girls. It held that the boy executed for their deaths had been denied the fair trial the Constitution guaranteed him.
Graham Young was 14 when he stood in the dock at the Central Criminal Court in London in July 1962. By that spring he had given poison to three people: his sister, his father and a boy at his school. All three recovered. The court convicted him on three counts of causing grievous bodily harm by administering poison, found that he was suffering from psychopathic disorder, and made two orders under the Mental Health Act, 1959: one sending him to Broadmoor, a special hospital, and a restriction order forbidding his release for 15 years without the Home Secretary’s consent. Had he been dealt with as a sane offender, the Home Secretary later told Parliament, he would have faced about seven or eight years in prison.
Broadmoor had no separate place for a boy of his age, a point a member of the House of Lords raised a decade later. Progress in his treatment was slow at first, the government said. In June 1970 the consultant responsible for him reported that there had been profound changes in him and that he was no longer a danger to others. On that advice he was conditionally discharged in February 1971, at 23. He had to live at an approved address, report to a probation officer, attend a psychiatric outpatient clinic, and stay in touch with the Broadmoor consultant who had treated him. He could be recalled at any time until 1977.
He went first to the Government Training Centre at Slough and then to a job with a firm at Bovingdon, near Hemel Hempstead, in Hertfordshire. He complied with the conditions of his discharge and gave his supervisors no grounds for suspicion, the government later said, but his interest in poisons had come back almost as soon as he left the hospital. He did not obtain poison through his employment, the Home Secretary told the Commons.
In 1971 men who worked with him began to fall ill. Two of them died. When his trial opened at St Albans Crown Court in June 1972, the Watford Observer described him as a 24-year-old foreman accused of poisoning eight people, seven of them colleagues, and reported the prosecution’s description of the victims as "human guinea pigs." On June 29, 1972, the jury convicted him of murder and other grave offenses, as the Lord Chancellor told the House of Lords that day, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The verdict became a political event the same day. The Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, went to the Commons to explain how a man found dangerous as a boy had come to be living and working freely. More than 300 patients had been released from Broadmoor in the previous 12 years, he said, and Young was the only one known to have killed again while under supervision. "Poisoning is a unique crime," he told the House. The only way to guarantee absolute safety, he conceded, would have been to keep a young man in Broadmoor for the rest of his life. In the Lords, the Lord Chancellor, Quintin Hogg, defended the men who had supervised Young and said he had hidden his renewed interest in poisons with considerable ingenuity. Maudling announced that no restricted patient would leave a special hospital without a second consultant’s concurring opinion, that supervision would be tightened, and that employers would be told enough to report concerns.
He also announced two inquiries. A review under Sir Carl Aarvold, the Recorder of London, reported in January 1973 and led to an independent board to advise the Home Secretary on the release of difficult cases. A wider committee under Lord Butler of Saffron Walden examined how the criminal law dealt with mentally disordered offenders; a psychiatrist writing to a Commons committee in 2000 described the Young case as the one that led to it. The psychiatrist G. Robertson later traced a fall in the number of restricted patients sent to ordinary local hospitals after 1973 and suggested the publicity around the case may have been the last straw for a long-standing unease about such placements.
Young spent the rest of his life in custody. He died in his cell at Parkhurst prison, on the Isle of Wight, on August 1, 1990.
Scotswood lies in the west end of Newcastle upon Tyne. In the spring and summer of 1968 two small boys from its streets died. Martin Brown was 4. He was found dead in Scotswood on May 25, 1968, and his death was at first taken for an accident, La Nación reported in a 2020 retelling of the case. Brian Howe was 3. He died in Scotswood on July 31, 1968; he had been strangled.
Only after the second death did suspicion turn to two girls from the same streets: Mary Bell, who was 10 when Martin died and 11 by the time of her trial, and a 13-year-old neighbor, N.B. Detective James Dobson questioned them, and both were held at the Newcastle West End police station. La Nación reported that Mary mentioned a pair of scissors in connection with Brian’s death before that detail had been made public. Both girls were charged with the murder of both boys.
The trial opened at Newcastle Assizes on December 5, 1968, before Mr Justice Cusack. The evidence took nine days to hear, the London Review of Books later recorded. Both girls denied the charges. In December 1968 the jury acquitted N.B. of everything. It found Mary not guilty of murder, and guilty of the manslaughter of both boys on the ground of diminished responsibility. She was sentenced to detention for life under section 53(1) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, the High Court recorded in 2003. Her name had been made public at the trial, and it would follow her for the rest of her life.
There was no obvious place to hold a girl of 11 under a life order. Salon, reviewing a later book about her, reported that she was held for a time as the only girl among about 20 boys. In 1977, at 20, she walked out of Moor Court, an open prison, and was at large for a short time before she was found and returned, an episode La Nación said drew wide coverage in the tabloid press. In all she spent about 12 years in custody, the High Court found. She was released on licence in 1980, at 23, with a new identity approved by the Home Office; La Nación gave the date as May 14, 1980. She remains on licence for life and can be recalled.
Gitta Sereny, a writer who had sat through the trial, published The Case of Mary Bell in 1972. Her argument was that children who kill are responding to harm done to them. "It isn’t that they’re motivated to kill by evil inside them," she told CBS News in 1999. In 1998 she published a second book, Cries Unheard, built on long interviews with Mary, who had been abused as a small child, Sereny reported. Mary told her that at 11 she "didn’t understand the concept of death," CBS reported. For years, Salon wrote, Mary had denied killing Martin and described her part in Brian’s death as secondary.
Mary had been paid for her part in the book, and the payment set off a storm. In the Commons on April 29, 1998, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said most people would find it wrong that money was paid or received in respect of books about such crimes. In the Lords the next day the government said the Proceeds of Crime Act 1995 could not clearly reach the case. Reporters found Mary and her teenage daughter, and the two had to move. Martin’s mother, June Richardson, told CBS News the book had brought fresh pain to her family and to the Howe family.
The courts had protected Mary’s daughter since her birth in 1984, through an injunction in wardship proceedings that barred identification of mother or child until the girl turned 18. Orders of that kind came to be called "Mary Bell orders," the New Statesman explained in 2000. As the daughter’s 18th birthday approached, the two women asked the High Court for protection for life. On May 21, 2003, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, President of the Family Division, granted it. The judgment rested on the right to private and family life, and chiefly on Bell’s mental health; a psychiatrist described a chronic anxiety and depressive disorder that press exposure would make worse. The judge found that Bell had been rehabilitated, that her youth at the time of the killings and her abusive childhood weighed heavily, and that mother and daughter could not be protected separately. The order binds everyone, not only the newspapers before the court. It forbids identifying either woman or where they live, but leaves the 1968 case itself free to be reported and discussed. Notoriety alone, the judge warned, would not earn an offender such protection.
The Brown family was in court for the ruling. "It takes us no further forward," Martin’s sister said, as The Scotsman and RTE News reported. June Richardson died in April 2013, at 68, The Sunday Post reported; asked whether her mother had forgiven Mary Bell, her daughter said she had "learned to live with it." In September 2020 La Nación described Bell as a free woman, living under the identity she was given in 1980.
On the night of July 27, 1987, Rebecca Spencer, a 27-year-old mother of two, was stabbed to death in Warwick, Rhode Island, in the Buttonwoods section of the city. No one was charged, and the case went cold. Two years later, on the night of September 4, 1989, Joan Heaton, 39, and her daughters Jennifer, 10, and Melissa, 8, were killed a few hundred yards away. WJAR in Providence later reported that Rebecca Spencer had lived a few doors from the family of a neighborhood boy named Craig Price.
Price was 15. A bloody sock print matched his foot, and the knives used in the Heaton killings were recovered, the Associated Press reported in a 2011 account of the case. He was arrested that September and admitted all four killings, closing the Spencer case along with the new one.
The law of the day gave the state almost nothing to work with. A 15-year-old could not then be tried as an adult for these killings in Rhode Island. On September 21, 1989, in Family Court, Price admitted sufficient facts to be adjudicated delinquent on four murder charges and two burglary charges. That adjudication is the whole of the legal record of the four deaths, and under Rhode Island law it is not a criminal conviction. The court committed him to the state Training School until his 21st birthday, the most it could order, and directed that he undergo psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
Public anger reached the State House quickly. The legislature extended its juvenile waiver law to defendants under 16 in 1990, the Providence Phoenix reported; The Public’s Radio, looking back in 2021, said lawmakers had cited the case within months of the killings. The change could not reach Price himself.
What kept him in custody was his own conduct. On November 16, 1989, on his lawyer’s advice, he stopped cooperating with the court-ordered evaluations, fearing, as the Rhode Island Supreme Court later put it, that anything he told the doctors could be used to commit him civilly beyond 21. The Family Court ordered him to cooperate at least six times between 1990 and 1993, and he refused each time. In an October 1990 report, one of the court’s psychiatrists, Dr. Wesley Profit, wrote that there could be "no doubt that Craig Price is a murderer of the serial type."
In October 1993 he threatened a worker at the Training School who had found contraband on him. He was indicted for extortion and simple assault, and on October 7, 1994, a Providence Superior Court jury convicted him on both counts, four days before he was due to go free, the Associated Press reported. The state also charged him with criminal contempt for his years of refusing treatment. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that such a contempt was not capped at one year, a jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to 25 years, 10 to serve, consecutive to the extortion term. The Supreme Court affirmed in 2003 and again, on postconviction review, in 2011, when it held that the 25-year term was not grossly disproportionate given his "repeated and defiant refusal" to obey the court’s orders. The attorney general’s office described the four killings that day as "unprovoked" and "unusually brutal."
He was later moved to the Florida prison system. In March 2015 the Rhode Island Parole Board denied him parole for the fourth time, WJAR reported. On April 4, 2017, at the Suwannee Correctional Institution, he stabbed a fellow inmate, who survived. Prosecutors charged him with attempted murder, and on January 18, 2019, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years in prison followed by 10 years of probation. As of that date he was in the custody of the Florida Department of Corrections.
On February 12, 1993, two 10-year-old boys abducted a two-year-old named James Bulger in Bootle, Merseyside. His death was discovered in Liverpool two days later. On February 18 police arrested Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, and both were charged with murder. ITV News later described them as the youngest people charged with murder in Britain in the 20th century. When they first appeared before magistrates, on February 22, there were violent scenes outside the court.
They were tried as Child A and Child B at Preston Crown Court. On November 24, 1993, after a 17-day trial, the jury convicted both boys, then 11, of the murder of James Bulger, with other charges, the Associated Press reported. The judge, Mr Justice Morland, then allowed them to be named. He told them they would be held "for very, very many years until you are mature and fully rehabilitated and no longer a danger to society." The sentence was detention during Her Majesty’s pleasure, the juvenile equivalent of life imprisonment.
The question of how long "very many years" should be became a legal battle of its own. The trial judge recommended a minimum of eight years, the Lord Chief Justice raised it to 10, and in July 1994 the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, raised it to 15. In June 1997 the House of Lords ruled by a majority that he had acted unlawfully. In 1999 the European Commission of Human Rights found that the boys had been denied a fair trial and fair sentencing by an independent tribunal. In October 2000 the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, restored the original eight years, which opened the way to release.
On January 8, 2001, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss granted both young men an injunction, unlimited in time, against publishing their images, their new identities or where they lived. In June 2001 the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, announced that the Parole Board had approved their release on licence. James’s mother said in a statement: "I do not want revenge, I just want justice," ABC News reported. Both young men were freed under new names and would remain on licence for life.
Venables has twice been returned to prison. He was recalled in February 2010 and on July 23, 2010, pleaded guilty to offenses involving indecent images of children and was sentenced to two years. Paroled in 2013, he was recalled in November 2017, and on February 7, 2018, at the Central Criminal Court, he was sentenced to 40 months for making indecent photographs of children and possessing a paedophile manual. In March 2019 the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, refused an application by James’s father and uncle to lift the anonymity order. In December 2023 the Parole Board refused Venables' release, saying it "was not satisfied that release at this point would be safe for the protection of the public," the Press Association reported.
Derrick Robie was 4 when he set out alone on August 2, 1993, for a summer recreation program at a park in Savona, New York. He did not arrive, and he was found dead in Savona later that day. He had been strangled.
Eric Smith, 13, lived in the village. Police spoke to him in the days after the killing, and a reenactment on August 6 showed that he could not have seen what he claimed to have seen from where he said he had been. On August 8 he confessed. "I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry. I killed that little boy," his grandfather recalled him saying. He was arrested the next day.
A grand jury indicted him on a charge of second-degree murder, and he was tried as an adult in August 1994. His lawyers argued that he suffered from a mental disease, which they called a rage disorder, and could not be held criminally responsible; prosecutors argued that he knew what he was doing was wrong. On August 16, 1994, the jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to nine years to life, to be served in a juvenile facility until he turned 21 and then in an adult prison. The prosecutor, John Tunney, said Smith "wanted to see what it felt like to be the victimizer." Smith later told 48 Hours that other children had bullied him for years.
The parole board turned him down again and again, at hearings roughly every two years. At his first, in June 2002, it cited his lack of remorse. In 2004 he said in a statement that he was "truly sorry" for the loss he had caused the Robie family. In 2009 he told a television station that his anger had been aimed at the boys who had bullied him, not at Derrick, and that he would change places with him if he could. Derrick’s mother said the family had to "beg to keep this killer behind bars."
At his 11th hearing, in October 2021, Smith told the board, "I’m not a threat." It granted parole on October 7, 2021, citing his clean disciplinary record, his release plan and low risk scores. Residents of Savona held a march and a candlelight vigil that November. After months of delay while approved housing was found, he was released on February 1, 2022, to live in Queens, New York. He will remain on parole for life.
On Friday, February 2, 1996, an eighth grader named Barry Loukaitis, 14, shot and killed, at his school in Moses Lake, Washington, two classmates, Manuel Vela Jr. and Arnie Fritz, both 14, and their teacher, Leona Caires, 49, a mother of four. A 13-year-old girl was also wounded. A teacher, Jonathan Lane, ended the attack and restrained him.
He was tried as an adult. The trial was moved to Seattle, where jury selection began on August 18, 1997. Loukaitis pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington history, records that police found 28 Stephen King books among his belongings and that he knew the Pearl Jam music video "Jeremy," which depicts a troubled boy in a classroom. The jury rejected the insanity defense and convicted him of murder and kidnapping. He was 16 when the trial ended. He was sentenced to two life terms plus 205 years, with no possibility of parole.
The 2012 ruling of the United States Supreme Court against mandatory life without parole for juveniles reopened his sentence. A few days before his resentencing he wrote to the judge, Michael Cooper, who had presided at his trial, offering his first apology. "I’ve never apologized for what I’ve done," he wrote; in court he called his acts "weak and evil and senseless." On April 19, 2017, Cooper resentenced him to 189 years. Loukaitis did not contest it and waived further appeals. As of 2019 he was held at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center.
Maddie Clifton was 8 when she disappeared from her neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, in November 1998. For a week police, her family and thousands of volunteers searched for her. A patrol sergeant later recalled speaking, the day before she was found, with a 14-year-old neighbor, Joshua Phillips. She was found seven days after she vanished. She had been killed, and Phillips was charged with her murder.
Phillips told police the death had begun as an accident and had turned into murder because he was afraid of his abusive father, News4JAX reported. A year after the killing he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He was 15.
In 2012 the United States Supreme Court held mandatory life without parole for juveniles unconstitutional, and Phillips was given a new sentencing hearing. In August 2017 he addressed Maddie’s family directly. "I don’t pretend to know or understand your pain or to grasp the void I created in your lives," he said. On November 17, 2017, Circuit Judge Waddell Wallace III sentenced him to life again. He said the crime was not impulsive and that Maddie had been deliberately lured, and called it "one of the most rare and unusual crimes that warrants life in prison." Her mother said: "No one should ever have to go through this twice." The new sentence carried a right to a review after 25 years.
Phillips applied for that review in May 2025, and was brought from the Suwannee County prison to the Duval County jail for hearings that were repeatedly postponed. "Maddie’s sentence was final. Her killer’s should be, too," her sister said. On May 6, 2026, Phillips withdrew his application. In a handwritten statement to the court he said a report by the state’s expert had raised concerns he needed professional counseling to address, that prison programs had been closed to him as a lifer, and that he intended to apply again. He remained in the custody of the Florida Department of Corrections.
Tiffany Eunick was 6 when she was beaten to death in South Florida in 1999. The boy charged with killing her, Lionel Tate, was 12. His lawyers argued at trial that he had been imitating professional wrestlers he had seen on television and did not understand that he could hurt her. "This is an innocent 12-year-old boy who played too rough," his trial lawyer, Jim Lewis, said later.
Before trial, prosecutors offered a plea that would have meant three years in a juvenile facility followed by ten years of probation. On the advice of his lawyer, and with his mother insisting he was innocent, the offer was turned down five days before trial. A grand jury had indicted him for first-degree murder, and the jury returned a general verdict covering both premeditated murder and felony murder based on aggravated child abuse. Under Florida law the sentence was mandatory: life in prison without parole. He was the youngest defendant in Florida to receive it, the Associated Press reported, and at one point the youngest person in the country serving such a sentence, the ABA Journal noted.
On December 10, 2003, the Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed the conviction. Judge Barry Stone, writing for the court, held that Tate’s age, his reduced mental functioning and the complexity of a first-degree murder case had required the trial court to order a competency evaluation before trial, and that it had been error not to do so. The court said, however, that a mandatory life sentence for a 12-year-old was not in itself unconstitutional.
In 2004 Tate pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was given ten years' probation. It did not last. In 2004 he was found with a knife, which added five years to his probation, and in May 2005 he was charged in the armed robbery of a pizza deliveryman. On May 18, 2006, Circuit Judge Joel T. Lazarus sentenced him to 30 years in prison for violating his probation by possessing a gun, saying Tate had shown "disdain and disrespect" for the law. In February 2008 he pleaded no contest to the robbery and received a concurrent ten-year term. His scheduled release date was then given as 2031.
The cases sit at the hinges of legal history. Pomeroy’s commutation turned on a public argument about whether the state could hang a boy. Stinney’s execution, and the ruling 70 years later that his trial had been unconstitutional, measure how far the courts moved in between. Young’s release led to two government inquiries and new rules for discharging restricted patients in England. Price’s adjudication drove Rhode Island to let 15-year-olds be tried as adults. Thompson and Venables took the question of a child’s sentence to the House of Lords and to Strasbourg, and the orders protecting them and Mary Bell became part of English law on anonymity. In the United States the 2012 Supreme Court ruling against mandatory life without parole for juveniles reopened the sentences of Loukaitis and Phillips, decades after the crimes, and returned the families of their victims to the courtroom.
• November 29, 1859: Jesse Harding Pomeroy is born.
• September 21, 1872: Pomeroy, 12, confesses to assaults on six small boys and is sent to the House of Reformation at Westborough.
• February 6, 1874: Pomeroy is released early for good behavior.
• March 18, 1874: Katie Curran, 10, disappears in South Boston.
• April 22, 1874: Horace Millen, 4, is found dead; Pomeroy is arrested that night.
• December 11, 1874: Pomeroy is found guilty of murder, with a recommendation of mercy.
• 1876: Pomeroy’s death sentence is commuted to life in solitary confinement.
• September 29, 1932: Pomeroy dies at Bridgewater.
• March 1944: Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames are killed in Alcolu, South Carolina; George Stinney Jr., 14, is arrested.
• June 16, 1944: Stinney is executed in Columbia.
• July 1962: Graham Young, 14, is convicted at the Central Criminal Court of poisoning three people and sent to Broadmoor.
• May 25, 1968: Martin Brown, 4, is found dead in Scotswood, Newcastle upon Tyne.
• July 31, 1968: Brian Howe, 3, is found dead in Scotswood.
• December 1968: Mary Bell, 11, is found guilty of the manslaughter of both boys on the ground of diminished responsibility; N.B. is acquitted.
• February 1971: Young is conditionally discharged from Broadmoor.
• June 29, 1972: Young is convicted at St Albans Crown Court of murder and other offenses and sentenced to life; the Home Secretary announces two inquiries.
• 1980: Bell is released on licence with a new identity.
• July 27, 1987: Rebecca Spencer, 27, is killed in Warwick, Rhode Island.
• September 4, 1989: Joan Heaton and her daughters Jennifer and Melissa are killed in Warwick.
• September 21, 1989: Craig Price, 15, is adjudicated delinquent in Family Court on four murder charges and two burglary charges.
• August 1, 1990: Young dies at Parkhurst prison.
• February 12, 1993: James Bulger, 2, is abducted in Bootle.
• August 2, 1993: Derrick Robie, 4, is killed in Savona, New York.
• November 24, 1993: Robert Thompson and Jon Venables are convicted of murder at Preston Crown Court.
• August 16, 1994: Eric Smith is convicted of second-degree murder.
• October 7, 1994: Price is convicted of extortion, four days before his scheduled release.
• February 2, 1996: Two students and a teacher are shot dead at Frontier Junior High School, Moses Lake, Washington.
• June 1997: The House of Lords rules that the Home Secretary acted unlawfully in raising the Bulger tariff.
• November 1998: Maddie Clifton, 8, is killed in Jacksonville, Florida.
• 1999: Tiffany Eunick, 6, is killed in Florida; Lionel Tate, 12, is later indicted for first-degree murder.
• October 2000: Lord Woolf restores the original eight-year tariff for Thompson and Venables.
• June 2001: Thompson and Venables are released on licence under new identities.
• May 21, 2003: The High Court grants Mary Bell and her daughter anonymity for life.
• December 10, 2003: Tate’s conviction is reversed.
• May 18, 2006: Tate is sentenced to 30 years for violating probation.
• July 23, 2010: Venables pleads guilty to indecent images offenses and is sentenced to two years.
• 2012: The United States Supreme Court rules against mandatory life without parole for juveniles.
• December 2014: Judge Carmen Mullen vacates Stinney’s conviction.
• April 19, 2017: Loukaitis is resentenced to 189 years.
• November 17, 2017: Phillips is resentenced to life with a review after 25 years.
• February 7, 2018: Venables is sentenced to 40 months for indecent images offenses.
• January 18, 2019: Price pleads guilty in Florida to attempted murder and is sentenced to 25 years.
• February 1, 2022: Smith is released on parole.
• December 2023: The Parole Board refuses Venables' release.
• May 6, 2026: Phillips withdraws his application for a sentence review.