Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (26 page)

Shortly afterwards, neighbours noted that the baby’s face and body were so swollen that he resembled the Elephant Man. He had over 50 injuries on his tiny body. And still Rebecca Lewis did nothing to help her terrorised son.

On 4 May 2005, she went out shopping, leaving her baby with Andrew Lloyd. He picked Aaron up and swung him violently against the wall. When Lewis returned, Lloyd was giving the child CPR. For the next 18 hours, doctors battled to save the infant but he had suffered massive brain damage and could not be revived.

Andrew Lloyd admitted Aaron’s murder and was jailed for 24 years. But Rebecca Lewis denied familial homicide and was tried at Swansea Crown Court in December 2006. The jury heard that she’d done nothing to prevent her boyfriend’s attacks
on her baby. They found her guilty and she was jailed for six years. The judge told her: ‘You put your own interests first, and above and beyond that of your vulnerable child. You could have stopped the violence that Lloyd was subjecting Aaron to. You could so easily have got the authorities to stop it.’

Afterwards, the Welsh division of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children stated ‘Without this new law it is likely that Rebecca Lewis and Andrew Lloyd would have joined a long list of couples who have been acquitted or not even brought to trial for murdering a child.’

Jodie gave birth to her first child at the age of 14 but proved unable to look after it. By 20, she had convictions for battery and robbery. Her boyfriend, Paul O’Neil, was unemployed and had been brutal towards the five children he had by two different women.

In November 2004, Taylor gave birth to O’Neil’s son and they called him Aaron. But Paul O’Neil bitterly resented the attention that his girlfriend paid to their child. Over the next few weeks, he hit his baby son repeatedly, battered him against the furniture and kicked him, breaking both of his legs and his collarbone and fracturing his ribs in 12 places. Social workers called repeatedly at the couple’s Kenton, Newcastle, home to see the infant but the pair refused to answer the door.

On 6 February of the following year, Paul O’Neil pressed the baby’s face against a gas fire until the skin blistered, causing agonising burns. He did the same to Aaron’s hands. But Jodie Taylor still didn’t take her infant to a doctor – she merely applied cream to the baby’s wounds.

Four days later, when Jodie Taylor was out, Paul O’Neil battered 92-day-old Aaron about the head, fracturing his skull and causing his death.

On 23 February 2006, the couple appeared at Newcastle Crown Court. Thirty-three-year-old O’Neil admitted cruelty but denied murder, whilst 21-year-old Taylor admitted cruelty by neglect as she’d failed to seek medical attention for her son’s burns.

O’Neil was jailed for life with the recommendation that he serve at least 22 years whilst Taylor got three-and-a-half years for failing to protect her child.

John G Howells, former director of the Institute of Family Psychiatry, has written: ‘Behind the battered child is an army of deprived children. They are surging into the future to make more disturbed families. Unhappiness feeds on unhappiness. The spiral of emotional deprivation must be halted. It can be halted.’

These well-meaning words were written in 1974 after the horrors of Maria Colwell’s death at the hands of her stepfather William Kepple. Sadly, the phenomena of damaged adults going on to brutalise their babies has continued unabated, with overburdened social services letting cases slip below their radar or ideological young social workers foolishly giving an abusive parent one last chance.

Though governments and social service departments promise new initiatives after such horrific murders, babies and older children are still starved, neglected and beaten at the hands of a clueless subclass. Given money from the welfare state for each child – with additional payments if the child has certain medical problems – they view their offspring as little more than cash cows and resent spending time or effort on them.

Ironically, many of these children are on the ‘at risk’ register from birth, so authorities know that they are likely to suffer. Someone then decides how much suffering is too much. Short
of giving each of these babies a live-in carer from birth, they are destined to have a painful and frightening start.

And it’s a sizeable problem, with one in ten children – a million a year – being badly treated, abused or neglected in Britain today according to a 2008
Lancet
report.

I
n the previous chapter, several of the couples shared a belief in excessive and repeated corporal punishment and were indifferent to the fact that their behaviour was both counterproductive and illegal. In this chapter, the couples shared a religious mania and took it out on their progeny with fatal results…

Twenty-three-year-old Angela Camacho and her 22-year-old common law husband John Rubio lived in a rundown apartment in Brownsville, Texas. Their living quarters were cramped, filthy, cockroach-ridden and strewn with dirty laundry and unwashed dishes, conditions which meant that their three children were frequently unwell. The family got most of their meals from soup kitchens as Rubio preferred to spend their welfare money on cans of spray paint, inhaling five such cans a day. Social workers became so concerned at the
emaciated state of the children that they enrolled the hapless couple in parenting classes. Both Camacho and Rubio complied with this. (Rubio had fathered the two youngest children whilst three-year-old Julissa, the eldest, was from one of his common law wife’s previous relationships.)

Like many uneducated people, they believed that a supernatural being would save them from poverty if they could only find the right words or actions. As such, they set up a black magic shrine in their rat-infested lounge and spent some of their welfare money on witchcraft paraphernalia rather than on food.

John, who had grown up in a superstitious household, told a relative that he kept hearing the voices of his dead relatives and that they sometimes spoke to him through his unfortunate offspring. He added that the children were possessed. He later told police that his wife had asked him to kill the babies because they were evil and wouldn’t get to heaven.

On 10 March 2003, he battered the children’s hamsters with a hammer then poured bleach on them in a bizarre exorcism before turning his attention to the children. He suffocated three-year-old Julissa for four minutes, telling his wife that the struggling little girl had the devil in her, that she didn’t want to die. He then stabbed the child 20 times and beheaded her by sawing through her tiny neck with his knife, before he and Angela had sex, rolling around in the toddler’s blood. Next, John Rubio suffocated, stabbed and beheaded his two-month-old baby daughter, Mary Ann, after which the couple had sex again. Finally, he murdered one-year-old John junior in the same way.

The couple had a bath, put their blood-stained clothing into the water to soak and had sex for the third time as they knew that they wouldn’t have the opportunity once they were arrested. Later, they put the severed heads of their three
children into a rubbish bag, leaving John junior’s decapitated body at the end of the bed.

A day after the triple murder, John’s brother visited the tiny apartment and was sickened to find it covered in blood, with John junior’s headless body still propped up in the bedroom. He raced out and flagged down a passing police car, and officers investigated to find the three mutilated corpses. Angela told one of the horrified policemen that they’d killed the children because they couldn’t afford to feed them – but John’s wallet was found to contain $146. In custody, she admitted that the motive had been religious, saying that someone had put an evil spell on the children and that they’d had to be killed brutally in order to cast the evil out. John – who believed that his late mother and grandmother had both been witches – told the same story, explaining that the children were possessed.

The couple were tried separately, with John Rubio pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. After eight hours of deliberation, the jury rejected his insanity plea and found him guilty of the triple homicide. He asked for the death penalty, saying that God had forgiven him and that he wanted to be with his children in heaven. The jury granted his wish and he was sent to Death Row to await his date with a lethal injection. But this ruling was later reversed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in September 2007 on the grounds that his defence lawyers hadn’t been given the opportunity to
cross-examine
his common law wife during his trial.

After mental health tests, he was told that he was competent to stand trial. In June 2008, he was told that this new trial would be held at Cameron County, a venue he objected to. In July 2010, a Texas jury rejected John Rubio’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and convicted him of murdering all three
children. He is currently on Death Row in Texas, a state which executes by lethal injection.

Angela Camacho pleaded guilty to three counts of capital murder to avoid the death penalty and was given three consecutive life sentences. She will be eligible for parole in 40 years.

In October 1982, the Greens were living in Stonegate, a fundamentalist Christian household near Charleston, West Virginia. Along with other Christian parents, they occupied a 27-roomed house run by the group’s leader Dorothy McClellan and her accountant husband John. For years the McClellans had been taking in troubled teenagers, often drug addicts, and persuading them to live a religious life. It was often a struggle, the families surviving by doing farming and construction work.

Dorothy McClellan’s ethos was that children should be subjected to corporal punishment to enforce obedience and each parent had their own monogrammed paddle which they carried around with them. These were used frequently and with severity – on one occasion in September 1982, McClellan beat her grandson, Daniel, for four hours.

On 5 October 1982, the Greens’ 23-month-old son, Joseph, hit another child (the way that he’d seen adults treat children) and refused to apologise, whereupon the Stonegate community formed a circle around the boy as his 25-year-old mother, Leslie, and began to beat him on the buttocks with a paddle. Later his father, Stuart, age 28, took over the paddling whilst both parents ordered him to say sorry to the other child.

After two hours of intermittent beating and demands that he apologise, Joseph went pale – he had gone into shock. One
of the fundamentalists fetched the group leader, Dorothy McClellan, and she told the parents to halt the paddling and administered first aid, but it was too late for the not-quite-two-year-old who died in hospital from loss of blood. The Stonegate community tried to pass the death off as an accident, but the child’s internal injuries revealed exactly what had taken place.

The couple were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and both served a year in jail and paid a $1,000 fine. Controversially – given that she hadn’t even been in the room whilst Joseph was being beaten – the religious group’s leader, Dorothy McClellan, was also found guilty of causing the boy’s death. Stuart Green spoke out against her in court, saying that she had encouraged parents to beat their children until the little ones apologised. His wife, Leslie, had joined McClellan’s household when she was only 15 so was very much under the older woman’s spell. After their release from prison, the Greens left the religious community and set up home together in Baltimore.

The judge said that Dorothy McClellan was a strong-willed and manipulative woman who had instituted a policy of discipline which led to Joseph Green’s terrifying ordeal and untimely demise. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1985 and her 1987 appeal was turned down.

I
n 2008 a woman complained to the British Medical Council that she had been given a blood transfusion whilst unconscious and that the transfusion was against her Jehovah’s Witness religion. Surgeons responded that the transfusion had been necessary to save her life. In principle, an adult should be allowed to refuse treatment and live – or not – with the consequences, but it should surely be illegal for a parent to withhold vital treatment from a child. Yet several American states still have a religious exemption clause, allowing parents to put their sick children through agonising days or weeks, followed by an entirely-preventable death.

Two-year-old Robyn Twitchell became ill in 1986, screaming and vomiting. He’d developed a twisted bowel which would have been easily corrected in hospital, but his parents were Christian Scientists, bound to a religion which believes that only prayer should be used to heal.

By the second day of Robyn’s illness, he was in such pain that the Twitchells, who lived near Boston, phoned the worldwide public relations manager of the Christian Science church for advice. He assured them that solely using prayer to treat symptoms was permissible, both morally and under the law. The suffering child was attended to by a Christian Science nurse (surely a contradiction in terms) who must have noted signs that he was becoming seriously dehydrated and that acid from his vomit had stripped the skin from his lips and chin, leaving it bright red. By now his screams were so loud and disturbing that the next-door neighbours closed their window to shut out the sound.

On the fourth day, Robyn was still in agony and unable to eat, but the Christian Science nurse force fed him and ordered his mother to give him food every half hour. By now, three wounds had appeared on his thigh, possibly suggesting septicaemia (blood poisoning).

By day five, his scrotum had blackened where the blood supply had been cut off and he began to vomit excrement. Later that same day, he died. Christian Scientists believe in resurrection so the Twitchells waited patiently by their son’s corpse, expecting him to come back to life again. Rigor mortis had set in by the time they finally admitted defeat and called the emergency services.

The couple were charged with manslaughter, with Massachusetts prosecutors contending that they were guilty of child neglect and the defence countering that the Twitchells had a right under the First Amendment to treat their son’s illness solely with prayer. The Christian Science nurse said that she’d healed Robyn and that he’d been playing with his cat a mere 15 minutes before he died. But an autopsy had shown this was impossible, that the child’s intestines were jet black and ruptured. He would
have been in such agony that he’d have tried to avoid any movement at all.

The couple were sentenced to 10 years’ probation, but this was overturned on a technicality in 1993. Thankfully, due to a public outcry over Robyn’s protracted suffering and unnecessary death, Massachusetts legislature repealed the religious exemption in their criminal code.

1986 also saw a similarly-preventable death in Sarasota, Florida, when seven-year-old Amy Hermanson began to lose weight and became increasingly lethargic. She had developed diabetes but her Christian Scientist parents refused to seek medical care. A neighbour saw Amy crawling on her hands and knees, too weak to walk, and begged her mother to take her to a doctor but her mother refused. She was seen by an aunt the day before she died, and the woman observed that the seven-year-old had become incoherent and could no longer focus her eyes.

After her death, her parents were convicted of felony child abuse and third degree murder, but, in 1992, the Florida Supreme Court overturned their conviction because of a religious exemption in Florida’s legal code.

Parents who live in a religious commune can find it almost impossible to seek medical aid for their child, as the group reinforces their already rigid anti-interventionist belief system. Fifty-two people in the Faith Assembly communes have died, most of them children, as the group professes that ‘only God can heal.’ One woman begged to see a doctor as she lay writhing in agony, but the group refused and continued their ostensibly-healing prayers until her death.

In the aforementioned cases, the parents killed out of a misguided belief system; though their children suffered terribly as the result of their inaction, they didn’t actually want them to die. But in the following case the couple didn’t refuse medical aid out of some confused religiosity. Instead, they just didn’t care.

Three-year-old Tiffany Hirst had a nursery place but her 22-year-old mother Sabina and 54-year-old stepfather Robert couldn’t be bothered to take her there and instead locked her up for days on end in her bedroom above the pub that they ran in Upperthorpe, Sheffield. Passers-by often saw her thin, unsmiling face at the window, but apparently didn’t realise that she was half-starved. The Hirsts often ignored the child and she was covered in insect-bites as the filthy room was infested with beetles. They also neglected and locked-up a one-year-old child who cannot be identified for legal reasons.

The couple kept their dogs in another room which was covered in faeces and urine: the stench was appalling. The first floor flat was also a potential death-trap for children, with live wires protruding from the walls.

The Hirsts apparently started locking Tiffany in her room on a regular basis in August 2006, though a health visitor saw her in February 2007 and said that she was happy and healthy. But the lock-ins continued, as did periods when the couple failed to provide the child with adequate food or water. By mid-2007, the three-year-old weighed the same as a two-year-old. In September she developed pneumonia, but her mother and stepfather were too busy to notice, far less seek medical assistance. When they found her body in October, she had been dead for up to two days. They phoned paramedics who arrived
to find what looked like a porcelain doll lying amongst filthy bedclothes. They picked her up and were shocked at her low body weight.

An autopsy revealed abnormalities in her bones, showing that she’d been given so little food at times that she’d stopped growing. At other times, she had been fed and her body had responded with a growth spurt. Pneumonia, brought on by a lack of food and water, was the cause of death.

The couple were initially charged with murder, but Robert Hirst’s lawyer pointed out that he had recently started a new job which took him away from the pub for 13 or 14 hours a day, so it was up to Mrs Hirst to care for her daughter during these hours. (Apparently she had cared for Tiffany until meeting Robert Hirst.) His charge was then changed to ‘neglect’. Sabina Hirst’s charge was also reduced, in her case from murder to manslaughter. Whilst awaiting trial, the couple moved to Barnsley and began to run another pub.

At Sheffield Crown Court in June 2008, Robert Hirst pleaded guilty to neglecting Tiffany, whilst Sabina Hirst pled guilty to her daughter’s manslaughter. They were remanded in custody. Later that month, she was sentenced to 12 years for manslaughter and he to five for cruelty, with Judge Alan Goldsack describing the case as ‘about as bad a case of child manslaughter as there can be.’