The Deadly Innocents: Portraits of Children Who Kill

by Muriel Gardiner

A psychoanalyst's accounts of ten children under the age of eighteen who have murdered or participated in murder call attention to the roles played in the crimes by suffering, passion, and accident

Genres: True Crime

Paperback

First published June 1, 1976

About the author

Gardiner was a psychoanalyst, born in America but trained in Vienna, Austria. She married an Austrian man and was part of the resistance against the Nazis in the late 1930s. After war broke out in 1939, she and her husband moved to the United States.

Reviews

[Meaghan]

Although this book is subheaded "Portraits of Children Who Kill," several of the children profiled had not actually killed anybody. Rather, they had committed assault with the intention to kill, but their victim survived. The last child profiled in the book had kidnapped a police officer at gunpoint but not actually harmed the man, nor did he intend to. In addition, one of the "children" was actually a young adult (he was eighteen years old and had been in the Navy for one year) when he committed his crime.

Each "portrait" gives the family background of the child criminal, the details of their childhood and their crime, then a summary of how they handled their incarceration and how they were after release (assuming they had been released; some were still in prison.) The author was a psychoanalyst who trained in Vienna in the thirties. She has changed identifying details in the case studies and it's not clear when these crimes took place, but it looks like during the fifties and sixties. I found the book interesting more for its portrait of the juvenile criminal justice system and the state of psychology/psychiatry at that time, than for anything else. There is a great deal of parent-blaming -- often with justification, it seems -- and nothing about possible biological or genetic causes of the children's aberrant behavior.

I have classified this as true crime but it's not really. It's a curiosity, I guess, worth reading if you're interested in that kind of thing.