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Killer Kids: Shocking True Stories Of Children Who Murdered Their Parents - Softcover

 
9780312950064: Killer Kids: Shocking True Stories Of Children Who Murdered Their Parents
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Innocent children turned ruthless murderers...Hate-filled and deeply disturbed...They kill with cold-blooded savagery...

Nothing was too good for precious Katy-- sports cars, jewelry, designer clothes. Her father, a successful South Florida businessman, could not resist any of her whims. But when he tried to curb her fast-lane lifestyle, she had him shot through the head while he slept.

Behind closed doors of her suburban Chicago home, Nancy Knuckles was a sadistic disciplinarian who, for years, terrorised her four children with religious fanaticism, beatings, and psychological torture, until they finally rebelled with a vengeance. After the oldest daughter strangled mom and stuffed her in a trunk, the kids partied hard, inviting their friends over for booze and rock 'n' roll.

Susan Cabot was a beautiful B-movie queen and obsessive mother. Her son Tim-- born a dwarf-- was pumped full of experimental drugs extracted from cadavers to increase his height. When the ex-film star's badly beaten body was discovered in her Hollywood home, little Timmy claimed she had been killed by men using Ninja methods-- before confessing.

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About the Author:

From grisly crime scenes to tense courtroom dramas, bestselling author Clifford Linedecker goes behind closed doors to unravel the shocking truth behind 10 of the country's most sensational cases.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Killer Kids
Chapter 1Mom's Beer PartyIt was party time at Nancy Knuckles' house!Her daughters and the other girls were going through Nancy's belongings in her upstairs bedroom and closets, selecting clothing and toiletries they wanted to keep for themselves.Her only son, Barton, was racing down the stairs with a gleaming new microwave in his arms. A card was Scotch-taped to the top identifying it as a present for all the kids, and a bright red ribbon lovingly tied by Nancy still encircled it."Thanks, Ma, for the microwave!" Bart whooped.But Bart was even more excited when he lifted a box from a closet and pulled out an insurance policy on his mother's life. "We're rich!" he yelled.Bart, his seventeen-year-old sister Pamela, and his fifteen-year-old sister Deborah, celebrated with their friends by breaking out beer and whiskey, putting on some rock records, and digging into additional presents their mother had been putting aside in anticipation of the approaching Christmas holiday. Both her girls found new Polaroid cameras, which they quickly loaded with film and began to use to snap pictures.One of their favorite photographs was a shot Debbie snapped of the rest of the gang forming a human pyramid in the front room. The boys were on the bottom,supporting the girls. There was Bart; Pamela's current boyfriend, Dennis Morris; and two of Bart's and Dennis's pals, Steven Wright and David Dukes. The wobbly second row was made up of Bart's girlfriend, nineteen-year-old Cindy Caruso; a fourteen-year-old girlfriend of Cindy's; and Pamela. Another fourteen-year-old girl and Cindy's two-year-old son, D.J., were at the very top.Nancy Knuckles was religious and wouldn't have approved of the boisterous soiree, with all the earsplitting rock music, dancing, boozing, and smoking. But even though she was right there in the front room, she had nothing to say about it. Her petite body, already stiffened by rigor mortis, had been folded up and stuffed in a steamer trunk that the kids had pulled into the middle of the floor.An ugly ligature of strong, braided white twine deeply embedded in her neck had left her face purple and the features frozen in agony, as if she were still gasping for breath.Only a few hours earlier, Nancy Knuckles had one hand on the front doorknob and was holding a bag of aprons in her other hand, preparing to leave the house to begin her three-to-eleven P.M. shift at the Health Oasis, a vegetarian restaurant. Her daughter Pamela had looped an efficiently formed garrote over her mother's head from behind and pulled. As Nancy felt the rope loop around her neck, she lurched around in a half-turn, and for a brief second her startled eyes locked accusingly on those of her daughter. Her lips twisted in what appeared to be a smirk, as if she were daring her daughter to kill her. Pamela responded by jerking the garrote tighter."Die, bitch, die, bitch!" she screeched.Nancy was a small woman, but killing by garrote is not easy, especially when victim and slayer are about the same size. As Nancy's body slumped to the floor, Pamela dropped to her knees beside her, continuing to pull on the braided twine digging into her mother'sneck. Nancy's body spasmed and bounced as she struggled for breath, and the teenager looked desperately to her boyfriend, who was standing a few feet away, watching the struggle.Dennis knelt on the floor beside the struggling mother and daughter, and leaned forward to help. He took hold of one end of the garrote and pulled. Then he took the other end.Debbie was upstairs in her room when she heard the commotion. Curious, she walked downstairs into the living room and saw her mother facedown on the floor near the piano, with the teenage sweethearts kneeling over the body with the garrote. Pamela turned as Debbie entered the room, and screamed for her to go back upstairs. Obediently, the younger girl complied.Much later, Bart would recall that he was in his bedroom when Debbie walked in and calmly advised: "Pam and Dennis just killed the old lady."Nancy's body was stretched out on the floor, the garrote still looped around her neck, when Bart walked downstairs. Pamela and Dennis were breathing in short, quick, excited gasps, and their faces were flushed as Bart kneeled and peered at his mother. He felt for a pulse and put his hand over her heart, but couldn't tell for certain if she was alive or not. He yelled at his sisters to bring him their mother's stethoscope from upstairs. After one of the girls clattered down the stairs with the stethoscope, he pressed it to his mother's chest and listened for a heartbeat. Then he straightened up."Well, she won't die," he said.He stalked into the kitchen and returned with a white plastic garbage bag, which he pulled over her head and tied in the back. After a few moments he again leaned forward and pressed the stethoscope to his mother's chest. When he straightened up, he was grinning. She was dead at last.Years later Pamela would recall how curious it seemed to her at the time that her mother was stillclutching the bag of aprons. Nancy had never loosened her grip on the bag, neither as her daughter looped the garrote around her neck, nor as she slumped to the floor, nor during her dying convulsions.Nancy D. Knuckles, a registered nurse and single mother who worked two jobs to take care of herself and her family, was deliberately and ruthlessly executed in her home by her own children and one of their friends. She was forty years old.It was a shocking and brutal crime, even for the Chicago area, which is known for such ruthless killers as prohibition-era mobster Al Capone, nurse-killer Richard Speck, and vicious homosexual serial slayer John Wayne Gacy. But this wasn't a gangster killing, and it wasn't a senseless sex-slaying of a stranger. The teenagers had brutally and remorselessly murdered their mother.Matricide just wasn't the kind of thing that happened in the far-western Chicago suburb of Villa Park, where Nancy had settled with her rambunctious brood a few months earlier. Villa Park was a comfortable middleclass community, presumably far enough from Chicago to insulate the hardworking residents from the runaway crime and violence of the big city. Although she grew up in the city, as an adult Nancy had been drawn to the comfort and presumed safety of the suburbs and rural Illinois countryside.Near the end of the summer of 1984, the hardworking nurse put a down payment on a comfortable three-bedroom, red brick duplex on East Vermont Street in Villa Park. The house was in a pleasant blue-collar neighborhood within short commuting distance of downtown Chicago, yet sufficiently isolated to make it an attractive environment for raising teenagers and younger children.From outward appearances, there was nothing about Nancy Knuckles that fit the profile of a parent likely to be murdered by her own children. Mrs. Knuckles kept so busy with her two jobs as a restaurant cook and as avisiting nurse who helped convalescents in their homes, that neighbors didn't see much of her. On the infrequent occasions when they did run into her outside the house, she was courteous and pleasant. But she never seemed to have time to do more than pass the time of day with a simple, cheery "Good morning," or a few dry comments about the weather.When Nancy wasn't working or taking care of her domestic duties, she was attending church or participating in church-oriented affairs with fellow members of the congregation.But the lives of the hardworking registered nurse and her teenagers weren't as comfortably normal as they may have appeared to her neighbors, prior to the dreadful event of that crisply cold late November day.The oldest of three children and the only girl, Nancy's childhood was polluted by violence and a relative's mental illness. There were terrible fights, and a family member would later talk of at least one incident when Nancy was still a toddler and was the victim of sexual abuse, or attempted abuse, that was interrupted only at the last moment by her mother as she walked into the bedroom and discovered what was going on. Nancy was still in school when her parents were divorced.Nancy seemed to handle the domestic troubles well, however, and as she grew up, she developed into an apparently normal teenager. She was a willowy blond beauty. The teenager cheerfully assumed responsibility for her share of the housework, made good grades in school, and worked after classes in the business office of a local department store. Most of the money she earned was spent on clothes.From early childhood, religion was an important part of Nancy's existence. At first her religious life centered around the Roman Catholicism she was born into. But when she was a teenager, she left the Catholic Church and became a Southern Baptist. In 1962, shortly after graduation from high school, she took another big steptoward establishing her independence and severing her strong familial ties, and moved out of her mother's house and into an apartment with a girlfriend.Soon after leaving home, Nancy dropped her former boyfriend and began dating Robert Knuckles. Knuckles was a high school dropout who wore his slicked-back hair in an Elvis ducktail, played the guitar, and occasionally sang in country and western bars. They were married in a civil ceremony. Nancy didn't ask her mother or other family members to attend.They didn't live happily ever after. Family members later recounted tales of Nancy showing up complaining of heavy boozing by her young husband. Somehow the couple limped through eight years of the troubled union and produced a son, Barton, and two daughters, Pamela and Deborah, before they gave up and called the marriage quits.Nancy was hypersensitive and quick to fly off the handle, and she administered erratic punishment to her brood with screams, threats, and slaps. When Bart was about five, Nancy once flew into a rage, hurled him to the ground and kicked him. His offense? Venturing outside without a coat.Years later, when her ex-husband was talking with a reporter about the breakup of his marriage, he didn't blame Nancy's rages. Instead, he blamed his drinking and Nancy's conversion to the Seventh Day Adventist Church for hammering the final nails into the coffin of their marriage.As soon as Nancy was exposed to the Seventh Day Adventists, she fell in love with the Church. She became obsessed with the religious teachings, and, driven by a stubborn determination, began to rebuild her life according to her personally strict interpretation of the Scriptures and the activities of the congregation. When she began dating again, it was with a former heroin addict who was initiated into the Church at the same time she was. They dated and shared problems with eachother for almost three years before Nancy broke off the relationship. He wasn't religious enough for her.Nancy had no time or tolerance for such ungodly trivialities or venal pleasures as television, movies, rock music, dancing or alcohol. Pastries, candy, and meat were also strictly off limits for Nancy or anyone moving in her spartan religious world of stern morality and self-righteous denial.Despite her zealous devotion to her religious faith, or perhaps because of it, the Devil began to torment her. She complained of frightening visions, and reported that Satan once stretched her mouth horribly out of shape until, after a desperate struggle, she was able to croak out the name of "Jesus." As soon as she uttered the name of the Messiah, Satan was gone and her poor, tortured mouth relaxed back into a normal position.She told confidants that Jesus came to her rescue another time when mysterious devilish forces began taunting her by making frightful noises inside her kitchen. When she went into the kitchen to investigate, the noises stopped, but they resumed as soon as she returned to the front room to sit down. Desperate to end the ordeal, she finally shouted: "In the name of Jesus, I command you to stop." The ungodly teasing ceased for good, as mysteriously as it had begun.Growing up in a home where devilish attacks were accepted as such a tangible and graphic fact of life, the children also began to have troubles with frightening visions attributed to the evil doings of the Prince of Darkness. There were stories of phantom figures mysteriously turning from white to black, of mystical signs appearing suddenly on the palms of tiny hands, and of a disembodied head rolling under a bed. Their mother always confirmed that it was the Devil's work, and admonished that only a strict religious life and devotion to God could offer protection and salvation.Nancy attempted to cleanse the souls of her children by beating the Devil out of them. In a sick parody of theself-inflicted abuse of the penitents of the Middle Ages, Nancy prepared for the daily beating of her children by reciting a prayer. Then she asked the children if they understood why they had a need for punishment.Obediently, Pamela would reply that she understood. Then the frightened child would submit to a beating with a piece of garden hose. Afterward, Pamela would sit on her mother's lap and apologize for being a bad girl, earning hugs and crooning assurances that Nancy loved her.Bart was more rebellious, and even though Nancy would patiently explain the need to beat him to rid him of the Devil and bring him closer to God, he would sometimes stubbornly insist that he didn't know why he had to be punished. His mother beat him anyway.Bart also fought back as best he could when his mother made him climb into a laundry bag, then dragged the bag into a closet. He ripped his way out of the bag, screaming and crying and tearing at the material with his hands. After his mother began tying his hands behind him to prevent him from ripping apart the cloth bags, he chewed his way out.When the girls were punished by being placed in the bags, usually for being noisy, they learned to simply curl up and go to sleep until their mother let them out. When a relative once suggested to Nancy that her methods of disciplining the children might be bad for them, she replied that God had told her how to bring them up.One time when Debbie began to take a shower, Pamela saw that her little sister's body was covered with ugly bruises. Pamela was so horrified and frightened that she ran to a relative's house for help. The relative notified authorities with the Department of Children and Family Services, the DCFS. But when an investigator went to the Knuckles home to check out the report of suspected child abuse, Nancy flew into a rage, bombarding him with accusations of interference with her right to rear her children according to her religious beliefs.Chastened, and fearful of becoming entangled in a nasty dispute over religious beliefs, parental rights, and the state, the investigator retreated. Nancy beat Pamela after he left.Almost anything could lead to a beating in the Knuckles home during those years. Pamela was in the fifth grade when she was caught kissing a boy during recess, and a teacher at the strict church school punished her with thirty whacks. At home Nancy administered ninety more. Any punishment meted out to the children at school was tripled when they returned home.The children were beaten for opening the refrigerator door without permission, for talking at the table, for eating meat or anything with sugar in it, making unnecessary noise...

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  • PublisherSt. Martin's Paperbacks
  • Publication date1993
  • ISBN 10 0312950063
  • ISBN 13 9780312950064
  • BindingMass Market Paperback
  • Number of pages304
  • Rating

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