Six Notorious Child Criminals

In May of 2014, 12-year-old schoolmates Morgan Geyser & Anissa Weier led their victim to the woods under the pretence of a game of hide and seek. The pair then pinned the female victim down and proceeded to stab her 19 times, causing serious injury. ABC News reports that one of the stab wounds missed an artery in the girl's heart by less than a millimetre. The victim, while seriously injured, has since healed from her physical injuries and returned to school.

After the incident it was alleged that the girls carried out the attack in order to appease Slender Man, a mythological creature popular on internet forums. Slender Man is depicted as a tall, faceless being, and users routinely photoshop images to make the character appear in them. The case has opened up debates about this kind of internet content's influence on children.

In July 2016, a decision to try the girls as adults was upheld by Wisconsin's Appeals Court. Geyser & Weier's attorneys allege that both girls have mental illnesses that prevent them from being tried as adults. The case is ongoing.

On 12th February 1993, two-year-old James Bulger was abducted from a shopping centre in Merseyside by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both aged 10 at the time.

Venables and Thompson tortured Bulger and left him by a railway line where he was discovered two days later. The two were tried as adults and were convicted of murder in November 1993

On 23 July 2010, Venables, aged 27, was jailed after admitting downloading and distributing indecent images of children. He was denied parole on 27 July 2011. He was reportedly released in 2013.

In June 1954, Pauline Parker & Juliet Hulme murdered Parker's mother Honorah in Christchurch, New Zealand. Afterwards the girls tried to paint the murder as an accident, saying that Honorah had fallen while on a walk. However, police later discovered a brick the girls had used to bludgeon her to death. Both girls were sentenced to five years in prison.

The 1994 film Heavenly Creatures starring Kate Winslet and directed by Peter Jackson was based on the crime.

Often described as the first mass school shooting in the US, Brenda Spencer (aged 16 at the time) killed two and injured 9 at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California while shooting from her home across the street.

Spencer was sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment. She was last considered for parole in 2009. Her request was denied, with it being advised that she would have to wait a decade before applying again.

The crime served as the inspiration for the 1979 song "I Don't Like Mondays" by The Boomtown Rats.

Alyssa Bustamante was 15 in 2009 when she killed and buried a nine-year-old girl in the woods of Jefferson City. Bustamante wrote in her diary after the murder that it was "amazing" and "pretty enjoyable." She pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison, with an additional 30 years for the charge of armed criminal action.

Bustamante's legal team requested a retrial in 2014, but this was denied. She will be eligible for parole after she serves 35 years in prison.

Eric Smith (aged 13 at the time) killed 4-year-old Derrick Robie at a park in Steuben County, New York in 1993. Smith is said to have tortured Robie as a way of unleashing the anger he had over being bullied by family members and other children at school.

He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1994. He has consistently been denied in his attempts for parole.