The Science of Monsters

Studies have found that kids with callous and unemotional traits are more likely than other kids to become criminals or display aggressive, psychopathic behaviors later in life. While adult psychopaths constitute only a tiny fraction of the general population, studies suggest that they commit half of all violent crimes. Researchers believe that two paths can lead to psychopathy: one dominated by nature, the other by nurture. For some children, their environment can turn them into violent people with a lack of empathy. Those who grow up in abusive homes, or are neglected, may show more traits in common with those who are diagnosed as psychopaths. For other children, a loving home environment doesn’t prevent them from displaying the traits.³

What are some warning signs that a child could be a potential murderer? The biggest red flags may be an affinity toward violence and a lack of feeling or recognizing others’ feelings. According to “My Child, the Murderer,”⁴ parents of killers recall their children getting into trouble in school more often, being bullied, or withdrawing from others.

Are there many instances of children murdering others? There are numerous cases of murder being committed by children over the course of history. Some notable child murderers include Mary Bell who committed the first of two shocking murders on the day before her eleventh birthday. In May of 1968, Bell and a friend strangled a four-year-old boy. A month later, and joined by that same friend, Bell strangled a three-year-old boy in the same area as the first killing. She returned to the body and carved an “M” into the boy’s stomach, along with scratching his legs and mutilating his genitals. Bell was convicted of manslaughter and released in 1980.

In 2000, a six-year-old boy named Dedrick Darnell Owens killed a classmate in Michigan. He had previous behavioral issues before the murder, including hitting, pinching, and even stabbing another student with a pencil. After fatally shooting a girl in his class with a gun he brought from home he was released to live with relatives. In an 1893 ruling,⁵ the US Supreme Court declared that “children under the age of seven years could not be guilty of felony, or punished for any capital offense, for within that age the child is conclusively presumed incapable of committing a crime.”

In February of 2009, eleven-year-old Jordan Brown murdered his father’s fiancée, Kenzie Houk, who was eight months pregnant at the time. While the soon-to-be mother was sleeping in her bed in their Pennsylvania home, Brown shot her in the back of the head. Initially, Brown was to be tried as an adult, but was eventually found guilty of first-degree murder as a juvenile.

In an attempted murder case, two Wisconsin girls lured a friend out into the woods in 2014 with plans to murder her. They claimed that they were trying to impress the fictional character Slender Man. The victim was able to survive her nineteen stab wounds but the case has led the public to question whether adolescents should be charged as adults in circumstances like these.

What can we deduce about the fictional Michael Myers? Was it nature or nurture that drove him to kill? As John Carpenter’s dialogue revealed, Michael most definitely had a lack of empathy and emotional connection to the world around him. We can assume he displayed some of the other telltale signs that he was a possible sociopath, but could his home environment have contributed to his behavior? Studies show that many children who kill have several things in common; including an abusive home life, isolation from their peers, and an inability to cope. Stefan Hutchinson in his book Halloween: Nightdance⁶ suggests that Michael Myers’s hometown of Haddonfield is the cause of his behavior. He calls Myers a “product of normal suburbia—all the repressed emotion of fake Norman Rockwell smiles.” We may never know Michael’s true motivation for the murder of his sister, but it won’t stop fans from trying to figure it out.

If you’ve seen the numerous sequels to the Halloween movies you know that Michael Myers somehow survives his wounds and goes on to kill another day (except for the third installment of the Halloween franchise, but that’s another story!). This led us to question if someone can really survive multiple gunshot wounds. Just like the young girl in Wisconsin who heroically survived nineteen stab wounds, there have been many cases of people living after being shot numerous times. Doctors who have treated gunshot victims say that people can survive gunshot wounds as long as major organs such as the heart, brain, and blood vessels are avoided.