10 Children Who Killed - A true crime list | ✔️

Graham Young

Although most of Graham Young's homicides occurred in adulthood, his disturbed mind pushed him to start killing, or trying to kill, at the young age of 14. Hadn't he been released from his first conviction, the following victims would have lived.

Molly Young was a 37-year-old housewife living in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England, with her husband Fred Young and his children from a previous marriage, Winifred and Graham, when she died on Easter Saturday of 1962 after months of suffering painful symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, excruciating stomach pain, loss of hair and weight. It was concluded that her death was due to the prolapse of a bone at the top of her spinal column, an injury connected to a blow to the head when she was involved in a bus crash. Upon suggestion of her 14-year-old stepson, Molly was cremated. In his father and sister's eyes, young Graham had something to do with all of this in the first place.

Graham's biological mother, Bessie, tragically died of tuberculosis only three months after his birth in 1947 and he was raised for the following two years by his aunt and uncle, while his elder sister went to live with their grandparents. Their father remarried in 1950, to Molly, and reunited the family. The separation from his aunt's household, though, caused little Graham a big distress.

He went on to become a solitary child obsessed with nonfiction books about murders, insanely fascinated with Adolf Hitler, the occult and, above all things, poisons. His schoolmates kept their distance from Graham, finding him creepy and dubbing him "The Mad Professor". Some of them told of how he would try to get them to sniff ether with him, and also - claiming to be a part of a local coven - engage them in occult ceremonies, which had involved cat sacrifices in at least one occasion. He used to spend long hours in the library reading books of chemistry, poisons and forensic science, eventually gaining the expertise of a chemistry post-graduate.

Knowing about his son's "hobby", his father bought Graham a chemistry set as a reward for his high school grades. That's when the boy's thirst of toxicological knowledge started to grow insatiable and lethal.

Armed with the fake ID of "M.E. Evans", aged 13, he managed to convince two separate local chemists that he was 17 and obtained "for study purposes" enough antimony, arsenic, digitalis and thallium to kill 300 people.

In order to test his knowledge of poisons, he began his experiments on fellow science enthusiast and only friend Christopher Williams. The two kids often spent lunchtime together at school, so it would be easy for Graham to inject harmful substances in Christopher's meals. He suffered an extended period of vomiting, painful cramps and headaches. Doctors couldn't diagnose his illness, just suggested that the symptoms were those of a severe migraine.

Christopher was lucky to survive, as Graham decided that he and other school friends didn't satisfy his scientific curiosity anymore. He needed to keep tabs on the symptoms, so he started to focus on someone he could observe at closer quarters... his own family.

In November 1961, Graham served a cup of tea to his sister Winifred, but she found it so bitter that she threw it away. Later that day, she felt sick on the train to work and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors concluded that she had been poisoned with belladonna.

Fred Young, even if doubtful, just thought that his son had inadvertently contaminated the food and did nothing but warn him to be more careful. It didn't take long until his wife Molly became ill, more and more, until, in that fatal Easter Saturday, he found her writhed in agony in the back garden while Graham was staring out of the kitchen window in fascination. He had been poisoning his stepmother with antimony for months, but when he understood that her organism had developed a tolerance to it, he gave her enough thallium to kill six people, murdering her.

He kept on poisoning his family members, his father included, who suspected his guilt but still didn't take any action.

It was Graham's school chemistry teacher, Geoffrey Hughes, the one who reported him to police after, upon searching the boy's school desk, he found bottles of poisons, drawings of dying men and essays about famous murders.

Thinking it was for a job, Graham was interviewed by a police psychiatric in disguise who, in order to ascertain his mental state, persuaded the boy to talk about his expertise with poisons and later reported his horrified findings to the authorities.

At first, when he was arrested in May 1962, Graham denied his guilt, but later broke down and admitted to have poisoned his father, sister and friend Christopher Williams. "It grew on me like drug habit" he said, "except it was not me who was taking the drugs". No charges were brought against him for Molly's death, since it was impossible to get useful evidence from her ashes.

At the age of 14, he was convicted for the poisonings and sent to Broadmoor maximum security hospital with the order that he was not to be released without the permission of the Home Secretary for 15 years, but, upon a psychiatric recommendation, stayed only 8 years.

His thirst wasn't satisfied at all and he became a serial killer known as "The Teacup Poisoner".

Graham was suspected for the death of a fellow prisoner named John Berridge of cyanide poisoning, but since there were no cyanide anywhere in the prison, the official verdict was that the man had taken his own life. He tried to poison the staff by putting bleach in the coffee and probably planned to poison nearly a hundred of people with a cleanser that was found in the communal tea urn. Afterwards, he became a model prisoner, which misled the prison psychiatrist into thinking that he was "no longer obsessed with poisons, violence and mischief" and let him out on February 1971, aged 23.

In the following months he poisoned numerous people among roommates and co-workers, killing two: Bob Egle, 59 years old, and Fred Biggs, 60 years old. Both of them suffered savagely and met gruesome deaths. Graham had served them tea with thallium, a substance used in their workplace, a photographic supply firm in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, and kept a diary where he recorded daily every symptom each of his victims suffered. This would be the biggest evidence that led him to downfall.

Following the suspicions the firm doctor had on him after a discussion they had together about thallium poisoning, he was arrested in November that same year and his trial took place on June 1972. A reporter stated that Graham "came across as incredibly creepy", that he "just had this unnerving aura about him".

"For him the whole thing was one big chemistry experiment" said his defence attorney, Peter Goodman.

Although the young man was confident that there wasn't enough evidence to prove beyond doubt that only he could have administered the poisons, so much that he confessed his guilt to the police only to deny it on court, he was finally convicted of two murders, two attempted murders and two counts of administering poison and sentenced to life in prison.

He served his sentence in the maximum security Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight, a place reserved for Britain's most dangerous prisoners. There, he met and befriended fellow inmate Ian Brady, one of the "Moors Murderers" pair, bonding over their shared fascination with Nazi Germany. Brady developed a one sided infatuation towards Graham, asserting in his biography that "power and death were his aphrodisiacs".

When asked if he felt remorse, Graham replied "No, that would be hypocritical. What I feel is the emptiness of my soul" and his wish of fame and immortality was granted when a waxwork made of him was installed in the "Chamber of Horrors" in Madam Tussaud's Museum in London, alongside Dr. Crippen's, one of his heroes.

Graham died in 1990, aged 42, of heart attack. This was the official diagnosis, but some suspected that he killed himself in a final act of power.

Considering the outrageous circumstances of Graham's case, UK laws were tightened on monitoring mentally ill offenders after release.

____

More on my Patreon page -->> https://www.patreon.com/posts/15776331