#multiple murder

Kim Edwards and Lucas Markham are considered to be Britain’s youngest double murderers, being only 14 years old whenever they murdered Edwards’ mother and younger sister. The pair stabbed their victims to death while they slept, Edwards’ sister was only 13 years old when she was killed.

The pair were described as ‘besotted’ by news agencies, they had previously ran away from home together and spent 6 days sleeping rough before being returned to their families. Edwards’ was allegedly also jealous of the close relationship that her mother had with her younger sister. Edwards’ and Markham planned the murders together, and once they were finished they spent the next 36 hours together in the house, they had sex, shared a bath, and watched the Twilight movies.

Japan mass killing: Six bodies found at house in mountain town

Authorities have discovered the bodies of six people, including a 7-year-old girl, at a house in the Japanese town of Takachiho, a popular destination for tourists visiting the Takachiho Gorge in southwestern Miyazaki province.

Police found the remains at a house owned by 72-year-old Yasuo Iihoshi after a family member had reported that his calls had gone unanswered, according to Miyazaki prefectural police. One of the bodies, a female, was discovered outside the property, while three males and two more females were found inside the house.

Japan, which ranks as one of the safest countries in the world to live, has a very low murder rate and mass killings are rare. Given Japan's strict gun laws, in the infrequent attacks that do occur, knives are more commonly used.

In the Takachiho killings, at least some of the victims had been stabbed, local media reported. The murder weapon has not been recovered. Authorities have released the names of the victims, including Yasuo Iihoshi, his 66-year-old wife Mihoko, their 7-year-old granddaughter Yui, 41-year-old daughter-in-law Mikiko, and 21-year-old grandson Takumi. They are all members of the immediate family of Iihoshi's second son, Masahiro. The sixth victim was named as 44-year-old Fumiaki Matsuoka, who is unrelated to the family but a friend of Masahiro's. Masahiro Iihoshi has been missing since the discovery of the bodies. The police also discovered a seventh body under a bridge crossing the Gokase River.

Japan's deadliest mass killing since World War II was recorded in 2016, when at least 19 people were killed and 26 injured in a stabbing spree at a facility for disabled people west of Tokyo.

A War Between Neighbors that Went Horribly Wrong

The night of September 3, 2012, a neighborhood in Titusville, Florida, was filled with screams and gunshots. William Woodward (then 44) dressed in full camo and, as if he were in the battlefield, he crawled and snuck into his neighbor’s house and shot two people to death and wounded a third one.

The victims were Gary Hambree (39), the house owner, and Roger Picior (44), who was temporarily living with Gary. Wounded was Bruce “Tim” Blake (50), who also lived in the neighborhood. They were having a barbecue when William attacked, and the rampage was vicious: there were 31 shots fired, each victim impacted several times, both from a distance and at point-blank in the head, execution style. Woodward would later explain to police that it was to “make sure there weren’t any survivors in the battlefield”. The only reason Blake survived, he added, was that he had ran out of bullets.

Woodward hadn’t always been at odds with his neighbors; in fact they all used to be friends, with William even paying rent for Blake when he was having money issues. But then, in mid July of 2012, a package was stolen.

William accused the daughter of Gary Hambree of taking a package that was in his lawn. Hambree denied it and it was the start of an escalating feud, in which Blake took Gary’s side. Over the following six weeks, there was a series of altercations, with the police been called multiple times. Five days before the shooting, everyone had been at court to request restraining orders against each other, but the judge had denied them. According to testimony giving in court, the night of the killings, Hambree and his friends had taunted William for hours, shining a floodlight onto his property, putting loud music and yelling insults at his house. The victims’ families testified that, in this ridiculous taunt war they’d been having, Woodward gave as good as he took.

William Woodward was a veteran from the Gulf War who had PTSD and a head injury that he claimed had left him mentally disabled and unable to control his actions well. When arrested, William not only showed no remorse for the murders, but felt he had acted in self defense. Later, he requested a special hearing in which his lawyers said he should get immunity from prosecution, citing the State your Ground law in Florida, which allows you to defend your life if you’re in fear of bodily injury.

At that hearing, Woodward’s defense lawyer said that his client had experienced a month of “domestic terrorism," in which his neighbors had threatened to burn his house and rape his 12 year old daughter. Woodward had installed surveillance cameras outside his house, and recorded all this. (The cameras also caught the night of the shootings). The prosecutor alleged that this wasn’t a shooting out of fear, but out of anger, and the judge agreed with him, saying that William was not in immediate risk when he had killed his neighbors and he had “preemptively struck” at them.

William Woodward was charged with two counts of first degree murder and one of attempted first degree murder, and he could have faced the death penalty. But in January of 2018, the jury at his trial dismissed those charges and instead found him guilty of second degree murder. In March 2018, he got two life sentences, with a minimum of 25 years, that he will serve concurrently.

Further reading:

Here’s a description of how the shooting went down and Woodward’s statement to police.

Here is a Facebook post by Jeanie Huppert, Gary Hambree’s mother, telling her version of the story.

The Baffling Crime of Macastre

On January 19, 1989, a shepherd of the small town of Macastre, Spain. made a shocking discovery. In a shed in which he kept some tools he found the body of a girl. She was lying on top of a bed, fully dressed but with her jeans unzipped. Her body didn’t show signs of violence. Her name was Rosario Sayete (also spelled Gayete in some articles), she was 15 and from a town 40 kilometers away.

Rosario had left her house a few days earlier with her boyfriend, Francisco Flores (14) and a mutual friend, Pilar Ruiz (15). They had gone to the hospital to visit Rosario’s mom and then no one had seen them again. Supposedly they had gone camping. No one had reported them missing, because these weren’t kids from solid families and had habit of leaving for days to inhale Benzole. Police wondered if Rosario could have died from a bad reaction to this drug. An autopsy was inconclusive, but suggested she’d died of a cardiac arrest. 

Then on April 8, Francisco’s body was found among some bushes, about 300 meters from the shed where Rosario was. The position he was found in, lying face down with his right arm raised, suggested he’d been running away from the shed. His body was too decomposed to determine a cause of death, but again, it didn’t show any clear signs of violence.

One question was obvious: how could they miss his body, when it was so close to the shed, for 79 days? Had he really been there all along?

Also, the trio was supposed to be camping in an area that was an hour away from where Rosario and Francisco were found. How had they got to that shed, when they didn’t have a vehicle of their own?

The theory of an accidental death was already crumbling by May 26, when Pilar’s body was finally found in Turis, 8 kilometers away from Macastre. This was the most gruesome and perplexing finding of all. Pilar’s face was disfigured, caused by a beating before death, and one of her hands and one of her feet had been cut off with a mechanical saw. Turns out that her foot had been found in late January in a dumpster in Alcasser, which was even farther away from Macastre. Even though the police confirmed the body and the foot belonged to PIlar, at the time her family expressed doubts that it was her. Her sister said that Pilar had a scar in her leg that they couldn’t find int he body.

The murders of Andrew and Abby Borden, 1892

Top row - Andrew Borden crime scene, Andrew Borden autopsy photo, Andrew Borden skull showing extent of his injuries.

Middle row - the murder weapon, Abby Borden crime scene

Andrea Yates

On June 20th, 2001, Andrea Yates placed a call to Seminole police insisting that something had happened, but refused to say what. She then called her husband Rusty Yates at work, telling him he needed to come home, and that ‘it’s time’. Rusty had left for work expecting his mother, Dora, to arrive an hour later to help supervise Andrea and the children. When police arrived at the home, they found her four young sons John, Paul and Luke, as well as baby daughter Mary, laid out on the bed. Their eldest son, Noah, was found still floating in the bathtub. Andrea readily confessed to drowning her children, and was promptly arrested. 

Andrea and Rusty Yates had been married since 1993, and were deeply involved with extremist preacher Michael Woroniecki, whom Rusty had met in college. The pair planned to have ‘as many babies as nature allowed’, and had three children - Noah, John, and Paul - before moving from their home in Friendswood, Texas, into a small motorhome in Seminole after Rusty was offered a job there.

Following the birth of their third child, Andrea began showing signs of severe depression and postpartum psychosis, culminating in a breakdown in 1999 followed by numerous suicide attempts and hospitalisations. Psychiatrists treating Andrea prescribed her antidepressants and Haldol, and strongly advised them not to have any more children due to the risk to Andrea’s mental health.

7 weeks following her release from inpatient care, their daughter Mary was conceived, and born on November 30th, 2000. She had stopped taking her prescribed Haldol, however seemed to be coping well until the death of her father in March 2001.

Andrea’s condition worsened quickly, as she stopped taking her medication and began self-mutilating and neglecting her baby. Plagued by thoughts that she was a bad mother and would lead her children to be condemned to hell, Andrea suffered from homicidal ideations, going so far as to fill a bathtub on May 3, 2001, which she later confessed to police had been intended to drown her children. She was again hospitalised the next day, and psychiatrists decided that she had probably run the bath intending to drown herself. She later told a jail psychiatrist that her children ‘weren’t righteous’, and were ‘doomed to perish in the fires of Hell’ because she was evil and a bad mother.

On June 20, 2001, Rusty left Andrea alone with the children as he left for work - he had been leaving her with the children for short periods in the hopes it would help her independence - against the advice of her psychiatrist, who had advised Andrea be supervised at all times. She drowned the children one by one, beginning with John, Paul, Luke and then Mary, whom she left floating in the tub while she called Noah into the bathroom. Noah attempted to flee, but was caught and drowned along with his siblings. 

Given her admissions of guilt, Andrea’s trial centered around whether or not she could be considered legally insane. Although she was found to be legally sane and the prosecution sought the death penalty, the jury found her guilty but gave her a life sentence, refusing the death penalty in light of her condition at the time.

The conviction was appealed in 2006, and overturned on the basis of false testimony by Dr. Park Dietz that Andrea had been copying an episode of Law & Order where a woman was acquitted of drowning her children by reason of insanity, an episode which had in fact never existed. A retrial was ordered, and on July 26, 2006, Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to a Texas mental facility.

The murder of the Yates children resulted in the addition of warnings of homicidal ideation as a rare side effect of the drug venlafaxine, which Andrea had been taking prior to the murders. Much speculation was also made of the role of Woroniecki’s preachings in the murders, as his particular extremist brand of Christianity preached that modern churches were not true Christians and could not save their followers from damnation. However, both Rusty Yates and Woroniecki himself reject any allegations that his preaching contributed to Andrea’s mental state and murders.