I think that whether someone’s childhood or past experience should be taken into account depends on various factors.
I think we can all acknowledge that nobody who brutally murders someone is mentally normal, and often that not normal has an underlying cause. That doesn’t justify it, it merely goes some way towards explaining how some people become the people they become.
When you look at someone like Rose west or Levi Bellfield, as horrendous a childhood as they might have had, by the time they committed the crimes they did, they weren’t children, they were grown adults, with families of their own, whom they were also abusing in many instances.
By that time they had become members of society, enough so to know that they needed to act normally in front of people while carrying out their crimes in secret. By then their childhoods were decades behind them.
But Christa Pike was to all intents and purposes still a child. All she’d ever known was violence. She was at a training facility for troubled teens, the kind of people around her were also the kinds who have probably only ever known violence.
Coleen Slemmer was there. We don’t know why. But teenagers don’t end up at camps for delinquents without having had something go wrong in their childhood. So for all we know Coleen Slemmer, had she not been killed, could have ended up the same kind of person, and people would have looked at her childhood to blame for that.
And people say that at 18 Christa Pike was old enough to know that what she did was wrong but was she? Did she really? She kept a piece of Coleen’s skull and showed it to people. She made no attempts to cover up what she’d done. That’s not the behaviour of someone who knows that what she’s done is wrong, that’s the behaviour of someone who thinks that that kind of violence is normal. And she has her childhood to blame for that. That cannot be denied.
It’s too easy to just say “she was a bitch, now that she wasn’t able to be killed just smother her and be done. But if we don’t look at how people become the people they become, then we never come closer to prevent such crimes in future.