Transcription
Is there anything more frightening than an evil child? Whether it's Sid from Toy Story mutilating his play things, Michael Myers murdering his older sister in Halloween, or Samara's vengeful ghost climbing out of a well in The Ring. The combination of children and horror has always made us deeply uncomfortable.
European folklore is rife with tales of changelings, supernatural children swapped by fairies, demons, or trolls for human infants. In Victorian England, many people believed children were born evil and could only be turned into decent adults through strict punishment. Even the popular children's stories of the age featured terrifying consequences for naughty children, such as The Red Shoes, in which a girl who refuses to stop wearing a pair of red shoes to church is condemned to dance to death until she begs an executioner to cut off her feet. In the early 20th century, a growing debate over the role of nature versus nurture in personality and behavior made the evil child trope more effective than ever.
But what about when the concept climbs out of folktales and morality stories and appears in real life? In 1925, 7-year-old Elsa Thompson made a shocking confession. The child told police that not only had she tried to poison the family she lived with, but she'd also already killed her previous caretaker and her two infant sisters. When the stunned officers asked her why she'd done these heinous acts, Elsa said, "Only, I guess I like to see them suffer."
The confession came after Mrs. Platt told the police in Hollywood, California, that the child they had been boarding for several weeks had begun trying to poison the family with sulfuric acid. Elsa and her youngest sister, Maxine, had been sent to live with the Platt family while their mother, Clare, worked at a store downtown. The family had moved to California from Dolphin, Canada. While still living in Manitoba, Clare and Russell Thompson's 2-year-old twin daughters, Muriel and Mildred, had died from a painful, protracted intestinal disease. Perhaps desperate to put the tragedy behind them, the Thompsons moved their two remaining children to Los Angeles. Shortly after arriving, Clare and Russell separated. Russell moved to Santa Anna, while Clare stayed in Hollywood with Elsa and Maxine.
According to some sources, Clare had dreams of becoming an actress and threw herself into auditioning for roles while also working as a clerk in a store to pay the bills. With no one to care for the young girls during her shifts, Clare was forced to board the pair with other families. While it may sound shocking today, before daycares and after-school programs were plentiful, it was quite common for a single mother to send her children to live with a nearby family, at least during the work week. Elsa and Maxine were sent to live with an elderly woman, Mrs. Steel, and her adult daughter, Netti. After a few months, Netti fell ill with stomach cancer and passed away. The girls were then settled with the Platt family, who had school-aged children of their own.
According to Mrs. Platt, about two weeks after Elsa and Maxine moved in, the various members of the Platt family began falling ill. Mr. Platt lost his voice. Mrs. Platt became weak and sick, and their children began to complain of various aches and pains. The family physician could not find a cause for their sudden bout of bad health, which made Mrs. Platt suspicious of Elsa. Mrs. Platt said the entire ordeal culminated when at dinner one night, the family noticed their food tasted terrible and refused to eat it. She said that Elsa was so infuriated with their refusal to eat that she chased her little sister Maxine into the bathroom with a sharp knife, threatening to cut her wrists. She also claimed that Elsa had killed the family canary, tortured the dog, and tormented neighborhood children.
The Hollywood police, however, were skeptical of the claims. Elsa was well-groomed, polite, and respectful. Most importantly, she was just 7 years old. How could such a small child plot a homicidal scheme and slip poison into the family's supper? But when the officers asked her if what Mrs. Platt said was true, the little girl immediately confessed.
Hollywood police captain L.L. McClary was unconvinced. He believed it was more likely that the young girl was suffering from hallucinations or mental illness than that she had truly committed these monstrous acts. A juvenile court judge agreed and ordered that Elsa be placed under psychiatric observation at LA General Hospital until her claims could be verified by medical professionals. For the next few days, physicians and police investigators probed Elsa's claims and observed her behavior. She happily repeated the same details each time she was asked about the alleged crimes.
Here is the entirety of what Elsa confessed to. While living in Canada, 5-year-old Elsa took a glass jar from the kitchen and smashed it on the front sidewalk. She picked up some of the pieces, carried them inside, and sprinkled them onto the cereal her mother had prepared for Muriel and Mildred. She watched them eat the tainted food, then went outside to play, afraid her mother would notice the glass shards and scold her. The twins became ill soon after and died after a few days. Elsa said, "When they died, I cried too, and everybody else cried. I felt sorry after they were dead." One doctor asked Elsa why, if she felt sorry, did she let her baby sisters eat the glass. Elsa answered, "I was sorry after they were dead, but I wasn't sorry while they were sick. I used to hear them crying, and I wasn't sorry then."
While living with Mrs. Steel, Elsa grew angry that she was being scolded for losing toys that her neighbor's daughter was stealing from her. She put ant paste in Netti Steel's food to poison her, after which she fell ill and died. And Elsa and her sister Maxine were sent to live with the Platt family. She wasn't any happier there, so she began adding battery acid to the family's coffee and food. Everyone got sick, but did not die, so she added ant paste to the food, hoping for the same effects she had achieved with Netti Steel. Again, everybody felt terribly ill. Mrs. Platt confronted Elsa, who confessed to poisoning the family and was immediately arrested.
Elsa said she got the idea for her poisons from adults who'd warned her about the dangers of different items. Her mother had once told her to never put glass in her mouth because if she swallowed any, she would die. Mrs. Steel had told her not to touch ant paste because it was poison, and a friend of Mrs. Platt had warned her never to touch the battery on the radio because it was poisonous.
Despite Elsa's shocking confessions, her parents insisted she was innocent. Russell Thompson told investigators that he had never observed Elsa inflict any cruelty on animals or other children. He and Clare were certain that their twin daughters had died of a sudden summer illness and that the notion of them being fed glass shards mixed with their cereal without them noticing was preposterous. Russell said that Elsa had not even had any concept of death at that point and had not understood when they took the twins' bodies away that they were dead. Indeed, the twins had been under constant medical care prior to their death, and a surgeon who attended them was insistent that their condition could not have been caused by ingesting glass. However, a country autopsy surgeon disputed this claim, arguing that glass could have caused the initial symptoms that were mistaken for intestinal disease. The doctor who treated Netti Steel declared that she had stomach cancer, a condition that had been present long before Elsa arrived, and that he saw no signs of arsenic poisoning while he was treating her. Netti's mother, the elder Mrs. Steel, also stated that while Elsa was a bad girl who told many lies, she had certainly not murdered Netti.
Elsa's teachers also doubted that she was capable of such callous actions. They described her as a bright, obedient student who was studying the 8th-grade curriculum despite being of kindergarten age. One teacher told the press that Elsa was a teller of elaborate tales, but she had never caused any trouble in the classroom.
The psychiatric professionals who evaluated Elsa Thompson did not believe her confession was an invented, elaborate tale. They concluded that she was telling the truth, at least about her responsibility in the deaths of her sisters and Netti Steel, even if a few details were embellished. One doctor said Elsa was born with too much intellect and not enough judgment, and that she had developed a murder complex. She and other witnesses were also interviewed by Chief Deputy District Attorney Byron Fitz, who was less convinced that her story was truthful but believed that more time was needed to determine which aspects of the tale were lies. Judge Gates of the Lunacy Commission ruled that Elsa was sane but lacking judgment and emotion and ordered that she be placed in the care of parole officer Jean McCracken to be placed in a retreat where her mind might be rid of all its abnormalities under the proper care.
Elsa's case was a media sensation. Newspaper writers dubbed her the "baby bourreau," named after the notorious family of nobles rumored to have used poison to eliminate their rivals and secure political and monetary gains. The story was all the more scandalous thanks to Russell and Clare's marital discord. Only about 1% of marriages ended in divorce in those days. Columnists speculated whether their defense of Elsa would result in a reconciliation.
In retrospect, it seems clear that Elsa's home life must have impacted her behavior and supposed confession. She'd lost two sisters, moved to another country, seen her parents separate, been sent to live with a woman she watched die of stomach cancer, and was then uprooted yet again to live with the Platts. Yet, at the time, no one seemed particularly concerned with determining which factors might lead Elsa to murder three people or lie about murdering them.
Just as it seemed her story had reached its climax, and as the public was waiting with bated breath to discover what Elsa might reveal while under care, she withdrew her confession. Elsa told her examiners that her stories were mere fairy tales that had been put in her head by a woman she lived with. Elsa did not disclose whether that woman was her mother, Mrs. Steel, or Mrs. Platt, but was now insistent that her earlier account had been a lie. Elsa's sudden change of heart complicated her legal case, which was already divided between the Lunacy Commission and the Juvenile Court. Her case was postponed indefinitely, and prosecutors admitted it was unlikely she would ever be formally tried for the crimes she'd previously confessed to. Elsa was released into the care of her father.
Had Elsa invented the story about poisoning her baby sisters and Netti Steel, or had the unusually bright child simply realized that without her confession, there was no evidence to convict her of murder? Perhaps the doctors who attended her dying siblings did not recognize that ingesting glass could cause symptoms similar to intestinal disease, and possibly Netti Steel did have stomach cancer but was hastened to death by Elsa's ant paste. And maybe Elsa's battery acid was the reason the Platt family fell ill. A local fireman had also testified that while Elsa lived with the Platts, he'd been served peaches at the house that tasted too terrible to eat.
It is equally dark to contemplate Elsa's innocence. If she had not committed the acts she claimed, then which adult manipulated her into confessing? Had her mother, with her desire to become a famous actress, taught Elsa that with carefully delivered lines, she could convince even medical professionals of anything she wished? Had Mrs. Platt despised her new charge so much that she convinced her she was responsible for the family's sudden poor health and the other tragedies in Elsa's short life?
Despite so many unanswered questions, Elsa's confession was never revisited. She moved to Santa Anna with her father, where she disappeared from the public eye for good. According to a few old newspaper clippings, she married her former classmate Harry R. Reed in 1935. Reed was an ambitious traveler and explorer who headed a 1946 expedition to Alaska with his group, becoming the first civilians to use the brand-new Alcan Highway to reach the territory. A 1947 news story about the expedition briefly mentions Elsa. "His wife, Elsa Thompson Reed, a writer, accompanied the expedition to gather article and book material."
We may never know for sure whether Elsa was a "child killer." Still, given that she went on to live a private, law-abiding life, it seems unlikely that she had the murder complex the psychiatrist once diagnosed her with. Indeed, it is more probable that Elsa herself was the victim of a complicated series of tragic circumstances and adult manipulation that led her to tell a story that very nearly ended with her spending the remainder of her life behind asylum walls. And yet, the details Elsa offered were disturbingly specific. The way she described mixing poisons into foods, pulverizing glass on the sidewalk, and watching as her victims grew ill and died—those weren't the imaginings of a typical 7-year-old. Whether she invented them or recalled them from life, we'll never know. All we can say for certain is that when Elsa Thompson walked free, so did the truth, whatever it really was.
Thank you for watching. And while I have your attention, I'd like to tell you about a new channel, Well, I Never Audio Books. We regularly get requests asking if I'd create audiobooks. And if you ask, we try to deliver. So, if that sounds like something you'd be into, do give it a look. Right then, take care, and I'll see you next time with another story to make you say, "Well, I never."