Professor carves niche studying children who kill
TAMPA (AP) – The way Kathleen Heide tells it, a prison movie she watched on TV as a kid back home in New Jersey started it all.
The 1950 film “Caged” was about a naive 19-year-old woman who becomes hardened after going to prison for a robbery. Heide figures it was about 9 when she saw it on TV in the early 1960s and found herself thinking for the first time about “why people got in trouble.” It’s a theme she would end up exploring for much of her life.
A few years later, she was captivated by the murders carried out by Charles Manson’s followers in Los Angeles. Then came the Attica prison riot in New York in 1971, and the sheltered teenager who attended an all-girl Catholic school became intrigued with life inside prisons.
In college at Vassar in the 1970s, Heide’s tenacious curiosity about what makes criminals tick led her to the study of violent children, particularly those who murder their parents. She recalls being fascinated by a New York Times article in the mid-’70s suggesting that modern society had bred “a new genetic strain of child murderer.”
Now a University of South Florida criminology professor, Heide’s expertise is kids who kill.
Little did she realize the niche she created for herself would make her a hot property outside the bubble of academia. As an internationally recognized authority on the topic, she is frequently summoned by attorneys as an expert witness in court to explain the inner-workings of a child’s mind. Beyond that, she’s become a go-to national media source skilled at delivering succinct observations on the latest school shooting or other violent act by a juvenile. Most recently, it was a group of South Florida boys who allegedly set a classmate on fire.
Heide’s made the local and national media rounds after the Columbine High School shootings and the massacre at Virginia Tech. She’s talked to reporters about the Adam Walsh slaying and why the Menendez brothers would kill their millionaire parents. A British production company sought her out for a documentary about the 1974 killings in Long Island, N.Y., by Ronald DeFeo Jr. The 23-year-old’s slayings of six members of his family preceded the alleged haunting that became the subject of “The Amityville Horror.”
Heide has been quoted by The Associated Press and dozens of newspapers and magazines, and has been all over the national TV talk shows. She’s written two books on kids who kill and for the next one is revisiting people who committed violent crimes as children years ago.
“I don’t think there’s anyone better,” says Craig Alldredge, a public defender in the Tampa Bay area who has frequently turned to Heide to evaluate his juvenile clients during the past 25 years. “In my world, you deal with experts who have egos the size of Montana. She, to her undying credit, is very self-effacing and incredibly understated for the work that she does.”