Posted by In June 1992 in Camberley, England, 12-year-old Sharon Carr randomly stabbed 18-year-old Katie Rackliff to death with 32 knife wounds. The case remained unsolved until 1994, when Sharon stabbed a schoolmate and then confessed to the murder. Convicted in 1997, she is the youngest female murderer in British history and has remained in custody because of her violence.
Sharon Carr, born in Belize on 21 December 1979 and brought to England in 1986, is not well known. Yet she should be since she’s the youngest killer in the UK.
When she was 12 she brutally stabbed an 18-year-old girl, but that’s not the end. The crime was so violent, and with an obvious sexual purpose, that the police thought the killer was a man.
So Sharon was never suspected, and got away with it for two years until she struck again.
The murder of Katie Rackliff
It is the night of 7 June 1992, and Katie Rackliff, an 18-year-old apprentice hairdresser, is walking home from the Ragamuffins nightclub in Camberley, Surrey, when she is brutally murdered.
The attack is ferocious: she is stabbed 32 times with a knife of about six and a half inches, and her body is mutilated. The most horrifying aspect is that her killer, who chose her at random, is Sharon Carr, a 12-year-old girl who did not even know her. She also stole some of her jewellery, then the body was taken by Sharon and some accomplices to Farnborough and dumped by a cemetery wall, where a group of boys found it the next morning.
After the attack Sharon returns home and will never be suspected of the murder. The police thought it was a sexual murder and that the killer is a man.
Two years go by and the murder of Katie remains a mystery. On 7 June 1994, the second anniversary of the murder, Sharon stabbed a 13-year-old schoolmate in the back in the toilets at Collingwood College, for no reason, puncturing her lung. She was stopped by five students and arrested.
The confession
While awaiting trial, she’s held in an assessment center where she attacks two operators and tries to strangle them.
She takes a fancy to one of the guards, and begins to tell him about the murder of Katie, two years earlier.
The girl knows details only the murderess could have known since they were not disclosed to the public. For example she describes in detail a specific injury and knows that the killer stole a bracelet to the victim.
The police then begin a search at Sharon’s house where they find her diaries. The cops will find many drawings of knives and sentences that describe Katie’s murder.
In a note she wrote this:
Every night I see the devil in my dreams, sometimes even in the mirror. Then I realize that instead it’s me.
After these findings the police questioned Sharon for 27 hours, during which she confessed the murder of Katie.
The sentence
On 25 March 1997, after a month-long trial at Winchester Crown Court, she was convicted of murder and ordered to serve at least 14 years before she could apply for parole. She is officially the youngest female murderer in British history: Mary Bell, in fact, had been convicted of manslaughter.
In 1998, however, she was moved to Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital, where she kept attacking staff and other patients, and for this reason she has remained in custody long after her minimum term.
Katie’s parents were shaken by the sentence given to their daughter’s killer. They are indeed confident that once free, Sharon will kill again.
Sharon seems in fact to have always been attracted by violence and sadism, and police discovered a long history of cruelty to animals: she had once beheaded a dog with a spade. She was dubbed by the press as “The Daughter of the Devil”.
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