Rikki Neave was six years old, and already hardened beyond his tender age. His mother Ruth, who had been the victim of abuse and neglect herself as a child and whose own parents had died in a bizarre suicide pact, was tragically repeating the cycle. She was a known amphetamine addict, and no stranger to the social services in Peterborough, England. She had admittedly physically abused Rikki as well as her other two children; the list of atrocities she had committed against her defenseless six-year-old makes for sickening reading. She routinely kicked and punched him, burned him with matches, dangled him off bridges by his feet, locked him out of the house barefoot in freezing weather, squirted dish soap into his mouth to punish him for swearing, scrawled the word “idiot” on his forehead with a felt-tip pen, and sometimes sent him out at night alone to pick up her drugs. The ever-changing roster of boyfriends cycling through the house was also an issue, and the man she was married to in 1994, whose name was Dean, actively hated little Rikki and made no secret of this fact.
On the morning of Thursday, November 28th, Rikki Neave left his home at Redmile Walk, Welland, at about nine a.m., ostensibly to go to school. But the child was often truant, and it didn’t appear that he was planning on attending school on this particular day, as none of his teachers reported seeing him. No one is quite sure what he was doing all day, though a few of the neighborhood kids claimed they had seen him wandering around the estate with some of his friends as late as seven p.m.
Rikki’s mother Ruth, despite her habitual neglect, apparently became concerned when the child hadn’t come home by tea time, and reported him missing to police at six p.m.
A search was undertaken, but Rikki Neave was not found until about noon on the following day. His nude body was discovered spread-eagled in a wooded area off Eye Road, only about five-hundred yards from his house. He had not been sexually assaulted, but he had been strangled to death. His clothing—including gray pants, a white shirt, black shoes, a blue coat, and reportedly his red school sweater—were later found in a nearby garbage can.
From very early on in the inquiry, authorities suspected that Ruth Neave had killed her six-year-old son. Her abuse of him was well-known, after all, and according to several witnesses, she had repeatedly stated that she wanted to kill him. Further, she had told numerous people that she was an “occult high priestess,” a claim that resonated with a public still somewhat in the grips of the so-called Satanic Panic; the way Rikki’s body was found spread out suggested to some a pentagram or other ritualistic aspect to the crime.
Police also found her behavior strange after her son was found, and noted that she had declined to participate in the search for him. And they took particular interest in Ruth’s fascination with true crime and her tendency to write stories about gruesome murders.
Ruth Neave was arrested and stood trial for the murder of her son in 1996. On the stand, she openly admitted her interest in the occult, her previous abuse of Rikki and her other two children, and her devastating drug habit, but asserted that she had not killed the boy. She believed that he had been murdered by a group of older children in the neighborhood, and that police were using her as an easy scapegoat.
This contention wasn’t entirely unfounded, it must be said; only the year before, in Merseyside, England, two ten-year-old boys had abducted two-year-old Jamie Bulger from a mall, tortured and murdered him, then placed his body on train tracks to be sliced in half. And many in the United Kingdom still remembered the chilling case of Mary Bell, the ten-year-old girl who strangled two toddlers in Newcastle upon Tyne back in 1968. Some have speculated that the murder of Rikki Neave, in fact, might have been a sort of copycat crime, perpetrated by other children living in the rather squalid, negligent atmosphere of the council estate.
Though Ruth’s testimony at the murder trial horrified the jury, they were ultimately not convinced that she had killed Rikki. She was acquitted of the murder, but was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of abuse and neglect.
After Ruth’s release, she campaigned for authorities to reopen the investigation, which they did in June of 2015. In April of 2016, a thirty-six-year-old man named James Watson was arrested in connection with the case; tellingly, he had been thirteen years old when Rikki Neave was murdered, suggesting that police were now pursuing the angle of a child killer. Watson, who had lived on the same council estate as the victim at the time of the slaying, and had sexually assaulted an eleven-year-old boy two years prior to Rikki Neaves’s murder, fled to Portugal while out on bail, but was re-arrested and extradited back to England for further questioning.
He was tried for the crime in spring of 2022; the most compelling evidence presented at the trial was the fact that his DNA was found on Rikki Neaves’s clothing. James Watson was convicted of the murder on June 24th, 2022, and sentenced to life in prison.
Crime Immemorial 