Runaway Devil: How Forbidden Love Drove A 12-year-old To Murder Her Family

I could barely put this book down once I started reading it. The authors did a great job & the book was really well written. Some of it was very disturbing considering the horrible crime that was commited. I did find it hard not to get emotional reading some of the details. I would highly recommend it.

The true story of a 12-year-old girl who convinced her older boyfriend to kill her family, Runaway Devil is dark and unsettling. If you've ever watched the evening news and thought, "well, yeah, but that will never happen here," this book will change your mind. Because it did - in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

For me, the most interesting part about this case was its implications for the young offender's act and the way we as a society deal with serious crimes committed by young people. I would have preferred a more detailed discussion of these issues, but would still recommend this book for true crime fans.

This story was told beautifully in Runaway Devil and in the same breathe, it truly broke my heart. I could not put it down, I just had to read more.

You learn all about the struggles that children go through and what lengths they can go through for something that we may find trivial. Jeremy longed for someone to love him and accept him, so much that he was willing to kill for it. (He was under the influence when he committed the murders however.) And JR, she's another story.

It was another case of wanting adulthood before her time..and although, I do applaud Canada for NOT wanting to release her name, her name is still very well known. By the people of Medicine Hat, neighboring cities, and maybe further than that.

I cannot help but feel sympathy towards JR, she will have to live with her acts for the rest of her life, but in the same breath, at 12 years old, she knew that life was sacred. That murder was wrong, I can understand how she felt about being grounded over love, and her older friends but her family was just looking out of her, like any family that loved their children would have done.

Her life ended when her family died. She has nobody left. And like she was told, I really hope she becomes a person that her parents will be proud of. And a hardworking member of society.

"Why?" That's apparently the last word uttered by the father of Canada's youngest multiple murderer and certainly the first question asked by most people who have heard her story. JR was just twelve years old when, with her 23-year-old boyfriend, she participated in killing her father, her mother, and her younger brother in the grisly April 2006 murders that took place in Medicine Hat, Alberta. We are used to adolescents having rebellions, but many people continue to struggle to make sense of this particular tragedy.

The vast majority of criminal offences happen in a context, though, and finding an easy answer to the question of "Why?" risks missing some of those important nuances and circumstances. Robert Remington and Sherri Zickefoose are reporters from the Calgary Herald who covered every aspect of this case, from the initial discovery of the bodies by a boy looking for his playmate, through the separate trials of JR and of Jeremy Steinke, and even up to the annual review hearing for JR's court-mandated Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision (IRCS) order. They are skilled writers with knowledge of the intricacies of the murders and of the murderers, though the story they tell in Runaway Devil never wallows in unnecessary detail. Tenaciously, Mr. Remington and Ms. Zickefoose tracked down members of the perpetrators' families, as well as friends of JR and Jeremy, verifying versions of events, weaving in courtroom testimony, and adding evidence never admitted in the trials, all to tell the story of how a seemingly bright, friendly, athletic young girl so quickly turned against her family. Was she the puppet master, manipulating the immature Jeremy into acting out her death fantasy or was he the Goth werewolf-wannabe who saw an opportunity to become the hero in his own version of Natural Born Killers?

Answering that question is where the book struggles, though not through any fault of the authors. We know the story. We know how it ends. At the time, however, as pieces of the narrative came together, we were shocked. She was a missing child, the subject of an Amber-Alert like media release. Suddenly, she became the suspect. They had communicated via the Internet and spent time in websites with names like Vampirefreaks.com. They had sex. They made out in the midst of a friend's party just hours after the murders. A marriage proposal was carried by police from one cell to the other after their arrests. She said he forced her to kill her brother. He said he wasn't even in the room when it happened. Each case had excellent and well-prepared Crown and defence lawyers, and the trials were overseen by respected justices who rarely stepped into the proceedings. The details have been told and retold and most people have likely formed their opinions about who really did what, about where the blame rests (society? music lyrics? drugs? parenting styles?), and about the justice system's response to a 12-year-old who, a full month before the murders, wrote of her "plan" that "begins with me killing them and ends with me living with you."

Mr. Remington and Ms. Zickefoose, then, took on a particular challenge: attempting to write more than a simple true crime book about a sensational event, while preserving the integrity of a seemingly well-known story. The result is a polished work that flows from beginning to end, that integrates the community's history into the personal stories, that provides new glimpses into the lives of the perpetrators and their families, that explains the lethal mixture of JR's need for control and Jeremy's need for acceptance, and that challenges the reader to look beyond the notion of simple answers.