Ask a six year old girl what her dreams are, and she might tell you she wishes for a pony, or glittery bike – little Beth Thomas just longed to murder her parents and baby brother.
In chilling scenes which aired as part of a 1990 TV documentary titled Child of Rage, Beth matter-of-factly recalls torturing animals, killing nestfuls of baby birds and repeatedly smashing her younger sibling’s head into the concrete floor of the family’s basement.
Beth was so intent on killing her brother – and good at stealing knives from the kitchen – that their adoptive parents, Tim and Julie Tennent, would lock her in her room at night.
But Beth wasn’t an evil child – she had been a victim of emotional and sexual abuse before she could walk, which led to her developing a rare attachment disorder which stopped her from trusting people, or knowing right from wrong.
Attachment styles are a psychological theory which describe how people relate to others in relationships – both personal and romantic – and they are largely shaped by early interactions with caregivers.
In the 1990 documentary, the Tennents explained that when they welcomed then 19-month-old Beth and Jonathan, seven months, into their home in February 1984, they had no idea that they had come from a real life house of horrors.
Their mother had died from kidney failure shortly after Jonathan was born, leaving them in the care of their alcoholic father.
He repeatedly raped Beth, and when they were rescued by child services, Jonathan was surrounded by bottles of curdled milk, and had a deformed head from being left lying in a soiled cot for long periods of time.
Beth Thomas was just six years old in the 1990 documentary Child of Rage
But the trauma of what had happened to them didn’t begin to manifest until years later.
‘There was a nightmare that she had, and the nightmare was about a man who was falling on her and hurting her with a part of himself,’ Mrs Tennent says, who also revealed that her young daughter would often brutalise her own private parts until they bled.
The Tennents were forced to start locking Beth in her bedroom overnight after they discovered that she had been sneaking into Jonathan’s room before they woke up, repeatedly punching him in the stomach – not to mention sticking pins in the family pets.
‘This kind of aggression at our animals and even her brother Jonathan was beginning to grow to such an excess that our life was miserable,’ Mrs Tennent says.
‘At home, John would cry in the mornings and say his stomach hurt. For the longest time, we thought maybe this child has some problem with his intestinal area, or maybe he has allergies. And so we’re trying to get all that checked out.
‘Come to find out Beth was coming out of her room and hitting him in the stomach.
‘And so as a last resort, just to protect him, we had to tie her door shut…we’ve had to tie her in at night, sort of barricade her.’
Keeping the then six-year-old locked up overnight was also another way to keep her from hiding knives she had stolen from the kitchen.
She speaks to psychologist Ken Magid about her urges to kill her parents and hurt animals
Mrs Tennent says that she initially felt ‘a little guilty’ for suspecting that the young girl had stolen the bladed cutlery, but she was forced to face up to the facts after she made a ‘malicious’ admission.
‘They had been gone several weeks. [Beth] was sitting at the table drawing, and mentioned to me, “what do those knives look like? That are gone?” And I said, “What knives Beth?” And she said, “weren’t they kind of silver? And about this big?”
‘And I knew then. And then she made this little smile that’s not not a sweet smile, but a malicious type of smile. And I knew then I thought, “she’s got them”.’
Following Mrs Tennent’s horrifying admission, the documentary cuts to a scene of a psychiatrist asking Beth what she planned to do with the knives.
‘I got them from the dishwasher,’ she admits, before saying she wanted to use them ‘to kill John and mommy with them, and daddy.’
The knives went missing, according to Mrs Tennent, after Beth had already openly stated she wanted to kill her brother, and had been caught smashing his head repeatedly into a concrete floor.
The documentary makers explain that because of the abuse that Beth endured at such a vulnerable and formative age, she never developed a sense of conscience, love or trust, and would exhibit inappropriate sexual behaviour, especially toward her brother.
This, and her violent outbursts, led to her being diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) by clinical psychologist Ken Magid.
Beth had been sexually and physically abused by her father before she turned one
He specialised in treating severely abused children who had been so traumatised in the first years of life that they were unable to bond with other people – and Beth was a textbook case.
In a 2016 interview on BBS Radio, Beth explained to presenter Sophia Ray what attachment theory is, and how it can be set in infancy.
She said: ‘In that first year cycle of life, when a child has a need, when a baby has a need, they cry.
‘If that cry is not taken care of right away, it becomes rage, because they’re so helpless and hopeless, because they cannot care for themselves.
‘And so therefore, when that need is met and they get adequate gratification, then they learn to trust that caregiver, that provider, and establish a bond.
‘And what happened is, when I would have that need, that gratification didn’t come, and therefore that trust was not established.’
She added that a common factor with children who have attachment disorders is that not only can they not accept affection, they can’t give it either – and it’s because they are desperately trying to control a situation so it feels ‘safe’.
‘I had extreme control problems, extremely sneaky, destructive to myself and others,’ she said.
Beth Thomas, pictured in 2017, is now an award-winning nurse
‘I was very abusive to my younger brother. We were adopted together, and I – very quickly, from 18-months – was already acting out on him and on my adoptive family at the time.
‘They don’t feel safe in the environment, because the last environment they might have been in was an abusive and scary one, so they set their control.
‘They control the situation so as to feel safe that no one can hurt them again because they’ve already been hurt when they let their guard down.’
Beth is able to speak so eloquently about her early life because she underwent a string of intensive – and controversial – therapies to reset her attachment theory.
And now, as an adult, she is a registered nurse who works in neonatal units and gives speeches to encourage parents of children with attachment disorders not to give up on them.
As seen in the documentary, on the advice of Dr Magid the Tennents are advised to send Beth away from the family home to stay with a child trauma specialist, Nancy Thomas.
She explains that she has previously worked with ‘children that have killed numerous times’.
Nancy says: ‘People don’t think a nine year old is capable of cold-blooded murder, but they are.
In Child of Rage, Beth goes to stay with Nancy Thomas who eventually adopted her as a teen
‘That attachment break does severe damage to the heart, the ability to care and the ability to love. They don’t care and they don’t love. They’re capable of anything.’
Nancy’s process was simple – but very strict.
‘Everything is completely monitored. We take complete control because a child who is unattached does not trust, and because they don’t trust, they don’t allow anybody to be boss of them,’ she says.
‘We take complete control. They are not boss of anything. They have to ask to get a drink of water, they have to ask to go to the bathroom, they have to ask to leave our sight.
‘Part of that is because we cannot trust them, because of the damage that they’ve done.’
Being introduced to Nancy was a huge turning point in Beth’s life – she was adopted by her when she was 15, a year or two after her initial placement with the Tennents ‘failed’ and the couple placed her in a group home.
In the 2016 interview, Beth explained that she and Nancy, who she now regards as her mother, had shared their experiences in a book, Dandelion On My Pillow, Butcher Knife Beneath, and set up a service helping other troubled children.
She also revealed that she had been given a Nurse Of The Year award in 2010 after being nominated by her colleagues in the neonatal unit where she worked.
‘It took a lot of hard work to get where I am today, for sure. I definitely had a tough beginning, a rough start, for sure and it was a long and bumpy road,’ she said.
‘But I feel like when you look at it, we all have our pasts.
‘Now, some of us have way more traumatic past than others, but we all have something that we feel like is a part of who we are.
‘What I’ve come to recognise is that it’s not your past that defines you, it’s what you choose to do with your future that matters.’
