Jasmine Richardson and Jeremy Steinke’s Dark True Story

It is always shocking when a child becomes a family annihilator. It is a rare act of violence that we don’t often see. In Canada, the youngest person who was ever charged with multiple counts of murder was 12 years old at the time of the crime.

On April 23, 2006, in Medicine Hat, Canada, the Richardson family was discovered in their home by a 6-year-old boy, a friend of Jasmine’s 8-year-old brother, Tyler Richardson. The boy told his mother that he thought he saw a body through the window, according to The Globe and Mail. The mother quickly called the police.

The police discovered that Debra was killed first. She was stabbed at least a dozen times. Marc fought back with a screwdriver but was eventually stabbed to death. Both bodies were discovered in the basement. Upstairs, Jasmine’s little brother had his throat slashed in his bed.

A trail of digital evidence between Jasmine and an older man named Jeremy, mainly consisting of emails exchanged between the two, led investigators to find the two in the community of Leader, Saskatchewan, about 81 miles (130 kilometers) away from the house.

Jasmine and Jeremy met at a punk rock show. Before the two met, Jasmine was described as a happy and social girl. However, the 11-year-old’s personality started to change after she started seeing the 23-year-old Jeremy. Jasmine immediately became enamored with him and the goth lifestyle.

After discovering that Jasmine was dating a 23-year-old who wore a vial of blood around his neck and claimed to be a “300-year-old werewolf,” Marc and Debra prohibited their daughter from seeing Jeremy.

Jeremy wrote on his blog on April 3, 2006, “Payment! My Lover’s rents are totally unfair; they say that they really care; they don’t know what is going on. They just assume … Their throats I want to slit … Finally there shall be silence. Their blood shall be payment!”

The night before the murders, the couple watched Oliver Stone’s 1994 film “Natural Born Killers.” The next day, the couple went to Jasmine’s family home to follow through with the family murders.

Two hours later, a witness spotted the couple laughing and kissing at a nearby restaurant. One witness recounted Jeremy saying that the victims had been “gutted like fish.” The two were later arrested.

In June 2007, 14-year-old Jasmine went on trial and pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. Identified as J.R. because of her age, she said she had  “hypothetical” conversations about killing her family, but didn’t intend on ever going through with it.

Jasmine was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, the maximum sentence allowed by the Youth Criminal Justice Act. The act states that any convicts who were under the age of 14 at the time they committed the crime cannot be charged as adults and can be given a maximum sentence of 10 years.

Despite the testimony of his terminally ill mother Jacqueline May, which highlighted Jeremy’s rough childhood and his history of self-harm, Jeremy was found guilty of all three murders. Jeremy, who was 25 at the time of the conviction, was given three life sentences.

After undergoing extensive rehabilitation and treatment, Jasmine Richardson now is freed from the prison. It was discovered through psychiatric assessment that Jasmine had a conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder. Jasmine Richardson today is now living in an undisclosed part of Canada, presumably under an assumed name.