The Youngest and Oldest Serial Killers Ever Caught

Most serial killers fall into a familiar range: twenties to forties, their rage brewing until it finally boils over. But if you look at the margins of history, the story gets stranger. On one end of the timeline, a child not even tall enough to ride the bumper cars. On the other, a man old enough to be dozing off in front of the evening news.

Both killed more than once. And both had people around them who helped keep the horror going.


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The Boy Who Smiled

In 2007, a rural village in Bihar, India, came face-to-face with something it wasn’t prepared for: Amarjeet Sada, an 8-year-old boy who admitted to killing three infants.

His 9-month-old sister. His 6-month-old cousin. Then a neighbor’s baby girl. Each time, Amarjeet carried the child away, crushed them with a brick, and tried to hide the body.

What makes the case even more disturbing is that Amarjeet’s family knew about the first two murders. Instead of alerting police, they kept it quiet — calling it a “family matter.” Only after the neighbor’s child went missing did the truth come out.

When questioned, Amarjeet reportedly smiled as he described what he had done. At eight years old, he was too young to stand trial under Indian law. He was sent to a juvenile home until adulthood, and today, his whereabouts are unknown.


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The Farmer Who Killed for Profit

Thousands of miles away, decades earlier, a Missouri farmer named Ray Copeland was running a scam that turned into a killing spree.

Starting in the late 1970s, Ray and his wife Faye would hire homeless men as farmhands. Ray used them to write bad checks at cattle auctions — checks that couldn’t be traced back to him. Once the scam was done, he executed them with his .22 rifle and disposed of the bodies.

At least five victims were confirmed. Investigators suspected more. And that suspicion feels justified — serial killers don’t usually start in their seventies. Was Ray killing in smaller ways earlier in life, hiding it among the transience of farm labor? Or did something change — head trauma, aging brain, or sheer desperation — that pushed him into open murder?

And then there’s Faye. She claimed she was a battered, passive wife, but the evidence doesn’t sit cleanly with that narrative. In their home, police found a quilt stitched from the clothing of dead men. That’s not just cleanup. That has the texture of trophy-making.

Ray was convicted in 1990 at the age of 75, making him the oldest American ever sentenced to death. He died of natural causes in 1993. Faye’s sentence was eventually reduced, but the suspicion around her has never gone away.


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Two Ends of the Spectrum, One Pattern

At first glance, Amarjeet Sada and Ray Copeland couldn’t be more different. A boy who barely understood the world, and a man who had already lived most of his life.

But what links them is chilling: they both had enablers. Amarjeet’s family shielded him until it was too late. Ray’s wife smoothed over the edges of his crimes, whether willingly or through willful blindness. In both cases, someone else’s silence bought the killer more time.

And maybe that’s the real point: extreme age creates hesitation. Too young to be taken seriously. Too old to be suspected. Both killers slipped through cracks that shouldn’t have existed.

I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t have every detail. There are surely angles I’ve missed. But from where I sit, these cases are reminders that violence doesn’t belong to one age group — and it rarely happens in isolation.