The murder of Silje Redergård
Silje Redergård (b. 1989 d. 1994) was beaten and murdered in Norway by two 6-year-old boys in 1994. The case echoes the infamous James Bulger murder where Jon Venables and Robert Thompson brutally abducted and killed 4-year-old James. Children killing children is always difficult to come to terms with, and in 1994 Norway was a nation in shock and mourning.
On October 15th 1994 5-year-old Silje was found naked and dead in the snow at a soccer field in the quiet, small town of Trondheim in Norway. A town with hardly any crime, peaceful and tucked away in the mountains.
Prior to this, Silje had been playing in the snow and making snow castles with two 6-year-old boys who lived next door. They’d played together before, but weren’t very close. At some point the fun stopped, and no one knows just what happened. A childish disagreement, a tantrum? The boys turned on Silje and started mercilessly beating her with stones, punching her and kicking her. They then removed her clothes, and left her to die in the snow.
"We didn't know that anything was wrong until a local boy came by and told us," Silje’s mother Beathe Redergård says. "He was the one who first told us what had happened. He was only eight-years-old, so we didn't know whether he was telling the truth. We went over towards where it had happened and saw a group of police officers. We were stopped and couldn't get to Silje." The police, she says, had cordoned off the area. Beathe Redergård stated -
"They asked us who we were, and then they put us in a police car and drove us to the station. We were interviewed. It looked like the murder could have something to do with sexual abuse because she was undressed, so the suspicion falls on the closest family members. We were at the police station for a long time. Afterwards, we were driven home. It was almost 10pm."
Naturally Silje’s parents and everyone else thought it must’ve been an adult who did this to her. It wasn’t until the following day that the shock of what had really happened to Silje was revealed.
"One of the people who'd tried to resuscitate Silje, we went over to her house to say thanks. We thought we should thank her for trying," says Redergard. ”The woman told us that she'd done so much to try to save Silje. I was sitting with her son on my lap. Then she said it was him and another boy that had done it. "I looked at the boy and asked him, 'What did you do?' He said, 'I jumped on her because I thought she was sleeping.' Then he said he took off her clothes because he thought she was sleeping. When we found out he had done it, we left. It was too difficult. I wanted to throttle him and be done with it. When I realised that I almost wanted to kill him, we left."
The little town soon developed a lynch mob atmosphere and people were desperate to know what could have caused this brutal act of violence.
Beathe Redergard says she "felt bad" for the boys even in the middle of her grief, because they were "just little kids".
"We beat her till she stopped crying," one of the little boys later told the police.
The boys faced no criminal repercussions but were placed in another local school. The caseworker who managed the boys after the incident said, "We don't believe in prison for youngsters, so we think that if we can help them in any other way, that's what we should do."
The two boys saw psychologists, and got a lot of help to move past the incident and realize what they’d done. Not much is known about the boys except that they’ve never been in trouble again, and one of them, the one who sat on Beathe’s lap, continues to struggle daily with his past.
The case worker had this to say about the now adult boy -
"He's self-medicating, using alcohol, pills and amphetamines. Life is too hard, and the drugs let him relax. It helps him deal with the everyday. There's no joy in his life ... He's still a young man, but he has no life. He's literally living in a nightmare."