Picture this grim scenario if you will: a couple has 10 children. Over a number of years, they starve and abuse 7 of their children to death. One little child is lucky to be alive when discovered by police before she met the same fate. You might ask yourself who could do such a thing?

Meet the Dudleys

There are people in the world like that. They live among us. These two were named Kenneth Edwin and Irene Adelle Dudley (now deceased). They seemed to live a nomadic lifestyle, probably because they feared being caught by police for murdering their own children.

On February 9, 1961, the body of a female child, about 4 years old, was found along Route 1, near L awrenceville, Virginia. Indications of severe abuse included bruises, open sores, and a healing fracture of the child’s right leg. The cause of death was listed as a combination of exposure to the elements and malnutrition. Three days later, a patrolman stopped the deadly duo just 50 yards away from the tiny corpse.

The father had driven along a lonely road and thrown the little body on what his wife thought was a dump; she heard the rattle of tin cans. According to official reports, Deborah Jane, three, died in Gary, W. Va., on May 21, 1960. About May 27, the Dudleys left her body in the woods by a highway somewhere in Kentucky.



The Dudleys had been traveling with several ragged children in their car, Interviews with two older daughters in New York revealed that the parents departed Syracuse in July 1958, with six children in their care. At the time of their arrest, only one, two-year-old Christine, was still alive. The others had been lost along a rambling trek across the continent and back again. Authorities could chart the family’s progress with a string of bodies. These two were worse than Bonnie and Clyde. And they were killing their own children.

The Victims

Claude had been the first to die, on November 19, 1958, still three months shy of his fourth birthday; hi s body, bound in canvas and a blanket, had been found near Lakeland, Florida.

Norman, ten years old, had died December 23, 1959, with eight-year-old Charles following on Christmas day; their bodies, tied together in a blanket and canvas, were dropped off a bridge into Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, on January 1, 1960.

Three-year-old Deborah Jane survived until May 21, 1960; her small corpse was wrapped in canvas, wedged into a cardboard box and dumped on a rubbish heap outside Jenkins, Kentucky. Carol Ann, age nine, was the last, her blanket-wrapped body discovered in a patch of snow near Lawrenceville on February 9.

Investigation demonstrated that another Dudley child had been unearthed near Syracuse, New York, in 1946, resulting in Kenneth’s imprisonment for improper burial. Seriously? Improper burial? Dudley had served a whole year on that charge, but detectives never pressed the search for evidence homicide. That makes sense.

Irene documented a pattern of brutal abuse through the years. In fits of anger, Kenneth often beat the children over trivial offenses, sometimes binding them with ropes for a day or more at a time, resulting in loss of circulation to arms and legs. Once he slapped one of the girls for “moving a lot,” and then thrust his fingers down the child’s throat to silence her “hollering.” The poor Dudley children finally died due to malnutrition and a general neglect. “Because we had no money,” Irene told police, “ At ti mes the children were denied food, as punishment for misbehavior. At times, my husband and I ate while the children had nothing. We were better off than the children.”

Both defendants were confined for psychiatric observation pending trial Naturally anyone capable of starving and abusing their kids to death had to be nuts, didn’t they? That was the last piece of information I found about the deadly Dudleys. I like to think they spent the rest of their miserable lives in prison but who knows? Kenneth was born in 1913 and Irene in 1917. Hopefully the two met with their rightful fate after they shuffled off their miserable mortal coils.