Runaway Devil

In April 2006, a twelve-year-old girl named J.R.* (known online as Runaway Devil) committed a brutal crime that horrified Canadians across the country: after weeks of plotting, she took part in the savage stabbing deaths of her parents and little brother in the family’s home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, making her the youngest multiple killer in Canadian history. J.R. was a quiet honour-roll student and a member of a local swim club whose middle-class existence concealed an ominous alter ego. Her Internet persona professed a fondness for a darker world of death metal music, the goth subculture, and her love for Jeremy Steinke, a twenty-three-year-old high-school dropout. When J.R. got involved with the much older Steinke, her concerned parents tried all the Dr. Phil strategies to restrain her and interrupt the relationship, to no avail. Was J.R. simply growing up too fast and under the spell of a Svengali-like Steinke, who is alleged to have committed the murders with her help? Or was she really the puppet master who manipulated her boyfriend to do her bidding? Based on the trials and exclusive interviews with the prosecutors, police officers, and family and friends of the victims and murderers, Runaway Devil gives the full, compelling truth behind the shocking tragedy. *As a young offender, her full name cannot be used.