The Torture and Murder of Rikki Neave

This is an old case, but one that I recently discovered. The facts of this case are no less disturbing than any other child abuse/murder case that I have covered or will cover in the future.

Sometimes I wonder if people knew what they would end up doing to their kids before they had them, if they would have them at all...or if the torture of your child(ren) is something that really just got their rocks off so much, that's why they had them to begin with.

Rikki's murder took place in 1994, in Peterborough, England. He was last known to be walking to school that morning, and when he did not return home later that day, his mother, Ruth Neave, called the police and reported him missing.

Now...before I get into the details of the murder, let me tell you about Ruth Neave, and the things that she had done to her children which led to her eventual arrest, charged with the murder of her son.

As most cases, Ruth Neave didn't have an easy childhood. Though I hold easy childhood or not, don't do what was done to you to them...stop the fucking cycle of abuse...anyway, I digress...

Ruth showed sings of disfunction early on. Her father was disabled. Her brother was born blind. She was, at an early age, in foster care after being rejected by her natural parents; who later committed suicide in a suicide pact when she was 24. She was also a known meth addict, as well as heavily into the occult. Throughout childhood in foster homes, she would often sneak out and go on drug binges.

By the time that Rikki was three, Ruth was throwing him out of the house far into the night to wait (and cry) until someone called social services, or his mother finally let him back inside. This would happen in any weather, and in the cold months would be left with nothing to keep him warm. Child Services, at this point in time, around this particular area was completely over-worked, under resourced, working as many cases as fifteen a day and was "close to collapse" at the time of Rikki's death.

This area was an area for indigent, single-parent homes with a high unemployment rate.

When Ruth married Dean Neave, Rikki's step-father, is when Rikki began getting the main brunt of the abuse, as Dean and Rikki did not get along. She blamed this for Dean not being around very often, and this is this went from bad to worse.

Ruth would send Rikki out with 40 of her 90 pounds of her weekly government supplement money to her drug dealer's for the purpose of buying her meth, or as she called it, "sherbet".

In several letters Ruth wrote to Dean she explained to him how she would burn him with matches and her cigarettes, "punch in his little face", and how she wanted to kill him, but that she couldn't. She also asked several times if he could take Rikki off her hands.

She, at one point, wrote "idiot" on the boy's forehead in marker with an order not to wash it off, squirting liquid dish soap down his throat to the point of choking him. It is reported that while she would beat him (and his sisters), as well as when she choked him with the dish soap, through his tears he just cowered and told her he loved her.

She would kick/beat him (around his head) until he was black and blue.

She even held him over a bridge by his feet and threatened to drop him.

She would also burn her daughters as well as, with at least one, picking her up off her feet by the throat and choking her. And leave them locked in a urine soaked room for hours.

Brushed their hair so hard the girl(s) would scream and Ruth would then hit them in the head with the brush until it broke.

Now the murder...

The last his mother knew he had left for school that morning. His body was found the next morning 500 feet from his home, naked, his body laid out in a star position, leading the investigators to think the murder was occult related. Which prompted Ruth Neave's arrest.

However, she was cleared of the murder charge in court, as she maintained that she did not kill her son, but did admit to the abuse she put him and the other children through and did serve time for those crimes.

Her other children were placed in other homes where they were safe and were eventually adopted.

The judge told Ruth, "I have to say I've rarely come across a case of such systematic cruelty to children. This is not a case of sudden loss of temper. Not a baby- bashing case in the ordinary sense. The harm done to all these children is infinitely worse. It is incalculable. It will have a scarring effect on them. The court has to do its best to protect children. If we don't, no one else will. The sentence I pass has to reflect the public abhorrence."

Now, Ruth, while a terrible person, was not the murderer of her son. There has been a man arrested by the name of James Watson, now 38, for the murder of Rikki Neave. At the time of the murder James Watson would have been thirteen.

The boy died as a result of being strangled, his clothes being dumped in a near by trashcan.

Witnesses reported two boys, one of them being James Watson, coming from the area of the murder on the day and the approximate time of the murder.

Police reopened the cold case in 2015 and have found enough evidence, or had enough evidence they didn't have the technology to test in 1994, to make an arrest.

As of May of 2020, he was still being held in prison awaiting the court date.