23. Kids Murdering Kids: Derrick Joseph Robie
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Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of Binge. Now before we jump into it, two things. Number one, again, if you listen to Binge and you enjoy it, please go leave us a five-star review, rate the podcast, it seriously helps us out so much and I really appreciate it. Second,

This case should probably come with a trigger warning. As you can tell by the title, this is kids murdering kids and our victim this week is pretty young. Now I'm not going to go into a ton of detail, but I did want to say I almost didn't cover this case.

It is so heartbreaking, and I've heard a lot of listeners with children themselves say that child cases are particularly hard to listen to. So I really want to make sure that we're being mindful of honoring the victim as you listen. Remember that this was a child whose life was unfairly and unjustly taken away. My sole purpose here is to remember who he was while sharing his story.

Now, we dropped a hint at the end of last week's episode about what case we'd be covering this week. And some of you guessed correctly. So, shouts out to Carrie Marley and Gabby Pena. You girls know your true crime. In fact, Carrie wrote that she was in close proximity to the killer in today's case, only a week before the murder we'll be covering, when she was only nine years old. This week's case takes place in the village of Savona, New York.

exactly 30 years ago this summer. Now, Savona is a small community, so serious crime was and still is rare. And this is a case that's still remembered there and talked about today. Derek Robbie didn't live long enough for much to be said about him. And if that's not a heartbreaking sentence, I don't know what is.

He was a little boy who loved frogs. He loved baseball and played on a t-ball team coached by his dad. He loved playing basketball and soccer. He liked to sit on his bike in front of his house and wave at cars that went by. People in the neighborhood called him the unofficial mayor of Savona.

But he just never had a chance to develop any of the richness that takes shape in a human being as they move through the lifelong process of maturity. Derek was only four years old when his life ended. He wasn't even in kindergarten yet.

Not even old enough to have become a person one could describe as anything other than just an ordinary little boy. Just like everyone else's kid is how his uncle struggled to describe him that August day back in 1993. This was the day that his body was found. That morning, Derek's mother, Doreen, was getting ready to take him to a park down the street from their house in Savona, New York.

The park was Savona Village Park, and there was a summer recreation program going on there, a summer day camp for school-aged children. And Derek was set to be entering kindergarten that fall. It was a Monday morning, and Derek was excited to return to camp after the weekend at home. That day's activities included kickball, which he loved, and he also looked forward to one of his other favorite pastimes, catching spiders inside the park bathroom.

So after his mom dressed Derek for camp, he was ready to go, but she wasn't quite ready to leave yet. Derek was antsy and ready to go. He'd been here before. He didn't want to wait any longer. It's okay. I'll just go by myself, he said. So because he was almost five years old and the park was just two blocks away, again, he'd been there before. There was no streets to cross. His mother said, okay, and she let him leave the house to head to the park.

He gave his mom a kiss on the cheek, said "I love you" and went skipping off to the sidewalk. It was the first time Derek's mom had ever let him go anywhere by himself. And before we rush to judgment, two things: This was a different time. This was a time where some people still believed in the innocence of where they lived. And number two, it's easy to justify letting your child explore individuality and responsibility when they've been there before and it's just two blocks away.

And on the morning of Monday, August 2nd, 1993, as you probably know, Derek Robbie left for camp and never showed up.

Two hours later, as storm clouds rolled in around 11 a.m. that morning, Derek's mother learned that her son never arrived at the camp. She immediately called authorities and reported him missing. Neighbors and police began an intensive search for the little boy almost right away. The state police, the county sheriff, and the fire department were all out looking for Derek. And people from all over the community were getting involved with the search, adults and kids alike.

And nearly five hours after he went missing, Derek's body was found in a small patch of woods just off the road. It was halfway between his house and the park where he had headed that morning. The village of Simona was among a population of just under a thousand people. The now devastated Robbie family was well known in this village and so the news spread like a wildfire. And it hit the community especially hard. The village would never be the same after this.

Free counseling services were set up for people in the community, including kids who were having a hard time processing it. Kids like Derek's nine-year-old friend Joe, who decided he wasn't going to ever leave his front yard again, at least for a couple years, he told a reporter. At least not till he learned how to fight again.

And not only was this a brutal murder, Derek had been bludgeoned with a blunt instrument and had other things done to him. No one thought something like this would ever happen in Savona. But now, yellow crime scene tape cordoned off an area where even many of the adults used to play as children. People suddenly were locking their doors and afraid to let their kids out of their sight. Derek's grieving mother, Doreen, gave an address at a community meeting.

This was just a little bit of independence I gave my son before he went to camp, she said. I didn't think 400 yards down a sidewalk without a crossing street would be a problem. In the days following Derek's murder, kids out playing was not a sight anyone was seeing in the village of Savona.

And the summer rec program was suspended for the remainder of the week following the murder, and many parents would not even allow their kids to return. There was still a killer out there, and the only lead investigators had was an unfamiliar green pickup truck that had recently been seen around town, and even that wasn't much to go on.

They also considered that Derek's murder might be connected to another child slaying three years earlier over in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. 12-year-old Jimmy Bernardo, who was abducted and later found dead in Newfield in November 1990. But they leaned toward the belief that the murderer lived among them in their county. Two days after his murder, it was voted that the baseball field at the local elementary school would be named after Derek Robbie to memorialize him.

And by this time, a team of 40 state troopers were working the investigation. And by the time Derek was laid to rest on the Saturday following his murder, the number of officers on the case increased to 50, each working 16 to 18 hour days. They were assigned to groups, each of which took on different avenues of pursuit.

They began questioning parolees in neighboring towns, looking at police records of known offenders. They began developing a profile on the offender. Dozens of tips an hour poured in through the telephone lines. But Derek's murder still seemed a long way from being solved.

At his funeral, his grandpa described his grandson as Babe Ruth, Nimrod, Isaac Walton, Huckleberry Finn, Dr. Doolittle, the Tasmanian Devil, and two sticks of dynamite packed into a three-foot frame. He was buried in his baseball uniform. Quote, "'It is not God's will that this happened,' Pastor Neil Strong said. "'There are weirdos out there who go against God's will.'"

And investigators remained stumped as to what kind of weirdo could have committed a crime so monstrous. And not far away from where Derek lived was another kid who's central to our story. 13-year-old Eric Smith. Now, Eric had attended the same summer recreation program as Derek.

On the night following the murder, Eric was spending some time at the house of his neighbors, John and Marlene Heskel. These were people whom he spent a lot of time with. They felt sorry for him because he seemed kind of lonely. But on this evening, the teenager seemed fixated on the topic of the little boy's murder, and it dominated the conversation he had that evening.

And the next two nights, it was the same deal. The conversation would just keep returning again and again to Derek Robbie's murder. And he asked the Heskills, in quite a matter-of-a-fact tone, what would happen if a kid did it? They replied that the kid in question would be in serious need of psychiatric help. Oh, okay, Eric said. What about DNA? He then asked. How does that work exactly?

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Pros.com/dark. Go on, take the quiz. See what they come up with. Take your free consultation, get your one of a kind formula and see the difference custom hair care can make with 50% off at pros, P-R-O-S-E.com/dark. Let's get back into the episode. But it wasn't just here that Eric Smith talked incessantly about Derek Robbie's murder. It was everywhere else too.

And then he just couldn't stop himself from going into the police station and asking if he could in some way be of assistance in helping solve Derek's murder, like he was inserting himself into the investigation.

Did you see Derek that day? The police asked. Eric initially said he hadn't, but then his story changed. He said he saw Derek across the street by the open field. He accurately described the clothes Derek had been wearing and described the lunch bag he'd been carrying. And then his story kept changing slightly every time he told it.

For a while, he seemed to be enjoying all of the interest the police were showing him. But when the police kept questioning him, Eric could feel the police officer's interest was turning into suspicion. He put his head down and with his voice cracking, he raised his fists and said, you think I killed him, don't you? He then said he needed a break.

At that point, his stepfather stepped out and then brought him back a glass of red Kool-Aid. And Eric took the glass and threw it down on the floor at the police station. He then began crying. Now, all of this caught the attention of the detectives for reasons beyond it just being a tantrum.

Derek's lunch bag had contained red Kool-Aid and his killer had opened the Kool-Aid and spilled it onto Derek's body. Something only the police and the killer knew at the time. So Eric dumping the Kool-Aid all over the police station floor was eerie to say the least. The next day, the police took him with his bike so he could show them where he last was when he saw Derek.

Again, like the day before, Eric didn't seem nervous and he seemed to be savoring all of the attention.

But Eric's family thought Eric might be hiding something. They thought maybe he'd seen something and was threatened by the killer, and maybe he wanted to say more but just didn't feel safe. And John and Marlene Heskel, the neighbors, they felt the same. They felt Eric knew more than he was letting on. And when Marlene Heskel learned that Derek's killer had smashed a banana that had been inside Derek's lunchbox...

This led her to theorize that the killer was not an adult, but another kid, because this just seemed like a childish thing to do, and her suspicions were drifting toward Eric.

So one night, the night after Derek's funeral, in fact, Marlene decided to put her theory to the test. She invited Eric and some other kids over and asked them if they wanted ice cream sundaes. Everybody did. She had vanilla ice cream, nuts, chocolate syrup, and bananas. And Eric, much like he didn't want the red Kool-Aid his father offered him at the police station, he was adamant that he did not want bananas on his sundae.

That's when Marlene knew in her heart that Eric had killed little Derek. The next day, Eric's family sat him down and pleaded with him to tell them everything he knew about the crime. And that's when he came clean and admitted that he had in fact killed little Derek Robbie. They were horrified to hear this.

And they then proceeded to do the opposite of what Aiden Fucci's mother did in our last episode story. They took him down to the DA's office, and upon being questioned, Eric dropped the charade and confessed to killing Derek. He told investigators the whole story. It was back on Monday morning, around 9 a.m. Eric had just been kicked out of the playground for breaking the rules. So he then went riding on his bike, and that's when he saw Derek walking to the park.

He invited the little boy to take a shortcut across the field. He then hid his bike in some bushes, led Derek into a wooded area, where he then crept up to the little boy from behind and strangled him until he passed out. He then proceeded to kill Derek with a 26-pound rock. But he wasn't quite done.

He opened Derek's lunch bag and smashed up a banana and took the box of red Kool-Aid out from inside and poured it on the little boy's corpse and into the open wounds. I'm not gonna go into further detail, but just know, Eric did do more to Derek. Eric admitted that he'd seen Derek before and he could tell the little boy got a lot of love and attention from his parents that Eric didn't get from his own.

And throughout the confession, detectives observed that Eric seemed to be enjoying all of the attention he was now getting. He was laughing and joking as though all of this was no big deal. He was eating it right up, it seemed. But with his mother, he broke down and cried. When his mother asked why he had done this, Eric couldn't say. He could only repeatedly say, I don't know.

Eric was placed under arrest and charged with second-degree murder. Because this was a big case, it would be another year before the case went to trial. The challenge that the judge had was to determine what level of responsibility Eric had, you know, in terms of his mental health and anything that might be a mitigating factor. There's something so shocking when a 13-year-old kills a 4-year-old. Do you try the 13-year-old as an adult? Did he know what he was doing?

Eric's defense team noted that when she was pregnant with Eric, Eric's mother was on an anti-epilepsy drug called tridione, which was known to cause birth defects. The defense suggested that this caused developmental delays and led to symptoms that the defense psychiatrist diagnosed as intermittent explosive disorder.

Eric had already been showing developmental problems by the age of two. He had a speech defect. He would fly into episodes of rage, banging his head repeatedly into the floor. And his family life was fraught with dysfunction. His stepfather was authoritarian and abusive, and his 16-year-old sister moved out of the house, accusing the stepfather of having sexually abused her.

And throughout Eric's academic career from the time he entered kindergarten, Eric was relentlessly bullied because of his auburn hair and freckles. And because he had deformed low set ears and wore thick glasses. Other kids told him he was worthless. His academic performance suffered and this even resulted in him being retained two grades and diagnosed with ADHD. So he was attending school with kids two years younger than him and he had trouble fitting in with them.

"My life is junk," he once told someone. "Kids treat me like trash." And then, because of his parents' divorce, he spent much of his time with his grandparents. And his grandmother had recently passed away and he was very close with her, so this was hard for him. And on top of that, his one and only friend in the world had recently died in a car accident. And he had a hard time with that too, because he kept calling the dead friend's family asking to speak with him.

He was a lonely, young teenager who would often ride his bike alone around the neighborhood and around town for hours on end. And in the years leading up to him murdering four-year-old Derek, the warning signs were numerous. When he was only nine years old, he took a garden hose and used it to strangle a neighbor's cat. When his stepfather learned about this, he kicked Eric so hard it lifted him off the ground.

And one time, not long before the murder, Eric had a fight with his sister and afterward found that he couldn't control his rage and it wouldn't go away. "I need help," Eric told his stepfather while bawling his fists up. "I feel like I want to hurt somebody." "Well now, hold it," his stepfather told him. "When I got angry when I was your age, I just grabbed a bag in our barn and started beating on it until I was too tired to do anything else."

In response to this suggestion, Eric walked outside and began ramming his fists into a tree. He walked back inside the house with raw, bloody knuckles.

Also, all of this seemed to play into that psychiatrist's diagnosis of intermittent explosive disorder. But intermittent explosive disorder suggests uncontrollable rage. The reality, though, was Eric seemingly premeditated Derek Robbie's murder. He wasn't in a rage when he first saw Derek.

Instead, he was patient and presented himself as friendly, offered to show the boy a shortcut to the park. He then lured the little boy away from the main road into a wooded area, and that's where he then let his anger and savagery loose.

And an expert hired by the prosecution testified that intermittent explosive disorder was very rare and almost never seen in people of Eric's age. Specialists hired by both the defense and the prosecution did extensive medical testing on Eric's brain function and hormone levels, and nothing abnormal was found. Now I gave you this little background on Eric not to gain sympathy for him, not even to excuse his behavior.

But when kids kill, the biggest question is, why did they do it? Are they born evil or are they made evil? It's a question that I don't know if we'll ever have the answer to. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.

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During the trial, which took place in 1994, prosecutor John Tunney complained, quote,

If he knew what he was doing was wrong, then he shouldn't have been doing it. Then he can have every psychological, psychiatric problem in the world, and he's still responsible for what he did under the law. And the jury agreed. They found him guilty of second-degree murder, and he was given the maximum sentence he could receive under law as a juvenile. Nine years to life. Those in the courtroom noted that Eric did not show any emotion, nor did he express any remorse for what he had done.

He was then sent to the Brookwood Juvenile Detention Center, and that's where he spent the rest of his years as a minor. It was during this time that Eric freely admitted that he took pleasure from inflicting harm on four-year-old Derek. And it felt good to be on the giving end and not the receiving end of the abuse. To be the victimizer for once, instead of the victim.

As he got older, Eric seemingly began developing some insight into the way his painful childhood caused him to have out-of-control rage and was the reason he targeted someone smaller than him to victimize as a way of temporary catharsis. When he turned 21, he was transferred to the Clinton State Correctional Facility, which features into a story we just profiled over on our Murder With My Husband podcast, which is a maximum security state prison.

At this time, he had written a letter to read aloud to news media, on TV, to demonstrate that he had changed. Quote, I know my actions have caused a terrible loss in his family, and for that, I am truly sorry. I've tried to think as much as possible about what Derek will never experience. His 16th birthday, Christmas, any time, owning his own house, graduating, going to college, getting married, his first child.

He then wrote that he couldn't bear the thought of walls, razor wire, and steel metal bars for the rest of his life. Eric first became eligible for parole in 2004.

At the parole hearing, he claimed that if he got out, he wanted to become a researcher exploring the reasons children commit murder. He said he was uniquely qualified to provide counseling to bullied children and that he would someday go on to become a forensic psychologist.

Smith talked about his troubled childhood and how it led him to committing murder. After quite a few years of verbal abuse and having been told that I'm nothing, Eric told the parole board, I shut down my feelings so I wouldn't feel the emotional pain which made me vulnerable and weak. But the damage was done. I began to believe that I was nothing and a nobody, and my outlook on life was dark. I felt that when I went to school, I was going to hell because that's what it was for me. How

However minor or major each abuse situation, it all adds up, until it gets to the point where the individual cannot take it anymore. After a while, they may cope in a horrific way or take their emotional anger or rage out on someone who has done nothing to bring on such violence like Derek. Not because they're evil or satanic little kids, it's because they want the abuse to stop, and it's the only way they know how. "'Instead of me being hurt,' Eric explained, "'I was hurting someone else.'"

He also admitted that, and this is really significant, that had he not been caught for Derek's murder, he probably would have killed again. The prosecutor, John Tunney, had believed that Smith was a serial killer in the making, and this seemed to confirm it.

Derek's parents were also at the parole hearing and they expressed how terrified they were that Eric would get out and possibly target their then 12-year-old son. Doreen said,

At his first parole hearing, Eric Smith's parole was denied, and it would be denied repeatedly. Every time Derek's family had to appear again to plead with the parole board not to release him. That was until 2021. At the most recent hearing, he told the parole board his plans for the future, told him that he was engaged to be married to a law student who first met him when she wrote to ask him questions for an academic paper,

He told the parole board that he felt God had called him to be a minister and he also planned to work in electrical installation or carpentry. He told the parole board he was not a threat and the 13-year-old who killed Derek is not the same person sitting in front of them today. He had by that point spent 28 years behind bars and was 41 years old. And at this time, he was finally granted parole.

The residents of Savona then held a protest, making it clear they did not want him back in their community. It took him some time to find approved housing, but once he did, he was finally released from prison in February of 2023. Eric Smith is now a free man for the first time in his adult life, living in Queens, New York. Smith has claimed that after years of therapy, he's a different person now, a changed man.

You can label me a monster, he said. A cold-blooded killer, a demon child, Satan incarnate, doesn't mean that's who I am. Doreen told CBS News that she doesn't let Eric Smith take up space in her head. I do not focus on where he is, what he's doing, she said, because I don't care, as long as he's not near friends and family. John Tunney, the man who prosecuted Smith, is now hoping he was wrong about Eric Smith having been a budding serial killer. All of this for the community's sake.

Imagine if Eric Smith had never confessed to Derek's murder, and the murder had remained unsolved. How that murder would have haunted the community much more deeply and hung over everyone's lives like an ominous cloud. And I trust Eric Smith's self-assessment. He would have likely killed again, until he got caught. Do you think Eric should have ever been paroled? Do you think he deserves a second chance?

And do you believe that whatever psychological defect led him to savagely kill and sexually abuse a four-year-old boy could possibly have been cured? Let's discuss it in the comments. I'll see you next time. Bye.