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'The Motive': 35 years later, Jerusalem family massacre yet to be solved

At just 14 years of age, a young boy shoots his entire family without batting an eyelid. What drove him to this madness?

Trigger Warning: Graphic content 

In 1968, on an unfortunate Friday night in Jerusalem, a 14-year-old Israeli boy murdered his parents and sisters in their sleep, with his father's rifle, point-blank, and no questions asked. He then quickly changed his clothes and ran over to the neighbor's house. 

Since the boy was a minor at the time he committed the crime, he was sent to a children's home to be detained for six years. When lawyers and the police dived in to investigate, the boy admitted that a green monster of some sort had entered his mind and ordered him to massacre his entire family. To this day, 35 years later, we're yet to know what his motive really was.

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Now a grown man with a family of his own, the murderer walks a free man, although his name and identity are still unknown to the media and the public, for obvious reasons.

The creators of the documentary, Tali Shemesh and Asaf Sudri, interviewed the murderer's lawyer, Yossi Arnon, who eventually spoke about his perspective about the uneventful happenings. According to Arnon, he admitted that the boy lied and made up a fake story about the green monster, adding a lot more mystery into the case that's yet to be solved.

'The Motive' is a four-part documentary created in the hopes of digging into and finding out a little more about what was going through the boy's mind when he killed his family, in the blink of an eye. And to think, he was known for his kind, composed, and brilliant nature. What went wrong?

A similar case took place in the 2000s, in the state of Bihar in India. Amarjeet Sada, an eight-year-old boy, became the world's youngest serial killer after murdering his cousin of six years (in 2006), his baby sister who was eight months old at the time, and his neighbor's infant. 

In accordance with the Indan law, a child cannot be sent to prison, no matter what crime they commit. And so, Sada was sent to a children's home to be detained till he turned 18, in the town of Munger. Today, he no longer goes by the same name and lives somewhere unknown with a different identity. 

'The Motive' is set to drop on October 28, on Netflix.