This Child Prodigy Wrote a Bestselling Novel Before Vanishing and Becoming a Missing Person’s Case

It’s hard to say exactly what makes a child prodigy. While some seem to develop their skills naturally without much prodding, just as many of them are raised in exacting, strict circumstances where they are treated more like guinea pigs than human beings. By all accounts, these strict upbringings do indeed produce children of incredible intelligence and capability. The only problem is, however, the parents often fail to take into account the child’s state of mind, much less happiness.

Tragically, some child prodigies are molded for the sake of their parent’s esteem which amounts to little more than party tricks. While some of these stories have happy endings, many end tragically. Some child prodigies embark on incredible early paths before burning out. Robbed of their childhoods, they either eschew their scholastic past entirely or fall into more tragic, precarious situations. In this article, we will explore 10 child prodigies who couldn’t bear the cost of success and met tragic ends.

(For acting prodigies, discover 20 child stars who vanished after their big break. )

To compile a list of child prodigies who met tragic ends, 24/7 Tempo consulted a range of entertainment, historical, and news publications including HuffPost , AFR, and History.com. Next, we selected child prodigies who showed incredible potential early in life before burning out and fading away as they aged. After that, we confirmed aspects of each person’s biography using sites like NPR , Russia Today , and Blackpast.org.

Ervin Nyiregyhazi

Raised by his opera singer father, Ervin Nyiregyhazi showed incredible aptitude for music during his infancy. He could reproduce songs note for note by the age of two, began composing around the same time, and effectively mastered the piano by his seventh birthday. Though he favored opera music, his mother pushed him to study the standard piano repertoire so he might make the family money. This sowed a division between Nyiregyhazi and his mother that lasted until her death.

When he debuted at Carnegie Hall at age 17, Nyiregyhazi was a master musician. Though his initial performance received some criticism, it also received glowing reviews from top musicians and composers like Arthur Schoenberg. Nyiregyhazi was erratic, however, and sued his concert manager a few years later for treating him like an inferior artist. After that, he struggled to find work. Though he grew up in comfortable circumstances, he suffered from bouts of poverty for the rest of his life, often sleeping on park and subway benches. His personal life didn’t fare much better. Married ten times throughout his life, one of Nyiregyhazi’s wives stabbed him with a kitchen knife, leading to an ugly, much-publicized divorce.

Eventually, Nyiregyhazi moved to Los Angeles where he found work as a movie studio musician and piano hand double for films. Due to an inability to manage his own affairs, however, much less relationships, Nyiregyhazi bounced from gig to gig for the rest of his life. Hoping to bring him back into the spotlight, Carnegie Hall offered him concerts in 1978, but he declined. Nyiregyhazi died of colon cancer in 1987.

Barbara Newhall Follett

Born and raised by a schoolteacher and a literary editor and professor, Barbara Newhall Follett grew up in a house of literature. Educated at home by her mother, Follett took to reading and writing with a strong imagination. She wrote her first poetry at the age of four and created a fully realized literary world by age seven. A year later, she began writing “The Adventures of Eepersip” as a birthday present for her mother. By age 12, she rewrote the novel and retitled it “The House Without Windows.” With her father’s assistance, the novel was published in 1927 by Knopf to critical acclaim.

Its success led to Follett being considered a child prodigy, with radio programs seeking her out to review other children’s books. Her next novel, “The Voyage of the Norman D,” also received critical acclaim. That same year, however, her father left the family for another woman which dealt a devastating blow to Follett. To make matters worse, the family fell further into unstable circumstances due to the onset of the Great Depression, effectively ending her literary career before she graduated high school.

From there, Follett worked a series of jobs before she met Nickerson Rogers, whom she married in 1934. A few years later, however, Rogers asked Follett for a divorce since he had met another woman. Though the marriage appeared doomed, they moved back in with each other. On December 7, 1939, the couple got into an argument. In response, Follett left the house, never to be seen again. Suspiciously, Rogers waited two weeks to report her missing. Even still, Follett’s body was never found, with police neither indicating nor excluding foul play.

William James Sidis

William James Sidis’ parents raised him with a zealous pursuit of knowledge. At 18 months old he could read the New York Times. By age eight, Sidis had taught himself eight languages, not including an entire language he made up himself. In 1909, Sidis, age 11, set a record by being the youngest person to enroll at Harvard University. Within a year, he lectured on the mathematical concept of four-dimensional bodies, attracting nationwide attention. For Sidis, it seemed like the sky was the limit.

Before his 18th birthday, Sidis became a graduate fellow at Rice University working towards his doctorate. He became frustrated with teaching, however, and quit his job, moving back home to New England. Though he later enrolled at Harvard Law School, he dropped out just shy of graduation. Not long after, Sidis took to radical politics. In 1919, police arrested him for participating in a violent Socialist May Day parade in Boston. After serving 18 months in prison, his parents enacted stronger control over their son and threatened to send him to an insane asylum to reform his behavior.

After that, Sidis eschewed the intellectual sphere, became estranged from his parents, and took only menial jobs for the rest of his life. All the while, however, he self-published periodicals and literary tracts covering a wide variety of topics and taught to a small group of ardent followers. He died at age 46 from a cerebral hemorrhage. While many consider Sidis one of the smartest people to ever live, others criticized his strict upbringing, leading Sidis to invariably burn out.

Natalia Strelchenko

One of the more recent child prodigies, Natalia Strelchenko showed remarkable skill on the piano from a young age. After playing her first concert at 12 years old with the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, Strelchenko refined her gift at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, Norway. This eventually led to a research fellowship at the Norwegian Music Academy. Later, she became an artist in residence at Leeds College of Music.

From her first concert on, many considered Strelchenko to be a virtuoso piano player. This led to countless gigs at esteemed institutions like Wigmore Hall and Carnegie Hall, often resulting in laudatory reviews. Eventually, she became the artistic director of the Menestrelles International Chamber Music Academy. She also served as an assistant professor in the Belfort conservative in eastern France. Around this time, she met John Martin while they were both performing at the Oslo Conservatoire. Though smitten with each other, they waited on a relationship until Strelchenko’s first marriage failed and Martin left his second wife. Eventually, the two moved in together in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Soon, however, the marriage began to fall apart due to Martin’s increasingly abusive behavior. He reportedly strangled her once, threw her around their bedroom, and even manipulated her into having an abortion. Horrifically, the pairing came to an end when Martin murdered Strelchenko on their second wedding anniversary. After a post-mortem indicated her death was due to traumatic head and neck injuries, police charged Martin with her murder. He was found guilty of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira

Perhaps more than any other person on this list, Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira is a case study of what happens when a child is raised to exacting, if not impossible, standards. Before her birth, her mother Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira worked as a socialist, feminist, and eugenicist. Seeking to create the perfect child and a woman of the future, her mother sought out a man who wouldn’t claim paternity so she could raise her experiment alone. Upon birth, Carballeira was put on an exacting schedule of academics.

By all accounts, it worked, as Carballeira could read by age two and type proficiently by age four. At age ten, she spoke German, French, and English fluently and gave a public lecture on feminism and female sexuality. In her early teenage years, Carballeira studied at the School of Law of the Complutense University of Madrid. Later, she taught at the school. Her involvement in the Spanish movement for sex reform led her to be chosen as secretary for the Spanish League for Sexual Reform. Her growing fame led to correspondences with famous figures like Margaret Sanger and H.G. Wells. All the while, however, her mother Aurora exacted strict control over her daughter, punishing her for anything that could distract her from her work.

In 1933, tragedy struck. While Carballeira, age 18, slept in bed, her mother shot and killed her. Sources differ on the reasons for her murder. Some say that Carballeira had fallen in love, while others say she intended to separate from her mother’s influence. Whatever the case, her mother went on trial for murder. She was convicted and sentenced to 26 years, 8 months and 10 days. Remarkably, her mother never expressed regret for killing Carballeira and said she would do it again. When asked about her reasoning for killing her daughter, Aurora said, “The sculptress, after discovering the most minimal imperfection in her work, destroys it.”

Sergey Reznichenko

Like the other childhood prodigies on this list, Sergey Reznichenko showed an uncanny aptitude for scholastic pursuits during infancy. He learned to read at age two, before devouring incredibly complicated topics throughout his childhood. At age 13, he became famous after appearing on the Russian version of “Britain’s Brainiest Kid.” Seemingly skilled at everything he tried, Reznichenko wrote well-regarded poetry and excelled at math and science. At age 15, Reznichenko began studying economics at Zaporizhzhya National University in Ukraine.

In hindsight, it appears that Reznichenko’s achievements came at the strict insistence of his incredibly religious, incredibly demanding mother. A member of an extremist offshoot of the Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian sect, his mother isolated Reznichenko from his peers so he could focus on his studies. Upon arriving at college, Reznichenko became free from his mother’s exacting influence. Liberated but adrift, he began engaging in increasing amounts of substance abuse. Still at college, drugs led to Reznichenko’s increasing withdrawal from the world at large. Instead, he retreated into the realms of anime and video games.

During the January 2011 school holiday, everyone went home to their families except Reznichenko. Having fallen into a deep depression, he became increasingly disconnected from reality, speaking at length on rebirth, god, and the power of thought to shape reality. One night in February, Reznichenko got up from his computer, walked into the hallway, broke a window, and jumped out to his death. He left a handwritten note in his room, which read simply, “I am God.”

Philippa Schuyler

From the start, Philippa Schuyler was cut from a unique cloth. Even before birth, her mother ate only raw food and embarked on intense cleanses to create a genius child. The daughter of a notable black writer and white Texan heiress, Schuyler also ate only raw and natural food from the get-go. Before the age of two, Schuyler knew the alphabet and could read and write not long after. By age four, she could read and write music with ease. Thanks to the overbearing influence of her mother, Schuyler won eight consecutive prizes from the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts at age eight, before being barred from the contest to give other kids a chance.

Upon reaching adolescence, Schuyler toured the United States constantly. She performed to sold-out crowds and earned countless accolades for her playing ability. In her teenage years, however, Schuyler became disillusioned with her trajectory after discovering her parents considered her nothing more than the perfect genetic experiment. Indeed, she felt isolated and alienated from most people and suffered many instances of physical abuse at the hands of her domineering mother. After growing disgusted by racial prejudice in the United States, she fled overseas where she played to more mixed-race crowds. Eventually, she put music on the backburner and pursued journalism, which led to her becoming one of the few black writers for the United Press International.

Often unhappy with life, Schuyler engaged in several extra-marital affairs but never properly married. Eventually, she developed an inferiority complex about the color of her skin and disavowed her parent’s interracial marriage and values. Upon taking up music again, Schuyler traveled to South Vietnam in 1967 to perform for the troops. While there, she boarded a helicopter on a mission to evacuate Vietnamese orphans from Da Nang. Tragically, the helicopter crashed in Da Nang Bay. Though she survived the crash, she could not swim and subsequently drowned at age 35.

(For other young talents, explore 20 celebrities who died before they reached 35. )

Brandenn Bremmer

By all accounts, Brandenn Bremmer oscillated between childhood affectation and adult disposition throughout his brief, wondrous life. Born without a pulse, his parents knew he was unusual from the outset. At eighteen months old, he could read easily. At age three, he could play piano impeccably and complete schoolwork normally reserved for first graders. By age ten, Bremmer had graduated high school, and enrolled in college the following year.

During that time, he was seen attending advanced physics lectures and music composition courses. This led to Bremmer releasing his own music compositions around the same time. Still in college, he studied to become an anesthesiologist and worked hard at making more music which he planned to release in another full CD. Tragedy struck in 2005, however, when Bremmer’s mother came home from a shopping trip to find him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

While his death was assumed to be suicide, he left no note. Compared to other child prodigies on this list who met tragic ends, Bremmer lived a pretty ordinary life besides his musical and scholastic aptitude. His parents didn’t push him into any arena; he developed his skills by himself, almost supernaturally. While many child prodigies burn out upon reaching adulthood, Bremmer left this life early and without explanation.

Edmund Thomas Clint

Much like the previous entry on this list, Edmund Thomas Clint showed remarkable skill in the arts before being robbed of a long life at an early age. Born in Kochi, India in 1976, his parents named him after Hollywood actor Clint Eastwood. A precocious child with a cherubic appearance, Clint became inspired by a family friend and artist G Mohanan, who would often paint in the family home. Whereas most children are restless and bounce from one thing to another, Clint watched Mohanan paint with preternatural focus.

Not long after, Clint’s parents bought him multi-colored chalk. He used it to draw for so long that the dust made his body swell up. In response, his parents bought him crayons which he took to like a fish to water. Within three months, Clint had used up 5,000 boxes of crayons. Under Mohanan’s tutelage, Clint began producing increasingly complex and artful drawings and paintings. Though doctors diagnosed him with a deadly kidney disease at age three, it didn’t stop Clint from drawing and painting obsessively. At five years old, Clint came to prominence after winning first place in a painting competition for artists under 18 years old.

Operating with a remarkably spiritual and mythological mindset and working in a nascent expressionist style, Clint produced an incredible 30,000 works of art in a few short years. Tragically, a month before his seventh birthday, Clint’s kidney disease came back with a vengeance. He died at age six in 1983. Since his death, several books and movies have been released detailing Clint’s uncanny artistic achievements.

Aaron Swartz

Perhaps the most well-known child prodigy on this list, Aaron Swartz grew up in a technologically-inclined household. As such, he immersed himself in all things technology and computers at an early age. By age 12, Swartz created a user-generated encyclopedia website, which won him the ArsDigita Prize for young people creating websites. Within two years, he helped develop the RSS web-feed format. Not long after, he enrolled in Stanford University, though he left a year later for Y Combinator’s first Summer Founders Program. There, he helped develop the website that would later become Reddit.com.

He remained involved with Reddit before leaving the company in 2007. From there, Swartz became immersed in activism. This led to him becoming a research fellow at the Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption at Harvard University. He also founded the group Demand Progress, which supported internet freedom and civil liberties. In 2011, however, Swartz became embroiled in legal problems. Police arrested him for state breaking-and-entering charges after he connected a computer to the MIT network and downloaded JSTOR articles systematically.

In what is now considered a railroading of justice, prosecutors charged Swartz with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Two days after declining a plea bargain that would have placed him in prison for six months, Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment. Following his death, congress questioned the handling of his criminal case. He also became something of a martyr to internet activists everywhere.

(For child prodigy stories with happy endings, learn about this well-known child prodigy who signed a record contract at age 11. )

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