Personally, I’d be a little worried. As other posters have pointed out, it’s not unusual for kids to play torture with dolls, but on the other hand, this was a doll belonging to someone else, whom your friend’s kid had just met. The part about the fireplace also unnerves me a little. Good thing he lives in another state is all I can say.
Am I the only one who is cracking up at this kid? Seriously, if the kid seems otherwise ok I wouldn’t worry. Every boy I knew at that age took heads off Barbies and such. Kids do things without the intent behind them that adults would attribute to them. We used to do bizarre things to our own baby dolls too.
As others have pointed out, the most I would do is give the kid a lesson about not breaking other people’s things and let it go.
We filled a G.I. Joe with catsup and ran over it with a minibike.
Lots of G.I. Joe abuse…reminds me of me. My brother used to be quite the homophobe, so just to get a rise out of him I would undress his 18" G.I. Joes and place them in various homoerotic poses on his bed for him to find when he came home from school. It was fun. 
I’ve been laughing for the last 5 minutes over that!
Good grief, I can’t believe some of the over-reactions and melodrama I’m reading in a few of the replies here. The majority of posters have it right – it’s not indicative of any “violent tendencies,” let alone “certifiably creepy,” “frightening,” or “unnerving.” It’s downright NORMAL behavior! And not necessarily just for little boys – I didn’t own a Barbie whose head remained attached to her body, thanks to my little sister who ripped every one of them off. She hated Barbies for whatever reason, and took great glee in breaking their heads, chopping their hair off, defacing them with pens, etc. Velma’s got it completely right. Obviously he needs to be told to respect for other people’s things, but I’m cracking up at the kid’s ingenuity in deciding how to best get rid of a creepy doll!
Frighteningly, she’s not talking about dolls. :eek:
Hee hee hee. 
I want pictures.
Or I’ll have to do this myself.
I think it’s pretty normal. We used to go around and gather up as many caterpillars as we could, then make a bonfire and burn them all up.
Burn! Burn! Burn!!! I can appreciate the fireplace idea of his…
And I grew out of it! Seriously, we did so many other things that I would consider “disturbing”, but we are all pretty damn “normal” adults.
Anybody got some lighter fluid??
I’d be slightly worried, though I wonder if the boy was re-enacting something he saw in a movie or on TV.
Rosanne once had an episode on a similar spisode.-Brother D.J. taking Darlene’s Barbies and keeping the bodies in one box and the heads in another. Her take was “Oh, look. D.J.'s got a hobby.” Later: “I told you beofore, boys and girls play different. He’s a boy. That’s what boys do.”
Classic line from Cheers
Woody: Wow, I’ve never seen so many Barbies in one place!
Kelly: I love Barbie.
Woody: But so many of them don’t have heads.
Kelly: Sometimes I get angry.
Eh, it’s normal behavior-my cousins and I used to tie up our Barbie dolls, have them kidnapped, all kinds of abuse.
However, at six, he’s DEFINITELY old enough to know better than to damage other people’s things. THAT’S what would make me upset.
I think I need to reiterate what’s been said before here - this is emphatically not the best way to get rid of it, and someone needs to explain to the little boy that a fireplace doesn’t burn nearly hot enough to get rid of a body. Crematoria burn a body at between 1400 and 2100 degrees fahrenheit in specially designed chambers that ensure that the body mass is completely incinerated, and the remaining bone bits have to be pulverized. A household fire would never do the trick.
Someone needs to clearly explain to the child the consequences of not properly disposing of bodies. It’s extremely disturbing to me that a child could have so many misconceptions about doing that.
Seriously, though, this seems very much within the realm of normal behavior. Destroying dolls is a pretty ordinary thing for children (of both sexes) to do - whether it bespeaks some sort of wired-in aggressive response towards other humans, I don’t know. But it’s normal. The body-stuffing thing seems like a pretty easy leap for a child, who knows that a fireplace burns things, that fire destroys stuff, and would therefore conclude that a fireplace is where you get rid of a body. Perhaps he’s had a relative die and his parents explained that they were cremated, which would make it an even easier guess for the kid to make. It just doesn’t strike me as particularly strange at all.
Even at six, children are not innocent creatures. Blowing up Barbie dolls with firecrackers, using magnifying glasses on ants and army men - little boys do that sort of thing. The only trouble is the idea that he’s got no respect for someone else’s property. But again, at six, those sorts of social norms are only beginning to develop. This ain’t no big deal at all.
My kid, who turned 1 last month, has me worried. First, he started carrying this baby doll with him everywhere, kissing it, cradling it, generally treating it like a baby. If that’s not bad enough, the other day when mom brought him home from the sitter, he was wearing his sister’s pink shoes. We bought him his own shoes but he didn’t like them and couldn’t walk in them, the sitter says that he brought his sisters shoes to her and kept yelling for her attention, she didn’t know what he wanted at first but then tried putting them on him, and he wore them the rest of the day.
He’s already playing with dolls and cross-dressing and he’s only 1!
You did know you were on the SDMB, right?
And yeah, the kid needs to be reminded about respecting other people’s property, nothing more. In a lot of ways, kids are better able than adults to recognize toys as toys, not totems of real humans. And for that matter, videogames as games, not mind-controlling killer-training simulators.
that is my favorite thing today
I don’t see any signs of a future Ted Bundy just yet. Not to say it’s appropriate behavior, but little kids can be pretty twisted, and readjusting certain sociopathic tendencies, especially in boys, is a major part of normal parenting, as far as I can tell.
I never was cruel animals (I watched a friend blow up a frog with an M-80, and it literally made me puke), but I did things to the little green army men that were pretty damn sadistic in concept. My Star Wars action figures didn’t fare too well either. I also used to play macabre tricks on my sister using her stuffed animal collection as props, and derived great satisfaction from her horrified screams. From what I can gather, I’m far from alone in having participated in such mischief, and none of boys I played such games with grew up to be even petty criminals. I’d keep an eye on the kid around your daughter’s stuff, but otherwise, it’s no great cause for concern.
[QUOTE=Excalibre]
I think I need to reiterate what’s been said before here - this is emphatically not the best way to get rid of it, and someone needs to explain to the little boy that a fireplace doesn’t burn nearly hot enough to get rid of a body. Crematoria burn a body at between 1400 and 2100 degrees fahrenheit in specially designed chambers that ensure that the body mass is completely incinerated, and the remaining bone bits have to be pulverized. A household fire would never do the trick.
Someone needs to clearly explain to the child the consequences of not properly disposing of bodies. It’s extremely disturbing to me that a child could have so many misconceptions about doing that./QUOTE]You’re sick. I like that.