The family of a teenager lynched by a pornography-obsessed killer have berated the police for allowing “a murderer in the making” to slip through the net.
Jamie Reynolds lured 17-year-old Georgia Williams to his home in May 2013 on the pretence of helping her friend with a photography project. Instead he killed Georgia and treated her body with contempt.
Reynolds, 24, went on the run for three days before he was arrested in Glasgow where he was found with 16,800 images and 72 videos of extreme pornography. He was described in court as a “sexual deviant” and a “potential serial killer” before being given a whole-life prison sentence at Stafford Crown Court in December 2013.
It emerged at the trial that the case bore chilling similarities to an incident five years earlier when Reynolds tried to throttle a female college friend. She survived and escaped after a struggle.
The court also heard Reynolds doctored photos of two girls he knew by drawing nooses around their necks. Despite police learning Reynolds was obsessed with torture porn and web images of women being hanged, they classed the attack - in January 2008 - as a simple assault.
Reynolds was let off with a warning, and was allowed to continue intimidating his victim at college. Meanwhile the girls in the doctored images were never told of their existence until after Georgia’s murder.
In a cruel twist Georgia’s father Steve Williams is himself a decorated police detective with the Serious Incident Unit at West Mercia police - the same force which investigated both Reynolds’ 2008 offence, and his own daughter’s murder.
The handling of the earlier offence by the police and other agencies involved in the case has been scrutinised in a Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) Discretionary Serious Case Review. Its contents were revealed at a press conference in Telford.
Speaking ahead of the conference, Georgia’s mother Lynnette Williams said: “In 2008 all the tools to deal with Reynolds were available - the law was there, sanctions and punishment was there, rehabilitation was there and most importantly actions could have been taken to protect the public from Reynolds.
“Unfortunately - to put it mildly - in our opinion incompetence, stupidity and acceptance of extremely low standards prevailed and, with the knowledge that Reynolds was dangerous, a murderer in the making was allowed to walk free to prey on any female.”
Currently three West Mercia police officers and a civilian staff member face misconduct hearings over the botched 2008 investigation.
Five other officers have been told they have no case to answer, but two of them are subject to ‘management action’.
The misconduct accusations follow an external investigation into West Mercia by Devon and Cornwall Police. Their findings have yet to be published.
