Two teenagers have been found guilty of the murder of a 16-year-old transgender girl in a "ferocious" attack in Cheshire, England in February this year.
The victim, identified as Brianna Ghey, was stabbed 28 times at a park in Cheshire. The culprits, known as Girl X and Boy Y, are also 16 years old and have not been named due to their age.
They were convicted of Ghey's murder at Manchester Crown Court on Wednesday. During the trial, the boy and the girl blamed each other for the murder. The sentence will be announced next month, according to a report in the BBC.
"What I have to decide is the minimum amount of time you will be required to serve before you might be considered for release," said judge Mrs Justice Yip.
"I'm not going to do that this week. I'm going to ask for some reports in relation to each of you".
The deceased and girl X had been friends for a few months before the former's murder. Girl X was fascinated with serial killers. She admitted that she used to watch torture videos on the dark web.
The two culprits had planned the murder for weeks. The investigating officers found a handwritten note in the girl's room that had a detailed plan of how they would go about killing Ghey.
They had a "kill list" of five children before they eventually decided to target Ghey. On the day of her murder, X asked her to come to a park and attacked her with a knife in broad daylight. Ghey's body had stab wounds to her head, neck, chest, and back.
The two had also planned to hide her body in the same park, but they were spotted by a couple and fled the scene in fear. It also needs to be noted that Y had never met Ghey before the murder. However, he has been friends with X since childhood.
According to the police, their motivation was just to see how it feels to kill. "This was a senseless murder committed by two teenagers who have an obsession with murder," The Guardian quoted Nigel Parr, senior investigating officer for Cheshire police, as saying.
The messages accessed by the police showed how the two of them planned to execute the killing. In one of the messages, the boy referred to Ghey as "prey" and said: "I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl."
"Girl X and Boy Y appear to have been a deadly influence on each other and turned what may have started out as dark fantasies about murder into a reality," said the Crown Prosecution Service after the verdict.
