One question hung over the trial of the two teenagers convicted of killing Brianna Ghey: why? At the sentencing on Friday, Brianna’s family finally received some answers.
The hearing began with some startling new information: though she had pleaded not guilty at trial, Scarlett Jenkinson had now admitted to stabbing Brianna repeatedly – more times than she could remember. It was “a lot”, she said.
It was “exciting”, the now 16-year-old told a psychiatrist who visited her at the secure unit where she has been held since her arrest. She said she did it because she thought Brianna was going to stop being her friend and this was a way they could always be together.
Deanna Heer KC, prosecuting, told the court: “She said she enjoyed thinking about the plan to kill Brianna but her motivation for doing so was because she considered Brianna a friend and anticipated that Brianna was going to leave her and she wanted to kill her so that she would always be with her.”
Jenkinson told the psychiatrist Dr Richard Church that she had planned to take one of Brianna’s body parts as a “token” but she and the second teenager, Eddie Ratcliffe, were disturbed by a pair of dog walkers and had to run away.
It meant she could not carry out the last part of the meticulous murder plan she had written out in her neat handwriting, which involved her dragging Brianna’s body away and hiding it in a pipe.
This was a major about-turn for Jenkinson, who first claimed that Brianna had “gone off with some lad from Manchester” and then in the witness box tried to blame Ratcliffe for the killing.
Ratcliffe has maintained the same account throughout: that Jenkinson did it while he had his back turned to urinate against a tree.
The DNA evidence suggested otherwise, with Brianna’s blood found on his coat and shoes as well as on the murder weapon, a hunting knife he had bought on a ski holiday just weeks earlier.
While Jenkinson told the jury that she enjoyed watching videos of murder and torture on the dark web, Ratcliffe never confessed to enjoying watching or thinking about anything violent.
Jenkinson told the author of a pre-sentence report that she “liked having complete power over someone” and “enjoyed the power she had over someone weaker like Brianna”. “And, interestingly, Eddie,” said Richard Littler KC, defending Ratcliffe.
She even claimed to be “sexually excited” as she planned Brianna’s murder, Littler said.
In contrast, Littler claimed Ratcliffe’s motives were far less sinister – banal, even – and understandable only in the context of Ratcliffe’s neurodivergence: he went along with Jenkinson’s plan because he wanted her to help him woo the girl he fancied, referred to in court as A to protect her identity.
The barrister knew that might be hard to believe, but he said: “The very idea that a 15-year-old boy would agree to help his 15-year-old friend to kill someone because that friend might help him to get to know a girl he fancied is only unbelievable when looked at through the prism of a non-autistic mind.”
He noted there was no evidence that Ratcliffe continued to harbour violent ambitions, whereas another “kill list” written by Jenkinson had been found in the secure children’s home where she is being held. On it, said Littler, were the names of “two or three members of staff”.
Ratcliffe has denied being motivated by a hatred of trans people, despite using transphobic language as he and Jenkinson planned the murder. He repeatedly referred to Brianna as “it” and said he wanted to know if “it would scream like a man or a girl” and to see “what size dick it had”.
Littler admitted Ratcliffe’s language was offensive but said the crime was not motivated by transphobia. After all, he said, Ratcliffe appeared willing to help Jenkinson murder others on her kill list, all of whom were boys. “Ironically, worse for Eddie, it would appear from the messages that Eddie would have helped Scarlett irrespective of the gender,” Littler said.
Hearing of Jenkinson’s apparent confession, the judge, Mrs Justice Yip, said: “There is so much evidence of untruths in the case of Scarlett that it’s impossible to believe anything she says.”
The judge said she suspected that Scarlett, “having been convicted, now wants to paint herself in as bad a light as possible”. This would be unfathomable, she said, were it not for Jenkinson’s obsession with notorious serial killers.
Yip’s scepticism was understandable: the court heard that despite admitting to the murder to Church, Jenkinson then gave a slightly different account to a social worker, and told her legal team to stick with her original story that Ratcliffe was solely responsible for the stabbing.
The judge concluded that Jenkinson was motivated by “a deep desire to kill” and that the messages she sent to her accomplice revealed her “sadistic motives”.
Sentencing her to a minimum term of 22 years, Mrs Justice Yip told her: “Your motivation, Scarlett, was to act out your fantasies. The messages show you wanted to make a real victim feel pain and fear.”
Handing Ratcliffe a minimum term of 20 years, the judge told him: “You seem to have seen Scarlett’s plans as a project. You were happy to help carry out the plans when you had nothing better to do.”
But she told him: “Eddie, although your motives may not have been the same, you knew what Scarlett wanted to do and why. You understood her desire to see Brianna suffer. You actively participated in this brutal murder knowing the sadistic motives behind it and you cannot avoid the same consequences just by saying you did not have the same desires.”
The judge also found that Ratcliffe was “motivated in part by hostility towards Brianna because she was transgender.” Yip told him: “You dehumanised Brianna by constantly referring to her as ‘it’.”
Brianna’s mother, Esther Ghey, also thinks transphobia played a role in Ratcliffe’s motivation and that Jenkinson killed her daughter for fun.
In her victim impact statement, she said: “I have moments where I feel sorry for them, because they have also ruined their own lives, but I have to remember that they felt no empathy for Brianna when they left her bleeding to death after their premeditated and vicious attack, which was carried out not because Brianna had done anything wrong but just because one hated trans people and the other thought it would be fun.”
