MURDER – The two serial killer-obsessed teenagers who savagely murdered Brianna Ghey have today been unmasked as Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe as they face life imprisonment at their sentencing hearing.
The Trial
Referred to as Girl X during her trial over the 16-year-old’s horrific stabbing, Jenkinson and Ratcliffe – a former champion kickboxer who was known as Boy Y – are being sentenced today in a televised hearing.
Detectives fear the ‘warped’ duo with a ‘taste for killing’ may have moved onto another victim had they not been arrested barely 24 hours after they knifed the transgender schoolgirl to death.
Where she was Found?
The body of ‘timid’ Brianna was found lying face-down in the mud with 28 stab wounds after the ‘frenzied’ attack at a popular beauty spot in a Cheshire village on February 11 last year.
Her twisted killers, described as a ‘danger to society’ by their victim’s mother, had planned the attack in great detail, with a handwritten note in Jenkinson’s room reading: ‘Saturday 11th February 2023. Victim: Brianna Ghey’.
They then desperately sought to cover their tracks, with Jenkinson posting a Snapchat tribute that called Brianna ‘such an amazing friend’ and ‘one of the best people I’ve ever met.
The Long Awaited Admission
On Friday morning Brianna’s mother Esther Ghey and her father Pete Spooner were pictured arriving at court, surrounded by friends and family, where they heard that Jenkinson has finally admitted she stabbed Brianna multiple times.
READ ALSO: Bristol police charge 44-year-old man with murder AFTER two lads aged 15 and 16 are stabbed to death
Jenkinson and Ratcliffe were both 15 when they stabbed Brianna 28 times in Culcheth Linear Park, Cheshire on February 11 last year.
They were still only 16 when they stood trial at Manchester Crown Court last November, meaning neither their names nor the schools they had attended could be published. They blamed one another for the brutal killing, but shortly before Christmas, jurors took less than five hours to unanimously convict them both.
The following day, trial judge Mrs Justice Yip ruled that their identities should be revealed to help the public ‘understand how children could do something so dreadful’.
But after hearing the families of both killers had been subjected to death threats, she ruled that the media could not identify them until today’s sentencing hearing, enabling measures to be put in place to keep them safe.
As a packed courtroom today prepares to hear statements from Brianna’s parents and sister before Jenkinson and Ratcliffe learn how long they must spend behind bars, Mrs Justice Yip formally stripped them of their anonymity.
For the first time Jenkinson has admitted stabbing Brianna ‘a number of times’, having previously blamed all of the blows on her fellow killer Ratcliffe.
Court Reveals
The court heard she has told a forensic psychiatrist that she took the knife from him and stabbed Brianna repeatedly. She also admitted to giving Ratcliffe the ‘instruction’ to bring his hunting knife.
Jenkinson – who was obsessed with serial killers and their methods – planned to take ‘part of her flesh’ as a ‘token’, prosecutor Deanna Heer KC said.
She continued: ‘[Jenkinson] said Eddie had thrown Brianna to the floor and stabbed her three or four times then he panicked and said he did not want to kill her, so she carried on and stabbed her a number of times.
‘When asked how many, she answered, ‘A lot.’ She was satisfied and excited by what she was doing.’
Why They Killed her
Jenkinson told consultant Dr Richard Church that while Ratcliffe ‘didn’t like Brianna because she was trans’, her motivation was ‘quite different’, the court heard.
‘She had enjoyed thinking about the plan to kill Brianna, but her motivation for doing so was that she considered Brianna a friend and anticipated that Brianna was going to leave her and that she wanted to kill her so that she would always be with her,’ Mrs Heer added.
Meanwhile Ratcliffe has stuck to the version of events he gave in court, in which he said Jenkinson had inflicted all the stab wounds to Brianna while he was ‘urinating against a tree’.
In a victim impact statement read to the court, Brianna’s mother said the ‘hardest’ thing about her daughter’s ordeal was finding out that one of her killers, Jenkinson, was ‘someone we believed to be her friend’.
