He’s the last boy in the world I could ever imagine would do something like this
A top-set student seen as a role model at school, his father’s the manager of a truck company while his go-getting mother’s a graphic designer. No wonder Eddie Ratcliffe’s former teacher says…
AMOP of curly blond hair, spectacles and a toothy grin — Eddie Ratcliffe shows off a selection of Buzz Lightyear toys as he celebrates his fourth birthday.
In another photograph he’s playing in the woods, dressed in tiny red wellies and a camouflage coat, his pet dog Ziggy by his side.
Again, he’s smiling at the camera — this time proudly showing off a large branch clasped in his arms.
‘Eddie found the biggest stick he could for Ziggy,’ his mother proudly commented on the Facebook post. ‘ Big ambitions,’ another close relative replied.
And, indeed, just 12 months ago Ratcliffe was on the brink of achieving so much. A top-set student at Culcheth High School in Cheshire, he was busily preparing to sit nine GCSEs. His favourite subjects were science and maths and he had ambitions to go to university to study microbiology.
‘He always got good grades; all his school reports were good,’ a source close to the investigation told the Daily Mail.
A fellow student added: ‘ The school wanted all their younger students to look up to him — he was like a role model.’
Not any more. Now, the only role he will be remembered for is the one he played in the brutal murder of Brianna Ghey.
Because while no one knows for certain who inflicted the 28 stab wounds, two things are for sure: it was Ratcliffe who brought the knife to the park and it was Ratcliffe who left the park covered in their victim’s blood, someone he had met for the first time that day.
Despite all the evidence against him, Ratcliffe was too cowardly to admit what he had done, instead claiming he had been manipulated by Scarlett Jenkinson, whom he said administered the fatal blows.
But the jury didn’t believe his excuses and the 20-year minimum sentence means the 16-year- old will be the same age as his parents are now before even being considered for parole.
As with Jenkinson, those who know Ratcliffe struggle to comprehend how it came to this.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I found out Eddie had been arrested for Brianna’s murder,’ one of his former teachers said: ‘He’s the last boy in the world I could ever imagine doing something like that. He always seemed a good, quiet kid.’
A neighbour added: ‘ Eddie has never been any trouble, you’d just see him walking past, minding his own business. There’s plenty of kids on this estate who do cause trouble and torment people, but Eddie’s never been one of them.
‘What could possibly have been going on in his mind?’
While his trial, which shed light on his increasingly twisted friendship with Jenkinson, provided some answers to that question, there were precious few warning signs in his upbringing.
Home for Ratcliffe was a semi-detached property in Leigh, a town located in the urban sprawl between Warrington and Bolton. It has some of the country’s highest rates of deprivation and family breakdown.
But this was not the case for Ratcliffe. His parents – 36-year- olds Kyle Ratcliffe and Alice Hemmings – both work and in 2015 the couple were able to purchase their former council house for £36,000 under the Right To Buy scheme.
Mr Ratcliffe is employed as the manager of a truck company and has an interest in martial arts, running a small gym of which he is the company director.
Ratcliffe’s mother comes from an artistic background and works as a graphic designer. She was just 18 when she and Mr Ratcliffe had their first child, a son. Their second, Eddie Maximus Ratcliffe, was born the following year, in 2007, with the family completed by the arrival of a daughter in 2008.
After the children started school, Ms Hemmings took a design course at the University of Salford. In 2017, she and fellow art students pitched designs to create a memorial wall at Salford Royal Hospital to commemorate bereaved families and organ donors. Her piece, depicting birds in flight cut from wood and mounted on to the wall, won.
The following year, her middle child started at Culcheth High. In fact, Ratcliffe was ten days late beginning his first term after travelling to Jamaica with his father to take part in the World Kickboxing Championships.
‘He has been kickboxing for two years,’ the school’s newsletter reported. ‘His dad looked up a local club following Eddie’s desire to do a combat sport. He trains weekly in Leigh and he enjoys the sport. Although a physical sport, he doesn’t get hurt as training involves only sparring or light hitting.
‘There were 50 competitors in his age group at the competition in Jamaica, and he deserves huge congratulations for coming second, losing in the final to a German competitor. The World Championships are in Cork next year, hopefully he will go one better than this time!’
Ratcliffe’s ability as a kickboxer would be brought up in his trial.
Jenkinson’s barrister suggested the teenager was ‘very good’ at the sport, linking his skill and strength to the ‘considerable force’ that must have been used to inflict some of the bone- cutting knife thrusts to Brianna’s body.
Ratcliffe, however, denied that he was anything more than ‘average’, with his own barrister telling the court he was ‘no Karate Kid’.
Another hobby was computer games, posting video footage on Facebook of himself playing online. Instagram accounts he followed included PlayStation, Lego and Marvel Studios. Other pictures posted include one of the family’s pet guinea pig, named Humbug, and some biscuits he had baked with the help of his mum.
What impact lockdown had on the already isolated Ratcliffe one can only speculate. But his mother saw
‘What could have been going on in his mind?’
it as an opportunity to launch herself as an online fitness coach, posting daily on social media. She also liked to post inspirational quotes.
‘Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land amongst the stars,’ she wrote. ‘I really like this quote, and it’s so true, we should all be aiming high high high!’
The family purchased a campervan to enjoy during lockdown, enjoying ‘amazing’ weekends away with relatives.
Another post read: ‘I want to have boundless energy to spend with my kids. I want them all to realise the positivity of a healthy, active lifestyle, to see how easily it can fit in each day, and to see it as a normal thing to make the effort to do.’
A second Instagram account belonging to Ratcliffe’s mum shows the family enjoying a range of
wholesome activities together — from baking cakes to playing crazy golf and learning to ski.
In March 2022, less than a year before Brianna was murdered in woodland, Ratcliffe was filmed out on a walk in a park with his brother, messing around with sticks and playing with their pet dog.
Other photos show the longhaired teenager in the gym, practising his kickboxing skills against a punchbag.
To neighbours, however, Ratcliffe seemed an isolated figure.
‘Eddie always seemed a bit of a loner. He didn’t seem to have many friends on the estate,’ said another neighbour. ‘You’d see him walking
‘Eddie always seemed to be a bit of a loner’
‘You can’t stab a person without wanting to do it’
past with his long, dark coat and long hair, but he didn’t really engage with anyone.’
A fellow pupil added: ‘ He was always very, very quiet. You wouldn’t hear a peep out of him. He started getting a full-grown beard when he was in Year Nine.’
By his own admission, his school years were not easy.
‘Everyone used to say I’d done stuff cos I didn’t have any friends. No one could back me up so I was told off,’ he told police, adding: ‘I say things that I don’t actually believe. cos I don’t want to seem an outcast in the group, so I try to fit in.’
At one point Ratcliffe enlisted the help of Jenkinson to ask out a girl he fancied because, in his own words, he was ‘socially inept’ and too ‘nervous’ to text her himself.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, she’s not going to think you are weird,’ she would tell him. ‘Show you care for her and give her support. She will know she can rely on you and open up to you.’
He answered: ‘What if she replies? What do I do? I’ve been trying to do this for the whole day.’ But their chat swiftly moved on to darker matters, discussing people they had fallen out with and how they intended to torture and kill them.
Although he had not met Brianna before the day of her murder, the language he used to describe her was deeply offensive. He pointedly referred to her as ‘it’, asking questions such as ‘is it a femboy or a tranny?’
His explanation? ‘When I speak to my friends, like, I think that we make jokes about gayness,’ he told police. ‘I don’t actually care if anyone is gay or not. With them, I make it seem like I do. It doesn’t really affect me.’
Of course, the crux of what happened on that day in February last year was the relationship between Ratcliffe and Jenkinson. Each blamed the other, with Ratcliffe’s barrister directly accusing Jenkinson of ‘tricking’, ‘controlling’ and ‘manipulating’ him.
Richard Littler Kc cited a notebook found at the girl’s house in which she described Ratcliffe as ‘very, very smart, genius level’ but also a ‘sociopath’, lacking emotion and socially awkward, who only had three followers on Instagram.
On her tablet, she had stored his details as ‘Tesco John Wick’, a reference to him resembling a ‘less good version’ of a movie hitman played by Keanu Reeves. Did Jenkinson perhaps see Ratcliffe as her ‘hitman’, the jury was asked?
Ratcliffe’s autism also featured in the trial. Although he was not formally diagnosed until after his arrest, he had discussed his autistic tendencies with Jenkinson.
He also suggested to her that his family were aware of it. Interestingly, his maternal grandmother used to run a homeopathic clinic.
Her website featured a section on autism and her ‘treatment’ of those suffering from it. The therapy she offered was known as cEASE Therapy — complete Elimination of Autistic Spectrum Expression — and is highly controversial.
Practitioners believe they can detoxify what they say are ‘causative’ factors of autism, including vaccines, using homeopathy and large doses of vitamin c. In 2019, the Advertising Standards Authority ordered 150 cEASE therapists to stop claiming they can treat or cure autism. It was backed by the National Autistic Society, which said autism was not a disease to be cured but a lifelong part of many people’s identity.
After his arrest, Ratcliffe’s mental health was said to have deteriorated. This manifested itself in ‘selective mutism’ — an inability to speak with anyone but his mother.
The jury was told this was beyond his control. At one stage his lawyers claimed his silence might in part have been caused by the shock of seeing Brianna being killed.
Efforts to ensure he was able to take part in the court case saw him allowed to point to a card saying Not Guilty, rather than speak the words. When he gave evidence, he did so in an annexe where he was able to type his answers on a laptop which were then read out by an intermediary.
Dressed in a black shirt and grey tie, his written responses were displayed on a screen for the jury to follow. An accompanying live feed showed him typing, pausing to concentrate on his answers and occasionally shrugging.
While his parents were both in court at the start of the hearing, his father stopped attending partway through the trial.
During the evidence it emerged that the hunting knife used to kill Brianna had been purchased by Mr Ratcliffe for his son while on a family skiing trip to Bulgaria at the end of December 2022.
A photograph on his mother’s Facebook page shows her and Mr Ratcliffe dressed in skiing gear and smiling for the camera at the top of a snow- covered piste during that holiday.
Ratcliffe took the 5 in knife to the park where it was used to murder innocent Brianna.
He carried it home with him afterwards, where it was found by detectives in his bedroom, covered in Brianna’s blood.
Ratcliffe’s defence was that he believed Jenkinson was a fantasist and that he simply went along with her stories — that Jenkinson had ‘directed’, ‘produced’ and ‘stagemanaged the play’. Ratcliffe was simply an ‘extra’ with no part in the actual killing.
The jury did not believe him and nor did the police.
‘You can’t stab someone without wanting to do it,’ observed one of the investigating officers.
Ratcliffe is now being held at Barton Moss, the secure youth accommodation unit in Salford, where his apparent ‘ arrogance’ has not endeared him to everyone, sources said. He has complained about the food, moaning about fruit not being fresh enough for him.
And after one day’s harrowing evidence in court during the trial last December he returned to his accommodation, breezed into his bedroom and quickly changed into his ‘christmas jumper’, eager to participate in that night’s festive activities planned for the boys on the unit, sources said.
Before the trial began, Ratcliffe had spent the summer studying for eight GcSEs. He is now studying for A-levels in physics, biology, chemistry, pure maths and English literature.
Exams that, if he passes them, will be of precious little use in the place where he is destined to spend the next two decades of his life.