EVIL WITH A PRETTY FACE
Scarlett Jenkinson began watching horror movies in lockdown then graduated to real killings and torture on the dark web. After being kicked out of school for poisoning a girl pupil with cannabis-laced sweets, fate threw her together with Brianna – and her murderous obsession began...
WOMEN who murder are rare enough. Girls rarer still. And today Scarlett Jenkinson joins the handful of female killers aged under 16 to have committed a crime so heinous it merits a life sentence. A fondness for horror films watched in her childhood bedroom developed into a sick fascination with serial killers, all further fuelled by footage of torture and murder that she sought out in the darkest recesses of the internet.
But Jenkinson wanted to kill for real. So she found a worthy accomplice and then, after weeks of planning, lured her unsuspecting ‘friend’ Brianna Ghey to her death.
This was the coldest of cold-blooded assassinations — committed for no reason other than to satisfy the sick kicks of two twisted teenagers. And what makes Jenkinson’s story so hard to fathom is that, unlike so many other child murderers brought up in broken, dysfunctional families, she had a start in life that many would envy.
Today, in this definitive account, we talk to fellow students, former teachers, local parents and neighbours in a bid to understand what drove Jenkinson and her henchman to commit an act so evil that it will see them go down in the annals of criminal history alongside the likes of James Bulger’s killers Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.
Part of a large family, raised by loving parents, Jenkinson grew up in the Cheshire village of Culcheth, a place where middle-class families move to make the most of its wellregarded schools and pubs, cafes and open spaces.
‘Culcheth is a wonderful place to raise children,’ is how one neighbour described it. ‘When she was arrested I just thought it had to be a mistake. I thought, “It can’t be Scarlett.”
‘So when the trial started and I read the messages she’d been writing, it blew me away. Where did all that hate come from, plotting to kill people? I just couldn’t bear to follow the case — it was just too much to think of Scarlett being into murder and torture. I can’t begin to imagine how her family are coping.’
Described as ‘hard-working’ and ‘law-abiding’, her parents, 51-yearold Brian Jenkinson and Emma Sutton, 49, regularly attended court during the trial of their youngest child. Indeed, the Daily Mail understands it was only as the hearing progressed that they became aware of the full, horrifying details of their daughter’s role in Brianna’s death.
Mr Jenkinson works as a builder and plasterer. He previously worked for a small engineering company, of which he had been a director. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is also a ‘qualified tutor’ who has taught construction to students and inmates in colleges and prisons in the North-West.
Jenkinson’s mother also teaches — home economics and design technology at a Catholic secondary school in Warrington. Work was juggled with a busy home life in a rented semi on a quiet housing estate. By the time Jenkinson was born in 2007, the couple already had three sons together. Sources close to the investigation have told the Mail that there has never been any social services involvement.
With 15 years separating her from her oldest brother, Jenkinson was the daughter who completed the family.
Photos clearly illustrate the age gap. In one, the brothers, one of whom has served as a submariner in the Royal Navy, can be seen sipping beers at a family gathering while a much younger Scarlett messes around in the background.
Other images posted on social media show Jenkinson enjoying what appears to be a happy upbringing — aged five she is pictured perched on top of a pony wearing a purple riding helmet.
‘My beautiful Scarlett at her horse-riding party, she loved it,’ reads a comment left by a close relative. Another photo, taken aged 11, shows her dressed in a smart blue dress, flanked by her parents, as they attend a party with family friends.
By now, Jenkinson had started at Culcheth High School, the wellregarded secondary on the outskirts of the village.
‘Culcheth is high achieving with a very middle-class catchment so kids do well,’ said one parent. ‘The kids get sort of teased when they go on to college afterwards with comments like, “Oh, you are one of the posh kids from Culcheth, are you?”’ It was there that Jenkinson
‘Where did all that hate come from?’
‘She had a fascination with Sweeney Todd’
met Eddie Ratcliffe when they both joined the school in Year 7.
He would be one of only a handful of individuals she could ever call a friend, even if it didn’t start like that. ‘It was weird at first,’ she told police. ‘We was like frenemies. We just gradually got closer.
‘We was mates with all the same people [sic].’
As the years passed, like many youngsters Jenkinson set up her own social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. The content started off innocently enough, pictures of pets and of her, smiling to the camera.
Other photos have ‘funny’ filters superimposing a cartoon puppy’s nose and ears on her face. One shows a cute cartoon penguin with a gun and the caption: ‘Penguins are dangerous lol.’
But by the time Jenkinson entered her teens in 2020, a dark side to this slight, bespectacled girl had emerged.
It was the year Covid struck and, like the rest of the nation, the lockdowns and school closures meant that she had time on her hands.
And while her mother used it to appeal for materials to make protective face shields for NHS workers, Jenkinson indulged her growing love of horror films.
On Instagram, she posted a photo of the television in her bedroom. Above the TV is a shelf with a child’s toy pony resting on it.
The screen reveals the films she had recently watched: Insidious, Dark Shadows, Beetlejuice, Child’s Play and A Nightmare On Elm Street. All dark, violent movies.
When first released in the UK, A Nightmare On Elm Street was given an 18 classification because of its ‘strong, sadistic horror and bloody violence’. Jenkinson would have been just 12 when she watched it.
‘Just been watching Netflix all the way through lockdown, I’m starting to run out of things to watch,’ Jenkinson wrote in an accompanying caption.
Her fascination with such content would grow, turning into an obsession with a film about Sweeney Todd, the murderous cutthroat barber turned pie-maker.
‘He kills people with one of the sharpest blades in the world,’ she would write to Ratcliffe of the Tim Burton-directed musical. ‘One slit, slice things very deep. It’s really good and dark and gory and romantic . . . I’m watching for the 9,000th time . . . you should watch it.’
She also celebrated her love of the film on her TikTok accounts, posting a compilation of Sweeney Todd clips.
Another TikTok collection has the title #gothic and features Gothic architecture with a soundtrack entitled Tear You