Father of boy who helped kill Brianna revealed as a sex offender
THE father of one of Brianna Ghey’s teenage killers was yesterday unmasked as a convicted sex offender after he admitted exposing himself while driving past two girls of 16.
Kyle Ratcliffe, whose son Eddie is serving a minimum of 20 years behind bars for the murder of Brianna, also admitted secretly filming a girl undressing at a water park last summer.
The offences could not be reported until yesterday after the judge in the trial of Brianna’s killers barred the media linking the 36-year- old to his son’s horrifying crime.
After he pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent exposure and one of taking an indecent photograph of a child, Ratcliffe was told he posed a ‘significant risk’ to young women. He was jailed for 15 months.
A former kickboxing champion, Ratcliffe ran a gym where his son trained. Along with Eddie’s mother, he bought the teenager the hunting knife which Eddie and Scarlett Jenkinson would
‘No excuse whatsoever’
later use to kill Brianna. It can also be revealed that Ratcliffe has two previous convictions for indecently exposing himself in his car.
Less than a week before the start of the trial of his son and torture-obsessed former schoolfriend Jenkinson last November, Ratcliffe was driving his Maserati in Salford, Manchester Crown Court heard.
As he passed a bus stop on November 22, 2023, two 16-year-old girls waiting to go to college saw him performing a sex act on himself with his trousers ‘down past his knees’, Michelle Brown, prosecuting, said. Initially they ‘laughed it off’, but at the same time the following day he drove past and the same thing happened, she said. One later described the incidents as ‘a violation of her privacy’.
Fortunately, one of the girls had the presence of mind to take a photograph of his number plate. Police traced Ratcliffe at his home in nearby Leigh, and he was arrested on December 15 – midway through his son’s murder trial.
Tattooed Ratcliffe, a manager at a truck firm, initially told police ‘a pack of lies’, claiming he often drove with his trousers down due to a need to go to the toilet urgently.
But searches of his mobile phone uncovered footage he had filmed secretly last August of a girl aged between 12 and 15 getting changed out of her swimming costume.
He had also searched the internet during his son’s trial for content relating to sex acts involving schoolchildren. Ratcliffe was arrested again and remanded in custody – meaning he was not able to be present when his son was jailed on February 4.
Initially, he falsely claimed the sick footage had been sent to him over Snapchat. No family members were in court as he admitted his guilt yesterday.
The court heard he had been convicted of indecently exposing himself while driving twice before, in 2008 and in 2012, but was spared jail on both occasions. His barrister, Mark Friend, argued it was ‘difficult, if not entirely unrealistic’ to divorce his latest crimes to the ‘misfortune facing his family’ over the past 12 months.
Jailing him, Judge John Potter told Ratcliffe he clearly had a ‘sexual attraction’ to girls and teenagers and represented a ‘significant risk’ to them. He said his son’s murder trial provided ‘no excuse whatsoever’ for his behaviour.
He was ordered to sign the sex offenders register for ten years and made subject to a Sexual Harm Prevention Order.
In February last year, his son and Jenkinson, both then 15, hatched a plan to lure Brianna, who was transexual, to a park in Culcheth, Cheshire, before hacking her to death.
The pair’s trial which began on November 27, left the nation struggling to comprehend how two children from supportive, stable family backgrounds could have plotted and carried out the savage killing.
Jenkinson is serving a minimum of 22 years behind bars and Ratcliffe 20 years.