How the cat killer ‘graduated’ from slaughtering animals to humans
ON MARCH 22 2021 Scarlet Blake, a 26-year-old transgender woman from Oxford, live streamed a video strangling, skinning and dissecting a cat before dumping its body in a blender.
Blake, the daughter of a doctor, tells the camera after the dissection in a monosyllabic tone: “One day I want to learn how to do this to a person.”
Blake had carefully assembled the props for that evening’s show, livestreamed to girlfriend Ashlynn Bell watching from more than 4,000 miles away in the US.
Scalpels, surgical gloves, a gas mask, a blender and a terrified cat stolen from a neighbour’s home were positioned in front of a video camera and tripod.
Vets said the cat, named Starlet, would have experienced excruciating pain for three minutes.
Blake, who posed and smiled with the animal’s severed head, would later claim Starlet’s torture and evisceration were all done as a “gift” for Bell and that Blake derived no pleasure from it.
However this was later proven to be a lie, with prosecutors “in no doubt” that Blake “personally enjoyed” the act.
The day after, Blake took a photo of a missing poster for Starlet put up in the local area by its former owners.
In the background of the livestream, the song True Faith by New Order can be heard playing on a loop.
The song’s relevance would become disturbingly clear for jurors sitting at Oxford Crown Court three years later, when they learnt that the track features on the Netflix documentary Don’t F--- With Cats, about a man who kills a cat and a student.
Four months later, Blake’s grotesque rehearsal took on an even more sinister meaning, with the murder of Jorge Martin Carreno, a 30-year-old BMW worker from Spain.
In the early hours of July 25, Blake, wearing a hooded black combat jacket and a mask and carrying a backpack containing a bottle of vodka, left home in Marston, north-east Oxford and started on the 40-minute walk towards the city centre.
CCTV footage played to jurors showed the murderer prowling the high streets of Oxford, “sizing up potential victims”.
Blake’s choice of date and time was significant. It was six days after the Government had lifted all lockdown rules, allowing people to freely socialise once more in nightclubs and bars. Blake knew that between 3am and 4am on a Sunday morning, the would-be killer “stood a good chance of finding someone vulnerable”.
It did not take long for Blake to come across Carreno, who had become lost after a night of drinking with work colleagues.
Blake noticed Carreno on his own outside Radcliffe Camera at Oxford University at 4am, and paused for a moment to look at him before deciding to sit next to him.
The prosecution said this was calculated “and predatory behaviour”.
“When you happened upon Jorge, you selected him precisely because you thought he looked vulnerable, sitting as he was on the ground at 4 o’clock in the morning, smaller and slighter than you and likely to have had something to drink,” the court heard.
Blake can be seen on footage appearing to offer to share with Carreno the bottle of vodka.
After about 12 minutes, Blake persuades Carreno to walk together towards Parson’s Pleasure, a remote area in the University Parks on the River Cherwell. Blake had visited the spot in the past and had earmarked it as a good place to kill “unseen and undisturbed”, the court heard.
At 5.15 am Blake struck Carreno in the back of the head, then tried to strangle him either using bare hands or a “broad ligature” before putting him in the river where he drowned.
The judge later told Blake during sentencing: “Your decision to kill Jorge was not ... a momentary mistake ... It was the culmination of a plan you had been considering and formulating for months.”
Days after the murder, Blake returned to the scene where Carreno’s body had been found, taking photos of the memorial left by his grieving family and the tree next to which he had been killed – a sign of “complete indifference” to his family’s suffering.
It would take two years before Blake was arrested in August 2023 after the coroner ruled Carreno had accidentally drowned because of alcohol intoxication.
In the run up to the murder Blake had developed an “obsession with harm and death,” most clearly seen in the relationship with Ms Bell, a trans escort who Blake met online.
Ms Bell would later come forward to give evidence to the prosecution in a breakthrough for detectives.
Before leaving home on the evening of the murder, Blake sent Ms Bell a “dark and menacing” selfie wearing the combat jacket.
Images recovered from Blake’s phone show a list of grotesque online jokes, and images sent to Ms Bell, showcasing an obsession with serial killers and sexual violence.
One “meme” showed an image of a rope, tape, a gun and knife, with the caption: “First date with me.”
Another photo showed a bed strewn with rose petals spelling the message: “Bruise my oesophagus.”
An image of a woman wearing a T-shirt with an image of two speech bubbles reading “you’re cute” and “murder me” was also shown to the jury.
Blake, who transitioned at the age of 12, would later try and convince the court of not wanting to kill a living creature, let alone a person and being pressured by Bell to do so.
Blake also claimed the choice of song played during the grotesque livestream had nothing to do with the Netflix Show, a claim rejected by Judge Chamberlain who said it “played a part in cementing in your own mind the link between killing a cat and killing a person”.
When Blake was arrested on August 2023, police body cam footage shows Blake asking for nicotine patches and saying, “At least it’s not genocide.”
Blake later answered “no comment” to all of the questions in the 11 police interviews. After a three-week trial, Blake was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 24 years.