best report: Will we ever know who killed Billie-Jo Jenkins?
After two decades, her birth mum is calling for the police to re-open the case but, after so long…
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the brutal murder of 13-year-old Billie-Jo Jenkins in the back garden of her foster parents’ home.
She’d been battered to death with an iron tent peg and was found lying in a pool of blood.
Yet two decades on, and an estimated £10 million spent on investigations, trials and appeals, the case is unsolved, and no one is currently in prison for her killing.
Even before her untimely death, Billie-Jo’s childhood in east London was traumatic.
Her birth father, Bill
Jenkins, went to prison for assaulting a policeman. Worried about her husband’s violence, her mum, Deborah, felt she can’t cope with looking after her daughter.
Aged nine, she was fostered by Lois and Sion Jenkins who, despite having the same surname, were not related to Billie-Jo.
Sion was the deputy head of William Parker School in their home town of Hastings, East Sussex, and the couple already had four daughters.
Billie-Jo seemed to settle in to her new family quickly.
‘I grew to love her and regard her as my own daughter,’ Lois said later. ‘She had a good rapport with Sion, and I truly believe that she was happy with her new family.’
However, just five years later, she was murdered.
On the day she was found, 15 February 1997, Lois had taken Esther, nine, and Maya, seven, for a walk on the seafront. At around 3pm, Sion took Annie, 12, to pick Lottie, 10, up from a clarinet lesson. Billie-Jo was left at home, busy painting the patio doors.
After driving home, Sion went inside, leaving Annie and Lottie in the car for less than five minutes. He then told them he needed to go to the shop for white spirit, but the girls remember him driving round the nearby park twice. When he finally reached the shop, he said he had no cash.
It was when they returned home that Lottie discovered Billie-Jo’s battered body, with the left side of her skull completely shattered. Sion ushered his girls upstairs before calling the police.
A mentally ill man was seen in the area around the time of the murder, but eyewitnesses placed him at least 15 minutes away at the exact time of the killing and forensic evidence ruled him out.
Then, police discovered Sion had lied on his CV to get his job – he hadn’t attended the public school he claimed to, and he’d exaggerated his academic qualifications.
Further investigations led detectives to discover 148 spots of his foster daughter’s blood on his clothing. They were so small they were invisible to the naked eye.
A month later, he was accused of murder.
Despite no apparent motive, the prosecution claimed the blood would only be present on Sion’s clothes if he’d killed her, and he was found guilty in July 1998 at Lewes Crown Court, and sent to prison.
However, that was far from the end of the case.
Six years later, in August 2004, his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal after new evidence emerged that suggested that his clothes could have been marked with blood when he knelt down to check whether or not Billie-Jo was breathing.
A retrial followed, but the jurors failed to reach a verdict.
At a second retrial at the Old Bailey in London, the prosecution suggested Sion was a bully. But although Lois claimed her husband had beaten her and the children, her evidence was not put to the jury. They were unable to come to a decision, and the judge ruled him not guilty.
On 9 February 2006, Sion was acquitted and released after six years in prison, and the Crown Prosecution Service stated they would not seek any further retrials.
Despite this reversal of Sion Jenkins’ imprisonment, there were some people who were still convinced of his guilt – including his by-then ex-wife and his own children.
It was just four days after the murder that Lois first became convinced that her husband had committed the horrendous crime.
‘I can recall with clarity the look in his eyes as he told the children, “Billie’s dead.” It had no trace of emotion,’ she said. ‘I woke up in the middle of the night as he turned over in bed, and it dawned on me it could have been him. I lay there terrified, thinking it must be him – and if it wasn’t him, at least it could have been him.’
Their marriage quickly collapsed, and after he was initially found guilty, she and her daughters left England to start a new life in Tasmania.
Sion, who went on to marry millionaire art dealer Christina Ferneyhough, maintains that a prowler killed Billie-Jo.
He has accused police of a ‘single minded and desperate determination to convict me at all costs’ and bitterly criticised the ‘dreadful errors’ in a ‘wilfully blind and incompetent’ police operation.
Understandably, Billie-Jo’s birth mum, Deborah, feels huge guilt at having sent her daughter away, and on this significant anniversary has called on the police to re-open the case, which hasn’t been looked at for a decade.
Family members have also reported that Billie-Jo had claimed she was being stalked by a man who fitted the description of the M25 rapist, Antoni Imiela, who is currently in jail for numerous brutal rapes and sexual attacks in the early 2000s.
But after so long, is BillieJo’s death doomed to remain forever a closed book, with only the killer knowing the real truth?
‘As he turned over in bed, it dawned on me that it could have been him’