SLAIN BY THE CHILD SAVAGES
Depraved lovers, 14, are youngest double murderers in history after bloody slaughter of churchgoing Scots mother and daughter, 13
A SCHOOLGIRL and her boyfriend became Brit- ain’s youngest double murderers yesterday after she was convicted of killing a churchgoing
Scottish mother and her daughter. The sweethearts were only 14 when they stabbed Edinburghborn Elizabeth Edwards, 49, and her daughter Katie, 13, to death.
The couple, compared in court to Bonnie and Clyde, then watched the teen romance Twilight vampire films, ate ice cream and tea cakes and had sex.
The boy, now 15, earlier pleaded guilty – and yesterday a jury unanimously convicted the girl, also 15, of both murders.
They had plotted the attacks in meticulous detail.
After their arrest, the girl told police: ‘I’d felt like murdering for quite a while.’
During the trial, she was accused of
SHE sat nervously in the dock, like the little girl she is, with her hands curled up into the sleeves of her cardigan and her head shrunk down into her neck; he scowled defiantly, in a way that only a teenager can.
It was a reminder, along with their all-too familiar social media profiles, that the defendants at the centre of this most disturbing case are still only children.
One image on Facebook is especially haunting, a ‘selfie’ of the two of them capturing, or so it seemed at the time, the innocence of first love: two fresh-faced, normal kids posing cheek-tocheek and smiling sweetly. ‘You look great together,’ a friend has written next to the photograph.
We now know that a little over four months later, the pair became the youngest double murderers in modern British criminal history and perhaps the most notorious since Robert Thompson and Jon Venables killed James Bulger nearly a quarter of a century ago.
The contrast between the teenage sweethearts in the Facebook picture – and, in the flesh, in court – and the scene which greeted police at the semi-detached house in Spalding, Lincolnshire, at midday on April 15, is something which will occupy psychiatrists and criminologists for years to come.
Dinner lady Elizabeth Edwards, 49, and her daughter Katie, 13, were stabbed in the throat as they slept in bed.
The boyfriend might have wielded the knife, then made sure they were dead by smothering them with a pillow, but his girlfriend was more than his equal; ‘oozing brutality and contempt’ for the victims, is how the prosecution described her.
Afterwards, the two, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, calmly had a bath, ate ice cream and toasted tea cakes, watched the vampire movie Twilight and had sex on a mattress they had dragged downstairs.
They remained in the house – with the bodies – until police forced their way in 36 hours later.
When the boy was asked what had happened, he told the officers: ‘Why don’t you go and see.’
The same question which was asked in the aftermath of the Bulger case, will now be asked again: were these teenagers simply born evil?
He pleaded guilty to murder. She denied murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, a defence which was unanimously rejected by the jury; she was not suffering from a mental illness.
Both of them, in other words, were judged to be cold-blooded killers – aged 14. The murders had been meticulously planned. Neither of them had expressed a scintilla of remorse; not then, not now.
The motive? Only one emerged during the trial: they had a grudge against Elizabeth Edwards and her daughter. The reason for that grudge still cannot be revealed for legal reasons.
Even now, though, it is almost impossible to comprehend how it could have culminated in a bloodbath at the Edwards’ household at No 5, Dawson Avenue.
There are striking parallels in the backgrounds of the killers. Both had unsettled upbringings. Her father disappeared from her life when she was young. She and her siblings were brought up by their mother.
His mother died when he was small and his father was rarely around. Since then he has lived with another family member.
The youngsters lived a few miles apart in Spalding. The setting for these terrible events could not have been more ordinary, more mundane.
In the early days, the girl ‘seemed happy enough’ and was doing well at school. ‘She was quite clever and was popular,’ said a friend who sat next to her in English class at her primary school.
‘She was normal and happy until she became a teenager. She started saying, “no one likes me”. ‘From then on, she always seemed depressed.’
Not long afterwards, she began experiencing suicidal thoughts. The court heard how she subsequently handed a note to a teacher which read: ‘Dear Miss, I feel so lonely, depressed but also I feel like no one cares … Help me before it’s too late… I have tried to be strong for so long but now I see death is the only way.’
The girl was referred to the child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS), which found she was ‘anxious, but not suicidal’.
So what do we know about her future boyfriend, the youngster with whom she would later gain chilling notoriety?
He attended the same secondary school as her, but at this stage they were not friends.
Neighbours recall him riding his bike and ‘knocking a little kid right off the pavement’.
On Facebook, he was a member of a group ‘for people that feel so alone’ and who ‘don’t feel like they fit in anywhere’.
He also found escape in fantasy, horror thriller novels. ‘He used to read these books on his own all the time – big thick high books,’ said the schoolfriend.
It was in 2015, that the two troubled protagonists began hanging out together.
They discovered they had the same attitude to life, the jury was told. Namely, ‘that it was s*** and it was going to get worse’. Eventually, he asked her out on Facebook.
In an interview with a psychiatrist following her arrest, she said ‘she had a mature attitude to sex’, telling him: ‘We decided ahead when we would do it and bought condoms…our relationship was very intense, we saw each other every day.
‘When we went back to school after the summer holidays everyone knew we were an item.’
Pictures on their Facebook pages show them kissing and cuddling like countless other teenagers. But in only a matter of months, their victims Elizabeth and Katie Edwards would be dead. Between October 13 and October 18 last year, the young pair ran away together and were reported missing.
‘The thing is, people liked her until she started going out with him,’ the former classmate said.
‘She oozed brutality and contempt’ ‘They had an intense, toxic relationship’
‘Like I said, she was popular but he never had any friends.’ At the time of the killings, he had been excluded from school and was attending a special unit for disruptive pupils, so he and his girlfriend would meet up after school.
What was the catalyst for the bloodbath? It was resentment towards Mrs Edwards and her utterly blameless and beautiful daughter Katie, who at 13, was a year younger than her killers. It is clear, however, that the couple began planning the atrocity on April 11, four days before they carried out the slaughter.
That night, in a scene which could have come straight from a horror movie, the boy left his own home with a backpack crammed with kitchen knives and met up with his girlfriend.
Two nights in a row, their plan to enter the Edwards’ household failed. On the third occasion, however, they succeeded.
The events that followed were described in macabre detail in the girl’s statement to detectives.
‘He gave me his backpack,’ she said. ‘I opened it slowly because I didn’t want to make much noise. I took out a black T-shirt with four black knives … two large knives with black handles, like average kitchen knives.
‘He said, “Are you sure you want to do this?” I said “yes”, but then in the end I couldn’t do it so he did it. [He] moved slowly to the landing, and slowly opened the [Mrs Edwards’] bedroom door.
‘I silently whispered, “What about your shoes?”, as we had planned to take them off so he didn’t make any noise. He said it didn’t matter.
‘He walked into the room and climbed on to the bed. She was lying on her side.
‘I went into see what was happening because I heard noises…and wanted to check if he was OK. Because I heard her gurgling, I went to check.
‘He was on top of her…I could only really see his shoulder because [he] had a pillow over her face.
‘He was crouched on to her fully, his weight down on his arms so she doesn’t make any noise or anything. I heard her say something like “get off me”, but I’m not entirely sure. [He] shouted at me to shut the door. She was struggling. I could see her arms and could see her legs kicking out and crashing on to the plastic shelves.’
‘When Mrs Edwards had stopped struggling, he took off his shoes went next door to her daughter’s room…all I could hear was her screaming.’
Police discovered, from the girl’s pink diary, that the two has met on the Coronation Channel riverbank – a local landmark and their ‘special place’ because it was where they went on the day he had asked her to be his girlfriend – to discuss the murders. Afterwards, they had planned to take their own lives.
For inside the diary was a note which read: ‘I want to be cremated and I want [our] ashes to be scattered at our special place … we don’t give a f*** anymore.’
Instead, the pair went downstairs, had sex and helped themselves to treats from the Edwards’ fridge.
Dr Philip Joseph is a consultant criminal psychiatrist, who interviewed the girl before she stood trial. He said she was ‘inappropriately upbeat’ during their meeting. He rejected the notion that she had a mental illness.
She told him: ‘No one knew about the plan. I felt excited about it and was looking forward to it … she deserved it.’
It is not clear if she was referring to Mrs Edwards or Katie.
But Dr Joseph was certain that if she ‘hadn’t got together [with the boy] and had this intense, toxic relationship, this would never have happened’.
‘A scene straight from a horror movie’