Their normality made me think ...what if that evil had been germinating in my own house?
WHAT could be worse than burying your own child? It must surely be a lifelong sentence of sadness, a nightmare from which you can never wake. But to suffer such a tragedy through an act of wanton violence is unthinkable.
I cannot imagine the pain of knowing that your beloved child’s final moments were filled with horror and that you were not there to protect them, to comfort them in the agonies of death.
The guilt, the regrets, the helpless rage, the constant replaying of those final conversations, the poring over messages, forever wondering if there was something you could have said or done differently to change the course of events.
Utterly agonising.
That’s the mental prison in which Brianna Ghey’s parents are now trapped, and it is a sentence that will long outlast those imposed on her killers Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe.
In the unlikely event they serve their whole terms, the pair will still only be in their early thirties upon their release. All their lives ahead of them, a second chance. Something Brianna and those who loved her have been brutally denied.
What was especially chilling was the twisted mental state of the two ‘children’ – both 15 at the time – who carried out this act of senseless evil.
Brianna’s obvious charm and sweet, naive, rather vulnerable nature only seems to have amplified their violent fantasies, as though preying on such a gentle soul were somehow part of the thrill.
That she was trans was also a factor, but it does not seem to have been the prime motivator. Yes, Ratcliffe was straightforwardly and ignorantly transphobic, demeaning Brianna by referring to her as ‘it’. But vile as that was, Jenkinson’s interest seems to have been far more complex and, of the two, much more horrifying.
Brianna wasn’t her only target – she had a ‘kill list’ of other children and has compiled another while in custody. She seemed to view the whole enterprise of murder as a project, researching serial killers and making extensive notes, detailing the methodology of the attack. Her approach to Brianna was strangely clinical, betraying no sense of her as human.
THEY say evil is not so much immorality as a lack of morality altogether. From all the evidence, Jenkinson fits that bill. That is why when the killers’ identities were revealed, I was dumbfounded. I expected to see the face of a monster.
Instead, here was this perfectly normal-looking child, pictured with her parents, riding a pony, smiling and posing on social media like any teenager. In some photos, she even reminded me of my own daughter at that age, a terrifying notion that I immediately pushed to the back of my mind.
But it made me think: what if that were my child? What if I’d been responsible for bringing this killer into the world? What if that evil had been germinating in my house, without me even knowing?
For Jenkinson’s parents, that is the awful reality. They have said the past year was ‘beyond our worst nightmares’, adding that they were ‘truly sorry’.
How gut-wrenching it must have been for them – and for Ratcliffe’s parents – to listen to the evidence of their child’s moral and spiritual corruption, every ugly detail stripping away their child and replacing it with an unrecognisable fiend.
Nothing, of course, compared to the primal agony of Brianna’s parents – but something insidious and terrifying. Always this gnawing question: is it my fault? Did I do something wrong? How did I not see the signs? The world is full of badly-behaved teenagers who push boundaries and indulge in destructive behaviour, but what makes two people cross the line from delinquency to murder? What renders them so desensitised to other people’s suffering that they can contemplate the kind of crimes these two committed?
In many cases, there’s a history of parental abuse, addiction or neglect, or some kind of deep trauma that, while never a justification, can at least offer an element of explanation.
But with Brianna’s killers, there’s none of that. Both came from respectable, stable families. Jenkinson’s mum is a teacher, her dad a tradesman. Ratcliffe’s mother was a ski-instructor and graphic designer, his father a truck company manager. And though Jenkinson had been expelled from her previous school for giving a child sweets laced with cannabis, the head of the school where Jenkinson met Brianna said ‘there was absolutely no
Preying on such a gentle soul seemed to be part of the thrill
indication in any of her behaviours that would indicate that she was capable in any way of what she did.’
Outwardly, perhaps, no. But inwardly, yes.
Because, as the trial uncovered, Jenkinson had, like many teenagers during lockdown, turned to the internet to while away the hours and days of isolation. In so doing, she seems to have crossed into the hellscape of the Dark Web, discovering ever more extreme forms of perversion, seeing things that no human should ever witness – let alone a child of that age.
Whether that planted some dark seed or whether it was always there, waiting to germinate, we can never know. But this terrible case is a lesson to us all, and especially us parents.
Just because your child is in their bedroom, never assume they’re safe. Don’t assume that because you have eyes on them in the real world, they are not lost in some dark place far beyond your reach.
Brianna’s mother said seeing the parent of her daughter’s killer break down in court reminded her that ‘we’ve all lost our children’.
If Brianna’s killers had not been encouraged by extreme violence witnessed online, had violence and murder not been legitimised and normalised by the films they watched and the games they played, perhaps murder would not have become their sick game in real life.
Perhaps, too, the boundaries between boastful fantasy and cold, hard reality would not have been blurred to the point where two immature and troubled minds could not tell the difference. And perhaps sweet, gentle Brianna would be alive today.