Search for the truth
Is the murderer of 13-year-old Billie-jo Jenkins still at large?
NEW FACTUAL Who Killed Billie-jo? Thursday, 9pm Channel 5
In February 1997, the murder of 13-year-old Billie-jo Jenkins gripped the nation and made headlines for months.
The teenager had been found on the patio of the family home in Hastings, East Sussex. She’d been bludgeoned with a metal tent peg and, bizarrely, a piece of black plastic was stuffed up her nose.
Billie-jo’s foster father, Siôn Jenkins, a deputy headteacher, became the prime suspect after splatters of Billie-jo’s blood were found on his clothing. Police believed he’d lashed out after losing his temper.
‘Good, strong scientific evidence had been found to suggest Siôn Jenkins was guilty of Billie-jo’s murder,’ recalls former detective Kevin Moore.
In 1998, Siôn was convicted and sentenced to life. But he was acquitted in 2006 after two retrials, where it was revealed that his clothing could
Police photofit… A suspect? have been contaminated with Billiejo’s blood as he comforted her in her dying moments.
Another view
This documentary looks at how detectives may have missed Billie-jo’s real killer. On the day of the murder, a mentally ill man with a fetish for plastic bags and a prominent facial mark was spotted near the Jenkins’ home, but was ruled out.
Crucially, another young girl had been attacked in a nearby park a few months earlier. She’d had a plastic bag put over her head and described her attacker as having a facial scar.
‘People preferred the story of this middle-class man killing his foster daughter to the story of a psychiatrically ill man killing her,’ says Dr Dennis Eady from Cardiff University Innocence Project. ‘A wrongful conviction could happen to anyone.’