The Mammoth Book of New Csi (23 page)

Jodi had been grounded by her mother in the weeks before her death, but the restrictions had been lifted on the afternoon of the murder. She arrived home from school at around 4.05 p.m. At 4.35 p.m. she used her mother’s mobile phone to send a text message to Mitchell. He responded a minute later. A further text was sent to him by Jodi at 4.38 p.m. After that, Mitchell said, he had listened to music while cooking dinner. His mother arrived home at 5.15 p.m. Mitchell said he waited at home for Jodi, leaving at around 5.30 or 5.40 p.m. when she had not arrived.

Jodi had left home at about 4.50 p.m., telling her mother that she was going to meet Mitchell and would be “mucking about up there”. At 4.54 p.m. a call was made from Mitchell’s mobile telephone to the speaking clock.

Between about 5.05 and 5.20 p.m., Leonard Kelly was cycling along the path from the west to the east end, and heard a noise, which he described as “a strangling sort of sound, a human thing”, coming from the far side of the wall. John Ferris and Gordon Dickie rode a moped along the path at about the same time. They did not hear anything of the sort described by Kelly and they did not see him. Nor did he see them.

Mitchell called Jodi’s home at 5.32 p.m., but got no reply. At 5.40 p.m., he phoned Jodi’s home again. This time Jodi’s mother’s boyfriend, Alan Ovens, answered and Mitchell asked if Jodi was there. He was told that she had already left to meet him. Mitchell replied: “OK, cool.”

When she failed to return at 10 p.m., her mother sent a text to Mitchell’s mobile phone, telling her daughter to come home. Mitchell replied with a call, saying he had not seen Jodi. At 11 p.m., a search party was formed, which included Jodi’s seventeen-year-old sister Janine and Janine’s boyfriend, nineteen-year-old Stephen Kelly, and their sixty-seven-year-old grandmother, Alice Walker. They began down the path from the Easthouses end, while Mitchell, with the family dog Mia, began from Newbattle. They met up near the east end of the path, then headed back west.

The search was conducted at night and the weather was poor. Nevertheless, Mitchell and Mia soon found Jodi’s body between 11 p.m. and midnight. He said that he had walked some 20 yards (18 m) past a V-shaped hole in the wall when Mia, who had been trained as a tracker dog, remained behind clawing at the wall, alerting him to something suspicious. For a month, the other members of the search party corroborated this. But later they claimed that he had not walked past the “V” in the wall before climbing over and finding Jodi’s body, which was well hidden by vegetation. The prosecution maintained that this constituted “guilty knowledge” – no one but the murderer could have known the exact location of Jodi’s remains.

Jodi’s body was found naked apart from her socks. Her trousers had been used to tie her hands behind her back. Other items of clothing were strewn around and had been extensively cut and torn with a sharp, bladed implement such as a knife. There was no sign of a struggle except in the area around the body. Carrying out the post-mortem, Professor Anthony Busuttil found that the deceased had suffered “a prolonged assault with extensive blunt force injury and that a stout, sharp-pointed, bladed weapon had been used against her several times before and after death”.

A series of incised wounds across her neck had cut through the neck muscles, windpipe, jugular vein and carotid artery. Cutting the artery would have caused unconsciousness within seconds and death within two minutes. This, Professor Busuttil determined, was the cause of death. There had been between twelve and twenty cuts to the neck. Extensive injuries to the face, chin, neck and head were consistent with punches, kicks or blows with a blunt weapon. One was severe enough to produce a contusion on the brain. There were signs of “mechanical asphyxia” – strangulation – possibly involving the use of clothing as a ligature. There were penetrating injuries to the forehead and tonsils, the latter caused by the introduction of a sharp object into the mouth. There was also a deep cut to the face.

Cutting injuries around the eyes and deep cuts to the breast, arm and abdomen had been inflicted after death. Extensive bruising and cuts to the hands and arms indicated that the deceased had tried to defend herself. There were no signs of a sexual assault, it was said. Professor Busuttil said that he had been involved in many homicide cases and had not come across mutilation as extensive as this, or had done so only infrequently. Mutilation was quite uncommon, he said, especially where there was no sexual element in the attack.

It was also noted that there were no signs of a struggle beyond the immediate scene of the crime, particularly on the path side of the wall. This led to the inference that Jodi had crossed to the wooded side voluntarily, possibly with someone she knew.

“There has to be an element of local knowledge given the location of the finding of the body,” said Detective Inspector Tom Martin. “It would be perhaps somewhat strange for a complete stranger to happen upon this walkway, which is a shortcut for kids and used by local people. To us, that would depend on some kind of local knowledge.”

More than forty officers carried out door-to-door enquiries and forensic teams engaged in a more detailed examination of the crime scene. The area of examination was repeatedly extended in the hope of discovering the murder weapon.

“There is a strong likelihood, given previous experience, that this could be found in reasonable proximity to where the body was found,” said Detective Inspector Martin.

Suspicion had already fallen on Luke Mitchell by the time of Jodi’s memorial service on 3 September 2003. Her family begged him to stay away, but he turned up and gave an interview to Sky News, who were covering the service.

Asked if he had killed his girlfriend he replied coolly: “No. I never, I wouldn’t . . . In all the time we were going out, we never had one argument at all. Never fell out or anything.”

He was filmed laying flowers at Jodi’s grave. They were later flung back at his front door by a distraught member of her family.

But the police did not rush to conclusions. They took over 3,000 statements during their enquiry.

“We interviewed everyone possible,” said Detective Superintendent Dobbie. “We interviewed every male who had been viewed with general suspicion. That group included any males known to Jodi – both relatives and friends. Luke was one, and, at first, he was no different from the rest of them. We were just trying to eliminate people from that group.”

School friends said that Mitchell carried a knife. He told another teenage that he knew the way “to slit someone’s throat”. A classmate recalled him saying: “I can just imagine myself going out and getting stoned and killing somebody and how funny it would be.”

A witness named Andrina Bryson claimed she had seen Mitchell with a female at the Easthouses end of Roan’s Dyke between 4.50 and 4.55 p.m. on the day Jodi was killed. She recognized Mitchell from a book of photographs and noted he was wearing a khaki green, hip-length, fishing-style jacket, identified by others as a parka. Its collar was up and a pocket was bulging. She was unable to identify the female, but gave a description of someone with black, shoulder-length hair, combed back into a ponytail. She was wearing a navy-blue jumper with a hood and a pair of lighter trousers, which Bryson took to be a pair of jeans. The couple had been seen together smoking cannabis in the woods.

Two other women identified Mitchell as the young man they saw at the Newbattle end of the path about fifty minutes later. One of them, Lorraine Fleming, said that it appeared he had been “up to no good”. But it was the difference between his account of finding the body and everyone else’s that troubled the police.

“We couldn’t get away from this conflict in versions,” said Detective Superintendent Dobbie. “We tried to eliminate Luke from our enquiries but we just couldn’t.”

The next inconsistency in his story concerned the wood burning stove in the Mitchell’s back garden that was in use between 6.30 and 7.30 that night. Neighbours said that they had smelt a strange smell emanating from it around 10 p.m. Mitchell was seen returning home around that time. He told the police that his mother Corinne and brother Shane were using the stove that night. Corinne said it was not being used and Shane was not able to say either way.

“We also had reports from neighbours saying they had smelled burning coming from the Mitchell’s back garden that night,” said Detective Superintendent Dobbie. “Then there was the parka jacket. We spoke to friends, school teachers and others who knew Mitchell and established he had a parka jacket. The eyewitnesses had also made references to a long parka-style jacket. His mother said he had never owned one.”

But others were adamant that he had one. The police then searched Mitchell’s house and could not find it. Then they made a connection between the missing parka and the wood burner, “and we started to paint a picture,” said Dobbie.

However, they did not want to make any further moves against Mitchell until the test results of the DNA collected at the crime scene had come back from the lab.

“When the results came back there was not one DNA profile which could not be accounted for,” said Dobbie. “Every profile belonged to people who knew Jodi, including Luke. However, what we didn’t have was DNA from someone unknown, which ruled out anyone unknown as the killer.”

In August, the police called Mitchell in for further questioning. They searched his house again and his father’s house, but still found no evidence of the parka or the knife he was reputed to have carried – a 4 in. (10 cm) lock knife, or “skunting” knife, which came with a pouch. But they did find cannabis – he boasted that he smoked hundreds of joints a week – and twenty bottles of urine.

“At this stage, unless Luke gave us a confession or took us to the knife, we did not want to arrest him,” said Dobbie. “We did not want to go down that road unless we were 100 per cent confident the circumstantial evidence we had was correct.”

It was not until October that the police believed that they had enough evidence to report Mitchell to the procurator fiscal. Senior detectives called on the FBI for help with the crime scene evidence in January 2004 and a warrant for Mitchell’s arrest was issued in April 2004, ten months after the murder.

His mother, forty-five-year-old Corinne Mitchell, and twenty-two-year-old brother Shane were arrested and charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice when Mitchell claimed them as an alibi. He had been at home with Shane at the time of the murder, while his mother insisted that Luke was at home cooking tea at the time and denied all knowledge of the green jacket he was seen wearing. But Shane then admitted he had been looking at porn on the internet on the evening of Jodi’s death, something he would not have done if anyone else had been in the house. The charges against Mitchell’s mother and brother were dropped, but the prosecution further sought to undermine Corinne Mitchell’s credibility as a witness by showing that she had signed a consent form confirming that Mitchell was over eighteen when he went to get a tattoo on his fifteenth birthday in October 2003. The tattoo showed a skull with flames coming from it. Mrs Mitchell told members of staff at the tattoo parlour: “That’s really him.”

On the day he was arrested, Mitchell’s house was searched again. This time the police found a knife pouch with the inscription “JJ 1989–2003” and the numbers 666 written on it, along with “The finest day I ever had was when tomorrow never came” – said to be one of Jodi’s favourite quotes from Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain.

“It was like some kind of memorial to Jodi,” said Dobbie. “We made enquiries and discovered that Mrs Mitchell had bought a knife which came with a pouch identical to this one in December 2003. She said she had bought it for him to go on a camping trip. But why purchase that knife? It seemed bizarre, bearing in mind Jodi had been killed and that her son was a suspect. We started to question whether that knife was a replacement to one he had previously.”

Mitchell described himself as a goth and admitted stubbing out cigarettes on his hand as a “party trick”. He also scratched the numbers 666 on his upper-right forearm with a compass and covered his schoolbooks with satanic symbols. On one of them he wrote: “I have tasted the Devil’s green blood.” On another were: “Evil is the way” and “Depression is only a stage in my life so fuck off and stay out of my mind”.

He wrote an essay saying: “If you ask me, God is just a futile excuse at most for a bunch of fools to go around annoying others who want nothing to do with him. Are these people insane? People like you need Satanic people like me to keep the balance. Once you shake hands with the Devil you then have truly experienced life.”

In another essay, he wrote: “So what if I am a goth in a Catholic school? So what if I dress in baggy clothes? Just because I am more violent than others and cut myself, does that justify some pompous git of a teacher to refer me to a psychiatrist? Just because I have chosen to follow the teachings of Satan doesn’t mean I need psychiatric help.”

However, some of these “satanic references” were not as sinister as they first appeared. It was later discovered that they were lines from the popular computer game
Max Payne
. Mitchell was said to have been a fan of musician and artist Marilyn Manson. And the prosecution claimed that Mitchell took a keen interest in the “Black Dahlia” case, an unsolved homicide where aspiring young actress Elizabeth Short was found murdered and mutilated in Los Angeles in 1947. Manson painted a picture of Short’s corpse, showing massive injuries to her face, breast and torso. The crown suggested that there was a similarity between Jodi and Elizabeth’s injuries. But a BBC documentary in 2007 revealed that Mitchell only owned one DVD by Manson. He bought
The Golden Age of Grotesque
two days after Jodi’s death.

An extensive search of his home and computer hard disk produced no evidence that Mitchell knew of the Black Dahlia case until after Jodi was dead. In the BBC documentary Professor Anthony Busuttil, when asked about the similarities between Jodi and Elizabeth’s injuries, said that “there were major dissimilarities” between Jodi Jones’s injuries and those of Elizabeth Short.