Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  There was an unexpected new development in August 2006. A forty-one-year-old schoolteacher called John Mark Karr was arrested in Bangkok on child pornography charges. Apparently the US authorities traced him by using the Internet after he sent e-mails about the Ramsey case to a professor of journalism. When he was arrested, he confessed to being with JonBenet when she died. He said her death had been an accident. Asked if he was innocent, he said, ‘No.’

  But only twelve days after Karr’s arrest it was announced that his DNA did not match that of the ‘stranger’ at the crime scene and the authorities decided that no charges would be brought against Karr for the child’s murder. Even so, four months later it was revealed that federal investigators were still looking into the possibility that Karr was an accomplice.

  The case appears to be tantalizingly close to being solved. One of the major suspects, Michael Helgos, is dead, probably killed by his even more dangerous associate. David Williams, one of the detectives involved in the case, says the killer could be taken into custody. They have his DNA. ‘It’s a travesty that it isn’t happening.’ It would take six detectives six months to solve the crime. But the District Attorney’s office does not have unlimited funds and the case may have to be closed before the final solution is reached.

  Meanwhile the Ramsey family has had to endure the horrible bereavement inflicted on them by total strangers, the loss of JonBenet. They have also had to endure a painful hostile interrogation by the authorities. They have been vilified in the press. They have been assumed to be guilty by their neighbours. They were forced to move away and try to make a new home for themselves in Atlanta, where they lived in reduced circumstances. Their lives have been destroyed.

  Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June 2006, at the age of forty-nine. She was aware at the time of her death that the Boulder County District Attorney was investigating a suspect in Bangkok, and this gave her the satisfaction of believing that her daughter’s killer had finally been traced and would be brought to justice. For her, it was a resolution of a kind.

  Death on the Patio: The Murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins

  On 15 February 1997, a thirteen-year-old English girl was brutally bludgeoned to death as she painted the French windows opening onto her own back garden in Lower Park Road, Hastings. Her name was Billie-Jo Jenkins, and from shortly after the discovery of her body was reported by her forty-year-old foster-father, Sion Jenkins, he was the prime suspect. Was it another case of the police jumping to too hasty a conclusion, deciding too quickly who the murderer was, and gathering only evidence that would gain his conviction? Or was Sion Jenkins really guilty as charged? As we shall see, the police did briefly consider another possibility, but dismissed it at a fairly early stage.

  Billie-Jo was born in March 1984 and initially brought up by her natural family in east London. She was then, from the age of nine, fostered by Sion and Lois Jenkins, who lived in Hastings. At the time of her death she was attending Helenswood School in Hastings. Sion Jenkins was Deputy Head at another Hastings school, the William Parker School, a comprehensive school for boys. Jenkins was a devout Baptist, had stood for the local council and was generally regarded as a pillar of the community, and therefore certainly not an obvious murder suspect.

  Sion Jenkins gave his initial statement to Sergeant Steve Hutt, who took notes as Jenkins recalled what had happened. On the day of the murder, Billie-Jo had arranged to meet a friend at four o’clock. The family had lunch together and after that Sion’s wife Lois had taken their two youngest children to a seafront playground. Jenkins took his ten-year-old daughter Lottie to a clarinet lesson and returned home at quarter past two to give Billie-Jo and his twelve-year-old daughter some domestic chores. Jenkins told Billie-Jo to paint the French windows opening onto the patio at the back of the house, and Annie was given the job of washing the car at the front. Jenkins noticed that Billie-Jo was painting the inside of the French windows and told her he wanted the outside painted (as well or instead). Billie-Jo was getting paint on the floor, and Jenkins had no white spirit to remove it. He told Billie-Jo to be careful, presumably meaning he did not want her to get any more paint on the floor.

  At about three o’clock, according to Sergeant Hutt’s notes, Sion Jenkins left Billie-Jo alone in the back garden of the family home, painting the French windows and listening to Oasis, while he took Annie with him to collect Lottie from her clarinet lesson. He shouted ‘Bye’ to Billie-Jo and told her he would be gone about fifteen minutes. He returned at twenty-five minutes past three and then decided to go and buy some white spirit. He set off in the car with Lottie and Annie but realised after they had set off that he had no cash. He returned home after this abortive trip between three thirty-nine and a quarter to four. They went in through the front door, Lottie first, then Annie, then Jenkins himself. They went into the dining room. Lottie screamed when she saw Billie-Jo’s leg. Jenkins went to see what had happened and found Billie-Jo laying face down with blood on her head. He held her and tried in vain to revive her. While he had been out of the house for no more than ten minutes she had been hit over the head at least ten times with a metal tent peg.

  Sion Jenkins and his wife Lois were encouraged to appear on television to appeal to the public for witnesses to come forward. This is a common police practice in the wake of a murder. One motive is to create an appearance of purposeful activity for the benefit of the general public: to make it appear that the police are ‘doing something’. Another is to subject close relatives who are suspects to the pressure of appearing in public; it is an extension of the police interrogation technique. Close examination of the suspects’ body language and tone of voice on the videotape suggest to the police investigators whether suspects are being truthful or not. It is to a great extent a test of suspects’ acting skills and as such it is a very questionable practice.

  Initially, the police thought the murder looked like the work of an intruder but, after questioning Jenkins, they believed there were inconsistencies and implausibilities in what he said. They began to suspect that he was the murderer. The house was set back from the road by a flight of steps. Because it was semi-detached, with houses at the back, the only entry and exit point for an intruder would have been up the front steps and round the side of the house. Jenkins was not out of the house for very long, and in that short time it would scarcely have been possible for an intruder to approach the house from the front, mount the steps, go round the side of the house, climb over the side gate, get round the back of the house to the patio, kill Billie-Jo and then leave by the same route. There was also the question of the murder weapon. An attacker could not have known that a metal tent peg would be lying there.

  The intruder scenario no longer seemed a reasonable option, and that left Sion Jenkins as the prime suspect. Nine days after the murder, Jenkins was arrested and released on bail. On 14 March he was formally charged with Billie-Jo’s murder.

  The police were dissatisfied with the account Jenkins gave of the shopping trip, which seemed designed to get him conveniently away from the crime scene for the ten minutes when the crime was committed. He claimed he had driven off with the intention of buying white spirit, when there was already enough white spirit in the house. He in any case returned home empty-handed as (he said) he had forgotten to take any money with him. This may not be as suspicious as it seems, as his wife commented that he had done the same thing earlier that day. It may be best explained as a simple piece of low-level domestic disorganization, the sort of off-duty incompetence that makes us (most of us) sometimes absent-mindedly lock ourselves out of our own houses; or remember while swimming that we have forgotten to take a towel; or indeed, as I have done several times, buy a bottle of white spirit when there is already a bottle in the house. The fact that a murder was being committed has inflated the significance of Sion Jenkins’s wasted trip out of proportion. We all waste trips.

  The police were also concerned at Jenkins’s behaviour after finding Billie-Jo’s body. He did not
dial 999 straight away. Instead he phoned a neighbour. When the neighbour arrived, she naturally insisted that he dial 999, which he did. It seems he also opened the door to a colleague after finding Billie-Jo, but did not mention what had happened. He also, very strangely, went out to his car, a convertible, to put the roof up. It was odd behaviour, the police thought, but in fact easily explicable in terms of displacement activity while in shock. Jenkins commented that while he was putting the roof up he wondered, ‘What the bloody hell am I doing here?’ When he phoned the emergency services, he was advised to put Billie-Jo into the recovery position. He did not follow this advice. He afterwards explained this by saying that he knew she was dead; the recorded 999 phone call shows that he did not know whether she was breathing or not, so he could not have known whether she was dead or not. On the other hand, he may have thought Billie-Jo was dead, but not wanted the emergency services to think so. At an unconscious level he may have sensed that the emergency services would react more quickly if they thought her life could still be saved. Or maybe he just felt vulnerable and helpless and wanted to pass on to the emergency services the awful responsibility of saying that his daughter was dead.

  Jenkins’s two daughters apparently gave versions of events that were different enough from each other to be considered unusable at the trial. It would be interesting to know why they contradicted one another.

  Overall, there were enough peculiarities about Sion Jenkins’s behaviour to arouse suspicion. Then, when the police routinely explored Jenkins’s professional life, they uncovered a certain amount of dishonesty. He had lied about his qualifications – most of them, in fact - in order to get his job as a Deputy Head, and he was currently repeating those lies in the process of applying for a headship. The court rightly ruled that this evidence could not be used to prove that he was a murderer and did not bear on the case in any way. But the revelation did cast doubt on Sion Jenkins’s honesty and probity. It also has to be borne in mind that a false claim to professional qualifications amounts to serious misconduct. In the teaching profession it is a dismissable offence. There may well be former colleagues of Sion Jenkins who now believe that he got his promotion to Deputy Head ahead of other candidates under false pretences. It is no small matter. In spite of the evidence offered that he was a pillar of the community, a devout Baptist and so on, he was prepared to tell lies in order to advance his position, and that must reflect on the reliability of his testimony.

  This accumulation of suspicion and doubt led to Sion Jenkins’s being accused of murdering Billie-Jo by hitting her repeatedly over the head with an eighteen-inch long metal tent spike. At Lewes Crown Court on 2 July, he was found guilty by a jury of four women and eight men and sentenced to life imprisonment. The jury’s unanimous verdict drew shouts of approval from the packed public gallery, where Bille-Jo’s natural parents were sitting. A problem was that Sion Jenkins was a man of good reputation, a man with no previous convictions, a man with no formal record of violence – and he had no known motive for such an angry, vicious attack. If he did kill Billie-Jo, the motive was known only to Jenkins; the courts never revealed one.

  In spite of this, the judge said at the conclusion of his case, ‘Sion Jenkins, the jury have convicted you of murder on what in my judgement was compelling evidence. On the 15th February last year you battered your foster daughter with an iron bar. It was a furious assault, the motive for which only you now know. The fact that you committed this crime, the circumstances in which it was committed and the way in which it was committed lead me to conclude that you are a very considerable danger to the community.’

  Jenkins decided at once to appeal against the verdict; he had steadfastly maintained his innocence. On 30 November 1999, he made his first appeal, challenging the prosecution’s forensic evidence, or rather their interpretation of that evidence. This appeal failed.

  He claimed that he discovered Billie-Jo’s body by chance when returning from a shopping trip with two of his children. The prosecution claimed that the abortive shopping trip was a thinly disguised alibi to make it appear that he was out of the house (and with witnesses to prove it) at the time of the murder.

  The most damning evidence against Jenkins was a spray of tiny blood droplets on his clothing. The prosecution claimed that the 158 blood droplets landed on him when he hit Billie-Jo with the tent peg. The defence claimed that while Jenkins was, in his shocked and bewildered state, trying to nurse and revive Billie-Jo, a bubble of air in her blood-filled nose burst, sending out a fine spray of droplets. At the trial much depended on the experts called to give evidence about the blood. One expert witness called by the prosecution said it was impossible for the blood to have been sprayed by exhalation. Another, also called for the prosecution, said the pattern of blood on Jenkins’s clothes was consistent with Jenkins delivering several blows over Billie-Jo’s head. But there was an alternative way that the blood could have been transferred, and it was to form the basis of a retrial.

  In 2003, Jenkins won the right to mount a second appeal. His lawyer at the time, Clare Montgomery, said that Jenkins had spent six years in prison ‘in appalling conditions as a child killer’. She was referring to the fact that people convicted of crimes against children are routinely subjected to hostile treatment by fellow-prisoners. She also drew attention to the fact that his arrest had led directly to separation and divorce proceedings initiated by his wife, Lois, and estrangement from his daughters. His life had been ruined by a wrongful accusation and a wrongful conviction.

  The appeal led by Clare Montgomery, the lawyer acting for Sion Jenkins, hinged on a challenge to the evidence given by Home Office pathologist Dr Ian Hill, who had carried out the post mortem on Billie-Jo. She described Dr Hill’s evidence as incomplete and incorrect. Dr Hill, she claimed, had not carried out a microscopic examination of Billie-Jo’s lungs. At the trial, Dr Hill had refused to countenance the defence’s claim that the blood specks on Jenkins’s clothing might have an innocent explanation, that they did not prove that Jenkins was guilty. The defence hypothesis was that at the time of death Billie-Jo’s airways had become temporarily blocked and that when Jenkins had raised Billie-Jo up in an attempt to revive her they had been freed; the sudden release of trapped air through her nose had sprayed an aerosol of blood onto his clothing. Dr Hill had wrongly ruled this out as a possibility. The effect of Dr Hill’s presentation of the evidence had been that the jury concluded that Jenkins could have acquired the blood stains only by killing Billie-Jo.

  The second appeal hearing was told that if a microscopic examination of the tissue round the lungs had been carried out it would have revealed that Billie-Jo was suffering from interstitial emphysema. Her lungs would have been full of air. Professor David Dennison, a lung specialist, carried out a new test which showed that in this condition Billie-Jo would have been able to release an aerosol-type spray of blood if her body was moved. And Sion Jenkins said that he had indeed moved her in his futile attempt to save her life. The new evidence of Professor Dennison was reviewed and supported by Professor Robert Schroter of Imperial College, London. He concluded that the fine spray of blood could have been expelled from Billie-Jo’s dead body, just by leaning on it or turning it, as Jenkins testified that he did. It was also possible that the fine spray could have been carried in any direction by minor local air currents on the patio. Dr Hill was confronted with the new evidence and agreed with it.

  The result of the appeal in 2004 was the ordering of a retrial. The jury in the retrial, which was held in 2005 and lasted three months, could not reach a verdict. A second retrial was held, and this too ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict, after thirty-nine hours of deliberation, in February 2006. As a result, Sion Jenkins was formally acquitted. He will not be put on trial again.

  Billie-Jo’s natural family were furious at Jenkins’s acquittal. One woman shouted, apparently at his second wife, Christina, ‘It’s not over yet, you slag.’ As Sion Jenkins sat outside Court Seven at the Old Bailey, two
of Billie-Jo’s aunts ran up and started hitting him, leaving him with blood on his chin. The aunts were led away chanting, ‘Justice for Billie-Jo!’ The family’s anger arose partly from the fact that some evidence that was potentially very damaging to Sion Jenkins was not heard in court. There were Lois’s claims that he had been violent towards her and the children. There was a statement from his daughter Annie that in a fit of rage he had punched her in the stomach. There was an allegation that in the weeks before the murder he had had an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl bearing more than a passing resemblance to Billie-Jo. These claims, which may or may not have been true, might have shown Sion Jenkins in a rather different light. There was a hint, buried within them, that Sion Jenkins was in a stressed state and may have reacted to Billie-Jo’s carelessness in getting paint on the floor with more than normal irritation, a hint that he may have snapped and, in a fit of uncontrolled rage, beaten her with the tent-peg.

  In fact, one of Billie-Jo’s friends and contemporaries, Holly Prior, told the jury at the retrial that Billie-Jo had confided in her that her foster father had hit her. Billie-Jo had asked Holly not to tell anyone. Holly noticed that she had scratches on her neck and bruises on her face. When Holly asked how she had got them she said Mr Jenkins had been hitting her dog, Buster; when she remonstrated with him ‘he pinned against the wall and scratched her face.’ Sion Jenkins denied this but agreed that on one occasion he slapped Billie-Jo round the face. Jenkins came to believe that it was reports like this – coming from his wife – that led to his arrest.