Part 4: Shock Horror
- genthewren
- Dec 10, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 24
Warning: You may find the images below distressing.
Before the guilty verdict was delivered, Judge Nimmo-Smith said he would not tolerate outbursts. He grossly overestimated his power, which evaporated entirely upon the word ‘Guilty’. And so, at just sixteen, Luke Mitchell began a twenty year prison sentence after a trial that failed to show how on earth he could have committed the crime.
Luke said that it was only by gripping the dock tightly that he remained standing. To fall would have made it impossible for the press to claim he showed no emotion. The mainstream media had refused for over a year to acknowledge what was under their nose and the sight of Luke Mitchell falling to his knees would be unlikely to make them question the verdict they worked so hard to bring about.
A fall in court might have interfered with shock, which has its purpose when it comes to survival. Shock can give the illusion of dignity, buries us deep down within ourselves where, for a time, no one can hurt us, where we cannot feel. Any who read their history know that the condemned do not generally wail and scream, nor do they do so when they are led to the scaffold. Knees buckle, hope springs and speeches are delivered with clarity, even humour.
The ways in which humans make sense of the abyss are consistently strange.
Luke Mitchell thought he was going home. Had he known he would never see his home again, he would have taken every opportunity to delay proceedings. Even after being physically sick he tried to return to court, believing that the sooner it was over, the sooner he would go home.
Your life and family may be destroyed in an instant but it takes more than an instant to comprehend that. Shock carries you in between.
Police officers know shock, how it varies and how long it can last. Unlike the police and prison staff, the general public might not recognize a young person in a state of shock and if they are given an interpretation to put upon a blank face, they will see what they are told to see.
I’m not going to tell you what to see.
This next image is from the film Scum, which drew on research from young offenders institutes and borstals. It shows Davis (played by Julian Firth), a young inmate, barely moving, barely blinking. Even when reminded by an unknowing inmate that he is to return to the scene of his brutal rape, the marks of which are still fresh on his face, even then he does not react. If you've seen the film, you'll know that Davis is about as far from alright as it is possible to be.
The Daily Record recorded that moments before the picture below was taken, a man screamed into Luke's face, 'Hang the bastard!' and still Luke did not react. His whiteness is chalk and his lips are, as his mother observed, blue.
In February 2005, this was called 'no emotion'.
I was fourteen when my class were informed by a weeping teacher that a massacre had taken place in our community. I did not think my reaction strange because it was largely mirrored by my classmates. We comprehended the enormity of the Dunblane massacre but we could not feel it. While my year sat numb, my sister and her peers, just two years above, were more inclined to cry. At the time, I kept silent out of a sense of impotence but could talk about it freely. A few years later it triggered a powerful emotional response and does so to this day.
Terry Mullins, who conducted Mitchells polygraph test in 2013, would confirm that recounting finding Jodi is harder for Mitchell as an adult than it was when he was a teenager. In 'through the wall', a six part podcast on the murder of Jodi Jones, Naomi Challon explores the effect of shock on teenagers, which is more than the Scottish courts and police ever did.
The blankness and stillness of shock was a black mark against Mitchell. Jodi's sister clung to this in her court testimony. When she described the night her sister was killed, it was as though her eyes never left Mitchell. Again, refer to the pictures taken in Cyprus. I don't know if the man is standing over a dead friend, cousin or a brother. I don't know how to interpret the bride, with her head resting on her husband's chest - perhaps he was in the process of getting dressed and she's giving him some dignity. I might testify that I could observe no emotion, that's quite different from repeatedly insisting on its absence.
There is another problem with this testimony. It was dark when the search party found Jodi Jones. All four required torches, uncomfortable when shone directly into the face. Luke had the strongest torch which means that with the torch held in front of him, his face would be in darkness. He was also behind a thick and high wall when Janine Jones claimed to see his face clearly. The Jury were taken back to that wall, they even recreated it, but they did not recreate that darkness - what we can and cannot see beyond torchlight. Even in daylight, to hear that a loved one has been found dead, it seems strange to be examining faces so closely in that terrible moment.
The groundwork had already been done on the prosecutions case for a lack of emotion. It began in earnest over a year earlier. When a police officer expected Luke to go back over the wall to the body, Luke was afraid and refused. This was viewed with annoyance and suspicion, so it began.
Find someone who knows nothing about this case and show them the pictures below. Explain that the subject, who turned fifteen that month, has been photographed at different times on the day of his girlfriend's funeral. The order of the pictures is chronological, the final picture taken within an hour of the one which shows him being comforted by his mother at his girlfriends grave. Ask them what they think the boy has been doing in the final picture.
To the press it was not obvious, he was 'grim' and 'stony-faced'. To one journalist it was highly suspect that he embraced his mother for several minutes on the grounds that they resembled boyfriend and girlfriend. This hug couldn't be attributed to a need to hide his face in a moment of vulnerability, a lengthy hug was proof of deviancy. They did not use words like 'comfort'. Sunken red eyes conveyed rage and they bemoaned the lack of tears that had plainly been shed. They told us to look for anger and we saw nothing else.
Dehumanization
Once someone has been dehumanized, you can do anything to them and do it with absolute moral certainty.
By his fifteenth birthday there was no possible humanity to contend with, he was not expected to feel as others feel. Do not confuse this with the blackening of character, though that happened too.
Dehumanized he could not reasonably expect to go to the funeral - the mere idea is outrageous. He would not be hurt at being publicly told to stay away, any sign of hurt must be deception. The only possible reason he would visit her grave would be to upset the family.
Acceptance of this kind of reporting is only possible if your subject is dehumanized. A neutral position, the position of innocent until proven guilty, would be to regret that a boy cannot go to his girlfriends funeral. Instead there was outrage that he visited the grave at all, accused of stealing the limelight he didn't want by those who thrust it upon him.
Equally, a neutral position, one of innocent until proven guilty, would value the importance of education and friendship as central to the lives of teenagers. When Luke's headteacher decided to hold him in isolation throughout the entire school day, she did not inform his parents. She kept it as a nice surprise for when he arrived at school two days after the start of term, looking forward to being back with friends. His unhappiness was reported as an unreasonable storming out. He is dehumanized, therefore capable of blind fury and nothing else.
Millions have been dehumanized on the grounds of race, religion, sexuality and ethnicity. In living memory we dehumanized those lost to AIDs and their loved ones.
Murderers dehumanize themselves by acts of unfathomable evil - they have no humanity to relate to. So the rumours in Dalkeith stripped away any sense of shared humanity. It seems to me that Judge Nimmo Smith didn't see this because he was equally blinded by it. Nimmo Smith believed he could banish the press reports entirely from the minds of all the jurors (a boast that is particularly impressive given he could not banish it from his own.)
You can see this at trial. Shane Mitchell felt compelled to leave Dalkeith after his brothers arrest, by the time it gets to trial, his wee brother has spent most of a year in custody, he and his mother have been arrested and threatened with jail. But the only way he could understand the importance of the case, it was decided, was by forcing him to look at several pictures of a child's mutilated corpse without warning. Judge Nimmo Smith considered this reasonable, and when Shane wept and asked for a break, he refused him.
When the prosecution raised with Corrine Mitchell that it was wrong of her to even visit the grave that day. She explained that they were told to stay away from the funeral, not the grave. If you think the visit outrageous, you must already be sure of guilt.
They were not always sensible. Smoking at the graveside is not sensible but anyone with a nicotine addiction is likely to increase their intake under that amount of pressure.
Equally if you have developed a taste for cannabis the same applies. That's not sensible either, but not a surprise.
To close I want to share a story that the press in Scotland would like to hide. I heard of this through the Leveson Enquiry in London.
Diane and Alan Watson
Barbara Glover planned the attack. She took a knife to school and in the playground stabbed sixteen year old Diane Watson multiple times. Diane was carried home and died as her father tried to resuscitate her while her younger brother Alan looked on.
Glover, fifteen at the time of the murder, served less than nine years in jail. The press did not attack her, nor express outrage that she should bring a weapon to school, quite the reverse. They were often mindful of Glover's age, that she had her life ahead of her. The Glasgow Herald, the Sunday Mail and Marie Claire published articles that suggested Diane had been responsible for her own death, had been a snob who looked down upon Glover. As I understand it, Glover harboured the mistaken belief that Watson had stolen her boyfriend.
Diane's grieving parents did everything they could to defend their daughters name. Diane's mother states that the girls barely knew each other but the Glasgow Herald ignored their protests and persisted in their reporting. It became was too much for their son. Fifteen year old Alan Watson was found dead with the articles in his hand. He left a note that read, '"Sorry mum and dad, but I just had to be with Diane."
You might think this tragedy would lead to a outpouring, a reckoning. No. On the day of Alan's funeral a third article was published.
Mrs Watson said, “I thought at least they would leave us alone for Alan’s funeral. They took away his respect, they took away his dignity. On the very day that we were laying our son to rest. If any journalist here thinks that good … then God forgive you because I won’t.”
Almost two decades passed before they received an apology.
A little over ten years after the death of Alan, the same industry, who refused to face the grieving Watson's, who did not call out the actions of irresponsible journalists, were lecturing the Scottish public to consider the feelings of the Jones family.
Scotland is a small interconnected country. Its media did not acknowledge the wrong done to the Watsons, though committed by a relatively small group.
The same media made the murder of Jodi Jones a sensation, therefore everyone within will have senior colleagues who played a part in it.
Remember this and do not expect bravery.
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