The case for an independent inquiry into the conviction of Luke Mitchell. Part 1
This is the story of a murder conviction that reeks to high heaven. Explore it and before long, the rats you smell practically introduce themselves to you. In a country whose education system was once the envy of the world, our judiciary is starting to expose itself to the incredulity of western society and the Scots who once believed in it.
Never in my lifetime has anyone been cast so violently to the wolves by the institutions and middle classes of Scotland, as a young boy from Dalkeith.
We are informed by the judiciary of Scotland, that there was once a fourteen-year boy who harboured demonic fantasies. Luke Mitchell was reasonably popular and academic but he copied shocking lyrics from songs and lines from violent computer games on his school jotters. He smoked cannabis with his friends, went out armed with a fishing knife. He met a girl. Jodi Jones was rebellious and equally clever. She listened to Marilyn Manson and the Deftones while he preferred Eminem.
One day he murdered her with his fishing knife. He left her mutilated body in the woods before returning that night to the scene of the crime, to show her family where she lay and the 300 injuries he had inflicted upon her.
We who remember the case, remember we couldn’t escape it. Rows of newspapers with either Jodi’s face or Luke’s for an entire year. In 2003 I was inclined to see something staged in the images they used to sensationalize the crimes of this demonic teen. To my young eyes, it was tabloid fodder, provided by those stupid enough to pose for it and attention seeking enough to court it.
I was made to look back two decades later. I saw Luke’s picture again and my failure to recognize him had nothing to do with the passage of time. It was taken only a few years after I had last seen him in 2003. The fifteen-year-old I saw interviewed by Sky News had sun bleached hair, nervous but wide eyes and clear skin. A more discerning viewer might have detected the signs of sedatives. Here was a boy who spent time outside, certainly not one confined to a room to dig into the darkest corners of the internet.
A few years passed, not many, and he is unrecognisable. His eyes are sunken and dead, his skin is waxy pale. His greasy hair is pulled back, now jet black in the absence of sunlight. His mouth set rigid as you’ll find with those who dehumanise to survive.
Some boast that at Polmont young offenders institute, an admission of guilt was eventually extracted under threat of violence. This aside, he has never admitted guilt though to do so would have set a path for release. At some point, he must have realized that Scotland didn’t want to look, as more and more powerful people glanced at a case that stank of corruption but passed it on as the work of a robust justice system lest it be revealed as shocking as any show trial in Putin’s Russia.
Some come to this story to play detective but that is not the purpose of this piece. It’s not to bring Jodi’s killer to justice, nor speculate on their identity. For details pertaining to the investigation, I refer you to Dr Sandra Lean who is both a leading criminologist and authority on this case. Dr Lean had nothing to gain by taking on this fight and everything to lose. Many experts in policing, law and forensics have looked at this case and raised the alarm. Rather than play detective anew, I’ll point you to documentaries from BBC Reporting Scotland and Channel 5‘s Murder in a Small Town. You’ll find ex-CID, former Metropolitan Police, experts at the Forensic Institute and David Wilson, Professor of Criminology, all willing to state publicly that they can’t see the hard evidence and some go even further and report that they can find no evidence at all.
Did we accuse an innocent fourteen-year-old?
Did we snare him at fifteen and lock him up at sixteen?
It is a wise impulse to consider the bereaved family, to place their sensitives and needs above all else. That most humane impulse has stopped many people going where I am about to go.
Fear, coercion, intimidation and love may lie behind the deceit that secured the conviction. Many were simply swept up in the frenzy. In this I include the Jones family as, regrettably, I cannot outline why I consider the conviction unsafe without discussing the role they played in securing it.
There is one programme that supports the conviction, BBC Scotland’s The Trials that Shocked Scotland. It is so light on detail that the 15-minute segment talks about the influence of Marilyn Manson before adding there was no evidence that Luke Mitchell was influenced by the singer, viewed his paintings or was aware of the Black Daliah murders that supposedly inspired him. The viewer is left wondering why it was mentioned? This was one of the longest trials in Scottish criminal history of a single accused. Why focus on points that are tenuous to the point of non-existent? The answer it would seem, is that the hard evidence does not exist. The programme also talks about a missing jacket and fishing knife. Since it aired, we have come to learn that these things were not missing at all.
The conviction was secured by four interlocking elements made up the police, the crown, the media and individuals who wished to deflect attention from elsewhere.
Faced with this trap, his liberty was in the hands of the public. Alas, there was no outcry and his fate was sealed.
Media
‘There’s something not right about this.’
This is psychologist Ian Stevens assessment of the relationship between Luke Mitchell and his mother Corinne, based on the interview they gave Sky news. It is indeed very uncomfortable viewing. It presented the public with a judgement to make. Mother and son know this, but too late.
Watch and decide. Is he guilty? Do you detect a liar?
In this context, his awkwardness and discomfort suggest a boy with something to hide. Ian Stevens is an eminent criminal psychologist and the media sought his damning assessment of Luke Mitchell. In ‘The Devils Own’ by BBC Reporting Scotland, he provided no depth of understanding and a breathtaking ignorance when it came to the maternal instinct. When provided with this Mitchell jotter scrawl, ‘‘I’ve tasted the devils green blood, flesh of fallen angels’ Stevens says,
‘It certainly sends a chill down my spine.”
Reporter Samantha Poling responds;
‘What if I were to tell you, that was the script from one of the best-selling PlayStation games that he had been playing in the two weeks before Jodi died and where he could actually be accused of plagiarism?’
Ian Stevens brushes it off and suggests that he was unable to tell the difference between games and reality. He talks of his obsessions, including with Marilyn Manson.
‘What if I told you that all that the police managed to seize from his house was one Marilyn Manson CD which had been bought after the murder and one torn up calendar. That was it.’
Yes, explain that Mr Stevens. You are supposedly the expert on the criminal mind. Did he think, ‘now that Marilyn Manson has inspired me to commit murder, I should see if his music is any good’?
‘That would certainly surprise me’ Stevens responds, ‘because certainly the impression given was a lot more serious than that.’
‘When you say ‘the impression given’, would that have been the impression given by the media?’
'Well the way the media presented it.’
How did the media present it?
Luke Mitchell had found the body of one of the most brutal killings in a generation. The body of someone he cared about deeply. Within hours he was taken to the police station, stripped, photographed and then interrogated for a further six hours. Within days, the press begin to hound him, the police tell him they have reports that he is a violent boy. He doesn’t know where such reports come from and they keep coming from both the police and the media, one feeding off the other. A press horde wait outside his house. With this knowledge the public might have kept an open mind.
Luke tells Sky reporter James Matthews that he doesn’t care about the stories in the press. He probably imagined saying this with conviction, but the fear in his voice prevents that. He wants to brush off words designed to hurt, as he would with any other bully. Tabloid images of him flipping the bird show that staged nonchalance teenagers try to show bullies. He admits he was dreading the funeral but wanted to go. Having been told that he can’t he’ll respect the families wishes. He communicates well but viewers were too busy playing body language expert.
His mother, sitting beside him, has no one to turn to, at least no one who can help her. She’s a single mother and perhaps, had she a partner, she might have been able to resist clutching her son. Unlike the viewers, she doesn’t see him as sexually mature because he’s her youngest child by eight years. Had Luke survived a terrorist attack, her actions would have been viewed as the normal response of a parent to a child who has suffered a traumatic event. But that wasn’t the lens we were given to look through. Misogyny was also at play. She committed the cardinal sin of not being mumsy. Mothers in their forties are not meant to have midriffs on display but Corinne, quite recently single, had a good figure and showed it off. She also smoked – more so when afraid.
Luke had a piercing below his bottom lip and when nervous he would run his tongue against it making his jaw appeared more prominent. This allowed the press to present him with a strong masculine jaw that he didn’t actually have, perhaps to add credence to their line that he was an adult in all but years.
Luke says it was easy to pin the murder on him as he was the local weirdo. It was easy to pin it on him because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a trained sniffer dog. He was also in the company of those who knew Jodi and could transfer what they knew of Jodi’s normal teenage rebellions onto him. By remembering her with the music and words she loved, he confirmed the lines they fed. But the media circus appeared to know nothing about music and the culture around it. Mistaking Luke for a goth is laughable, too laughable to be a genuine mistake. Laughable then becomes sinister. The Daily Record showed his school book with the word ‘Slayer’ doodled upon it, seemingly unaware they were looking at the logo for the thrash metal band, Slayer. So too, ‘A friend in need's a friend indeed. A friend with weed is better’, a lyric from the band Placebo. This music isn’t mainstream but it’s not obscure either.
Feeding the Media
This brings me to another murder that took place a few years prior, in the south of England. Sarah Payne was a couple of years younger than Jodi. Unlike Jodi, Sarah’s killer was convicted using forensic evidence. The media response was such that I still find it very easy to bring Sarah’s pretty, cheeky little face to mind. Rebekah Brooks, editor of The News of the World, befriended the family to the extent that when she was arrested during the phone hacking-scandal, Sara Payne, the mother of the deceased, went to great lengths to defend her. Sara Payne said Brooks was constantly at her side during the disappearance of her daughter. Whatever conclusions you draw regarding Rebekah Brooks attentions to the Payne family, it clearly suits their purpose as journalists to have intimate access. So it was with Jodi.
But what if those guilty or witness to murder could manipulate this? Stick close to the family and the media that surrounds them and in so doing shape the narrative spun? What if they could use such attentions to spread poison and deflect scrutiny from their own loved ones? The press were so hungry, they would print any story about Luke, even if it made little sense.
There was no media manager to help Corinne navigate the national press. This was well known and exploited. Corinne claims she specifically asked for the interview not to be aired on the day of Jodi’s funeral. But of course it was.
As instructed, the Mitchells did not attend but had no reason to believe they couldn’t visit Jodi’s grave. They visited on the evening of the funeral. Had they arrived just a little later they might have gone unnoticed, but a shout went up and the cameras returned.
The flowers they left at the grave didn’t stay long. The card and his poem appeared in the press and the flowers were thrown back upon his doorstep.
How can you interpret such an act? That it simply was not true that they feared his presence would create a media circus. Someone wanted it known far and wide that the family considered him a killer. To be simply angry at the interview, a proportionate response might have been to bin the flowers. Choosing the most public act was a perfect elixir to actively feed a media circus. The cameras were primed, hoping to capture the moment the flowers were discovered. Such an image would be worth a fortune, even more if it could capture shock, rage or better yet tears.
In the days immediately following the murder, the Jones family did not consider Luke a killer. I do not know the basis upon which they changed their mind. Coming round to comfort Luke, days later, Jodi’s mother made it known that he was emotionless and stiff, “like a stick of rock.”
If the purpose was indeed to comfort, it is interesting that she so quickly shared what should have been a private meeting. But it was important that it be made known he was unemotional, for statements were to change to erase what emotion he did show.
The Law of the Jungle
Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
From The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The trees of the forest communicate when they need to survive. Similar networks exist in communities. If you wonder at the sinister implication I suggest you have never been on the wrong side of such a network.
One day a friend of mine looked down from the window of his flat to dozens of police cars and vans. He took a few pictures of the spectacle and later, out walking in the city, someone drove alongside him and asked if he had been taking pictures. He answered yes, unaware that pictures of the police activity had appeared in the press, taken from a vantage point similar to his.
From then on he lived in fear of his neighbours. He couldn’t leave his flat without threats from all directions. ‘You should know the rules’, ‘You don’t fuck around’. One neighbour told him that her daughter had been taken into care but that his crime was the worst thing anyone had ever done to her. The police told him there was little they could do and what they could do, might well make it worse. And so he fled the city.
We do not know how far these networks extend but with anonymity, those embroiled would tell the press whatever they wanted to hear. As witnesses they would say whatever the prosecution needed them to say. Jurors so connected wouldn’t disclose links and conflicts of interest that should exclude them from service. And it would take just one such juror to corrupt the process, for one has access to all.
The root system is hidden but it does its job very well.
The defense knew a trial in Edinburgh, seven miles from Dalkeith, could not be fair. Indeed, the trial had to be restarted when a juror was found to have a connection to the case. As well as wasting a fortune, you might have thought this proved the point. Even then, the crown would not hear of it and later dismissed the argument at appeal.
Lothian and Borders Police
There are many reports of the police making in known in the days after the murder, that Luke was the killer. Before forensics returned nothing, before the raided houses also returned nothing, a huge effort was made in spreading their confidence in his guilt, briefing any journalist who would listen.
Of course, having done so, having been so certain, who could bear to be wrong? They ploughed on, searching and searching his mothers house, his fathers house, his friends house. They took all the family albums and gained a sense of who the Mitchell family were.
Had it been incriminating; they would certainly have used it. After all, they released an image of Luke’s bedroom. Huge resources ploughed for what? They can’t use photographs of a boy and his pony, his rabbit, his dog and the hedgehogs the family care for. Nor the caravanning holidays. The narrative they had been so sure of, the wild demonic teen couldn’t be made flesh. He was built on rumour and the façade of a fourteen-year-old trying to appear streetwise but he wasn’t real. Jodi wrote, ‘If I am crying, he hugs me and strokes my face. He is just so sweet. No matter what he says I believe him."
Having nurtured a media circus the spotlight had nothing to highlight but it suited both police and media to keep the circus in play. They just had to lie to do it.
The police tried to tell Luke that they had information sufficient to convict him, when they had nothing. Again, those close to me have experienced this police tactic. But they needed something. The crime scene left untouched, would have revealed much had it not been trampled by police. Officers dragged Jodi’s body across the ground and onto a plastic sheet where she lay, entirely exposed to the elements, until the morning. I have seen nothing to indicate that the family found this upsetting or disrespectful.
Just as laughable becomes sinister, incompetency can become conscious corruption.
Daniel Morgan
A year before Luke Mitchell was born, a private investigator called Daniel Morgan (pictured below) was murdered in London. The scene was a pub car park and the weapon an axe.
But the police did not search the crime scene and to this day, no one has been charged with his murder. Many decades later the Home Office launched an independent enquiry into Morgan’s death. The enquiry revealed a deeply corrupt police force intent on saving its reputation and a police officer knowingly perverting the course of justice.
In the beginning there were four witness statements from the members of the search party, these matched those of the first officers to arrive on the scene and the 999 call log. Altogether they paint a picture of a terrified young man who couldn’t bring himself to say what he had found when his dog reacted to something behind the wall.
Three statements were revised to tell of an emotionless boy with a useless dog who climbed over the wall and marched directly to the body.
Even The Daily Record, in their ‘cold hard facts’ that support the conviction, admit the statements change. What the Daily Record did not explore was how those statements changed. They do not admit that without those changes, the house of cards would come tumbling down.
The Crown
Hopes rested with The Crown even after the guilty verdict. At appeal, Luke’s treatment at the hands of the police was called, ‘Outrageous and to be deplored’ but that, and his denial of legal support meant nothing for ‘he gave as good as he got.’
This outrageous and deplorable treatment has been evidenced. I don’t know upon what basis the appeal judges assumed the same officers who acted outrageously would not exhibit this behaviour elsewhere. These judges knew that many witnesses in this case were children, one as young as eleven. Easily bullied, easily coerced into telling the police what they wanted to hear in an environment that was deeply hostile to any friend of Luke Mitchell. I cannot understand how they failed to take this to its logical conclusion. It is evident in the interviews with Shane Mitchell, Luke’s older brother, it is evident in the testimony of the cyclist who was in the vicinity around the time of the murder, he revised his statement under police pressure.
It is clear and stark, as it was with Hillsborough when police pressured colleagues to change statements and where they had not the power to pressure, altered 140 witness statements. They too were desperate to present a hoped-for narrative to blame drunk and aggressive football fans. They, aided by the tabloid media, pursued it to the point of madness. How else can we explain their decision to test the blood alcohol levels of the youngest victim, a ten-year-old child?
Those officers were not about to condemn a child to twenty years in jail. To be in jail as a high-profile child killer you can expect no leniency for being a child yourself. That Luke, ‘had a hard time in Polmont’, is a much repeated understatement, the full reality of which, I don’t want to know.
I wonder if the lead prosecutor, Lord Turnbull, observed the juror giving a thumbs up to the Jones family as the jury returned to deliver their verdict. Corinne Mitchell heard the words ‘guilty’ and thought she had missed the preceding ‘not’. Only when the jeering began did she realize.
The dogs were set on Corinne Mitchell and they were not called off. She has no memory of her son being led down. When the taunts sounded, ‘Fuck you!’, ‘Go to hell Mrs Mitchell’ and ‘Hang the Bastard!’, I wonder if Lord Turnbull realised who else had won. Those who would not be content to see the sixteen-year-old sent down, they would go after his loved ones. Those that would threaten his grandmother, a woman in her eighties, circling and kicking the car she travelled in. Those that would physically attack his mother at her business and then burn it almost to the ground. Those that would threaten any who spoke out against them. Those that would threaten to kill with impunity.
Lord Turnbull would be aware that Corinne Mitchell would not leave through a side entrance to be spirited away. She ran into the jeering. On she went for the next fifteen years, refusing to run away. Believe me, it almost killed her. Eventually living without heat, light and plumbing, the cold hit her lungs, the trauma got to her mind and the strain got to her heart.
Fifteen years and many appeals later, The Crown and Police Scotland could dismiss this case on the grounds that ‘all avenues have been exhausted for Mitchell.” Spoken with all the reassurance of a gleeful villain.
But there was cause for optimism. Andrew Malkinson (pictured) also had several appeals rejected by The Criminal Case Review Commission in England. After serving seventeen years for rape, his conviction was declared unsafe after it was discovered that Police withheld information from the defense. Unlike Luke Mitchells lawyers, Malkinson’s team had been permitted to test DNA from the crime scene, these results pointed to another unknown man.
Luke Mitchell’s team could point to many similarities in terms of police mishandling. Malkinson was freed in 2020, his conviction quashed in 2023 and in between, the documentary Murder in a Small Town hit our screens.
When you try to discredit an individual, your power, however strong, wains when those you hope to discredit, keep being right.
After Murder in a Small Town came out, Police Scotland dismissed it as ‘one-sided’ and set about destroying the evidence while they still had the power to do so. They would have destroyed all the productions, all hopes to conduct further DNA testing, were it not for a police officer with a conscience. Whoever they were, they blew the whistle in time for some scraps to be saved. But more importantly, to reveal what the police had denied ever holding.
Scott Forbes is not an emotional man, he is tenacious and almost brutally blunt. In 2003 he saw that, as with the murder of Daniel Morgan, the police were dismissing lines of enquiry. When he challenged them, he was smeared as a chancer with a criminal past and accused of trying to sell stories to the press. Forbes had a troubled friend who had written an essay about a killing very similar to Jodi’s but that was not the only reason he believed he should speak to Police, if just to be eliminated from the enquiry. In 2003 Forbes was starting to turn his life around and he is now a criminal lawyer. The police denied the existence of the essays but almost two decades later, Scott saw them listed among the productions destroyed. Scott found himself tearfully muttering, ‘You bastards, you bastards’.
The Trials that shocked Scotland series, referred to a missing knife and a missing coat. The knife Luke used to chop cannabis, perhaps the same knife he used to carve his and Jodi’s initials onto a tree, was never missing, it was with the police. The knife could have been ruled out as the murder weapon, instead they made sure that could never be established. A parka coat, belonging to Luke’s friend, was also seized and destroyed among the productions. Witness identification relied upon this coat, police could not prove his mother burnt it but by withholding it, they could present it as a possibility.
Were it not for the destruction of evidence, I might be afraid to write this. I would be afraid of what I don’t know, I would be afraid to be wrong. This is true in any miscarriage of justice case.
That’s why the middle classes of Scotland abandoned Luke Mitchell, they don’t risk careers, homes, even social media points. What makes Dr Sandra Lean so remarkable, is that this single mother of two was prepared to sacrifice all of these things.
If you are concerned that an independent review will release a killer to kill again, you already have no faith in the justice system. If an independent review supports the conviction then our systems will have been examined and this is never without value.
Who fed stories to the press? Who terrorised his family? Who insisted that he be educated alone? To suggest that all this was done to an entirely innocent teenager and his family, the cognitive dissonance is loaded with unbearable guilt. He must be guilty, for the alternative is to acknowledge the roles played in truly despicable acts. Those complicit, even slightly, do not want to consider it.
I use, to quote Ian Stevens, ‘emotive words’. Directly opposing the emotive words used twenty years ago. Ask yourself this; if it had been my words appearing at newsagents, my words read and debated by the jury, do you really think the majority of jurors would still have found him guilty?
Do you think, as the judge did, that it doesn’t matter?
You know it does.
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