Sion Jenkins verdict ..or not...

[Beetroot]

verdict

This is a total and complete tangent, but I do wonder at the irresponsibility of his wife Lois, fostering a child while knowing full well that her husband was violent.

She too must have lied to social workers in order to foster Billy-Jo. I'd be very surprised if they allowed a couple who had told them that DV was a feature of their relationship, to foster a vulnerable child.

I don't think one can assume that a bad tempered (hesitate to use the term 'violent'-if everyone who had ever been at the receiving end of that epithet was counted,we would have most of the world in there) man is a muderer.

Also re the aunts having a go,where the hell were they when the kid needed a home???
I can never understand the whinging of the extended family when a child who they obviously didn't want to care for meets a sorry end.

I worked with someone who knew the family and all he would say was there is a lot you don't know and would never know. He eluded to him being innocent but that it was very very complicated.

Anyway innocent until proven guilty. I don't have any feeling about his guilt or innocence but feel sad for the girl who died such a horrible death.

I was thinking the same last night, Caligula. They/he probably lied to Social Services but somehow their semblance of respectability meant that they were approved without any anomalies comign to light. Did they have other foster children before Billie Jo, I wonder .

christ if three trials haven't convicted him then I reckon he is about as innocent as a man gets.
and I agree that the DV is not getting us any futher. A propensity to violence doesn't make a man a murderer imho. And clearly the judges thought that evidence wasn't admissible so that's that.
whatever the truth of it, his life is over. I pity him.

I remember reading something where his wife was portrayed as bitter and angry and a fewq sandwiches short, and I kind of vaguely remember it being one of their daughter's saying that. Didn't Rough Justice have a whole load of evidence showing that he was probably innocent???? I thought they took up his case.

You all seem to forget that while he was tried three times, he was found guilty once and then on appeal the jury could not decide beyond reasonable doubt twice. He has never been 'found innocent' iyswim. I think it is very telling that he is a liar and violent and had been violent towards Billy Jo before her murder. For this to go to trial three times, the cps must have been pretty sure he was the one.

but the thing that always puzzled me is that he only had a window of 3 minutes to commit the crime. His daughters left the house and he joined them 3 mins later and they went to the DIY store together. 3 minutes to batter someone to death, only getting superficial blood stains on your jacket and shoes, gather your compusire and pop out of the house to get on with some shopping???!!!

i think it is a very interesting case, not least because it shows that people are very quick to condemn anyone who isn't 'perfect' on paper: he lied on his cv (if that makes you a murderer then 85% of the population must be surely?!); he had a violent temper and he hit his wife and kids. The last thing is certainly a motive for his wife to never want to see him again and divorce him when he was imprisoned but has she ever said she truely believes she and her daughters escaped the same fate as Billie Joe?

don't believe he's guilty, just based on the timing and the forensic evidence. don't think he sounds like a great character but that's not the same as being a cold-blooded and calculated murderer.

composure

According to him he only had three minutes. And he did have blood on him.

Sorry, he did have blood on him in a spatter pattern, or whatever horrid way it is described.

yes, i said he had blood on him... but it was sprayed rather than the pattern you might expect with a battering. The forensic expert they had from america said that the spray pattern was consistent with air being pushed out of the wounds when he turned her over. and his daughters were with him to verify the timing.

and if he had his daughters waiting for him outside, would you really kill another person in that time, knowing that the girls could come back into the house at any time, looking for him or going back to get something they'd forgotten etc?

I really don't know one way or the other - not having seen anything other than what the press choose to tell us - but what I have seen in recent documentaries (I'm thinking of the one on shaken baby syndome last autumn) of the way the police sometimes work makes me think I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was innocent. ie: sometimes they seem to be very ready to jump to conclusions and rather than seeing it as their job to find out who did something, they view their role as securing a conviction. If the police in this case were anything like the ones in that documentary then you can really imagine them discovering he's lied on his cv & that he had been violent towards his wife and from that point putting everything into trying to convict and ignoring any contrary evidence.

Also, I remember reading somewhere - don't know if it's true - that one of the expert witnesses that got the original conviction (by claiming that the blood spatters on his jacket can only have been caused by him being the murderer) was Dr David Southall (I think that was his name) who was later discredited as an expert witness in MSPB cases.

What gave me doubts was the fact that if he had killed her why would he let his own daughters discover the body - very sick, a desperate instinct for self preservation or innocent ? As to the timings , well I wonder if it could have theoretically been possible for him to manipulate it, so that 3 minutes was actually longer ? Not sure exactly how the girls corroborated it.

Did anyone else hear that forensic evidence was withheld, because the prosecution submitted it too late - and that the blood had minute fragments of bone in it?

Haven't heard that before Paolosgirl.

The mention of Dr Southall would certainly make me pause for thought.

paolosgril, it was reported in the paper today but they subsequently discredited it as categoric evidence anyway.

Isn't there some dispute as to whether it was only 3 minutes? Poor memories etc

I totally agree with moondog and thought the exact same thing myself last night. the aunts were just show casing for the cameras. its all well and good to go bananas now but they didn't take her in did they? I thought they made themselves look terrible actually. FWIW as we'll never know, I never thought he did it. Don't know what the mother was doing fostering a child if she alleged he was violent towards her. The so called 'friend' who saw him kick billie jo, didn't do anything about it at the time or even tell anyone. very fishy.

Exactly bosscat. If I was a friend of someone and I saw them kick a child who was fostered, I would report them to SS. Even if it had to be anonymously.

Fostered children have enough to contend with, without being fostered by people who can't cope with their own lives.

Agree with kittyfish and Marina.

Apparently he got married again recently to a wealthy heiress who had started writing to him in prison, owns a 3 storey house in Belgravia, now moved to a mansion in Herts.

Hope he IS innocent..........................

The local word is that he is guilty as hell....

I also heard at the first retrial that his daughters evidence sounded 'learned' iyswim.

I always find these women who start writing to convicted murderers (which I presume he was a the time) very odd. Unless it's for religious reasons, or as part of a charity thing. But these people who just up and decide to write to any old murderer and then marry him, are just wierd. OK, I know some of the people in prison are innocent and the victims of a miscarriage of justice, but still...

(I knew one years ago who wrote to two violent criminals, one in Brixton Prison and one in another one. She then had a dilemma because they were both being let out on the same weekend and she'd offered both of them the shelter of her flat without mentioning the other one...)