Who killed Billie-Jo?

[Sidge]

Did anyone watch this?

I remember this awful event. The documentary last night was very interesting.

Also, do you know what a miscarriage of justice actually is?

It's not about guilt or innocence. It's about due process of court.

Look long and hard at his ex wife. There is something very wrong there.

@bottleofbeer

Look long and hard at his ex wife. There is something very wrong there.

Like what? Genuinely interested.

@bottleofbeer

Look long and hard at his ex wife. There is something very wrong there.

Several people on this thread have noted a strange vibe about her, myself included.
I suppose the police must have looked into her whereabouts during that fateful day? Or was it a case of they thought they had their man and so looked no further?
The fact the DC don't see their father anymore doesn't mean a lot to me, it is very easy to manipulate a child and poison their minds against someone.

You obviously know lots about this case @bottleofbeer, can you recommend any things I could read to find out more? I find it so sad that poor Billie Jo hasn't got justice.

I agree Lois came across colder than SJ did tbh. I thought she had a cast iron alibi for the murder? She's irresponsible at best for taking Billie into that household, if SJ was as violent as she claimed.

Lois has a cast iron alibi, yes.

If you think there is something off about her, tell me what YOU think.

AFAIK there is only SJ and Woffindden's book which is obviously biased.

I don't rate Woffinden particularly highly either.

I feel the same about Lois. I didn’t want to voice it on here for fear of getting jumped on but it just doesn’t add up for me that she was a social worker, apparently in a very abusive relationship (burst eardrum?), with her DC being abused, fostering a very vulnerable teenager who was also being abused but she said fuck all about it until that poor teenager was murdered. Where was her duty of care? I’m sorry but I don’t believe she didn’t have the capacity to get support or was too terrified to leave. If the family friend (Gamiester?) didn’t tell her he caught Sion ‘kicking the daylights’ out of Billie-Jo, why, if he did, again where was her duty of care? They surely weren’t that strapped for cash, they desperately needed the fostering allowance?

I was similarly manipulated by my mother into believing stuff about my father, nothing near the level of this of course. I didn’t have contact with him from age 7 - 38. It took a lot of courage to ‘betray’ her and I had to overcome a lot of fear by meeting him. Sion’s daughters probably believe their Dad murdered their sister AND abused their Mum so i don’t read anything into them not wanting contact with him, that’s all bad enough!

It is horrific as there is absolutely no justice for Billie-Jo because as well as being horrifically murdered and having her life taken away, the family who did her a massive kindness and took her in has also been shattered, foster Dad’s life in effect ended too, and her sisters have to live with legacy that their Dad has been branded a crazed murderer and the effect that will have had and will have on them. If it was wasn’t actually Sion, there’s no RIP for her.

I have become a bit over invested in this case since seeing the documentary as I have current experience of a family friend being accused of a crime they didn’t commit (nothing like this) and is going through absolute hell, life on hold as well as spending £000s on a defence that they’ll never get back. It makes my blood boil. Similarly the Clydach murders which was also recently featured in a documentary. I know who I think’s guilty there too and it isn’t the guy who recently died behind bars after spending years in prison for it,

She claimed she was hospitalised with a burst eardrum caused by Sion. No records exist of this injury. Sion however, DID need hospitalisation after a bust eardrum caused by him playing with the kids, sticking flags in his ears and the daughter getting over excited and smacking one right down his ear canal.

Heh, what were the chances of a random attack? Oh, I dunno, how many examples do you need?

We get bogged down in statistics. Statistically it's somebody known to the victim. Yes, true. But we have p values which can support or reject the null. Sometimes we reject the null and accept the alternative because we recognise there is room for error.

It's very, very unusual for a woman to beat another female to death with a blunt object, even where that female is a (teenage) child. God knows what happened that day (much like William Herbert Wallace, it feels like a 'couldn't have been him; couldn't have been anyone else' murder) but I don't really like Lois for it.

We know Lois didn't do it.

If my husband ran for Tory councillor, that would be a deal breaker for me. Our ideals would be too different.

Lois was out with the two younger kids and dog and was never a suspect; there's no evidence, no motive, and arguably no opportunity for Sion to have done it. The crime scene wasn't fully investigated, the forensic science presented when he was found guilty was inaccurate, and not from an expert.

Stranger murders do happen. The garden was overlooked and easily accessed. I can't see why no-one else could have been responsible other than Sion (or Lois).

It's true you can't get much information online that's not from Sion - his book is The Murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins.

You can also find the judgement on the first appeal (failed) and the second (new scientific evidence, succeeded) but not the later statements from family and experts at the trial. Also most of the text of the successful appeal, but some text is retracted and it covers only a few points where fresh evidence (not argument about interpretation) could be claimed.

My Gran lived about 2 roads away from the house and I spent a lot of my childhood in Hastings. It’s hard to explain but the gardens are really easily accessible in that road, and in a lot of the surrounding houses. My Grans house was similar and I remember really clearly lots of the local children I used to play with running between the gardens and climbing over the fences. No one used to lock any gates and the fences were all really small. The park opposite was beautiful and very large and quite a lot of people would walk across it. I suppose it isn’t out of the question that some random weirdo would hear maybe music playing (?- was music playing? I seem to remember reading this somewhere) and being nosey and seeing BJ on her own painting, and deciding to randomly take that chance to murder her.

If the piece of plastic in her nose was not found do we know it ever really existed at all? Is it possible the neighbour was mistaken and it was, sorry for this, dark congealed blood she pulled from BJs nostril?

The plastic was still attached to the bag she had been kneeling on, so probably was correctly identified. It wasn't possible at that date to run useful forensic tests on that material, apparently. No DNA results were made available from the murder weapon either - I'm not sure if it was tested.

DNA is discussed a bit here - can't find a tidier source. www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/billie-jo-killing-was-dna-missed-2279742

* I feel the same about Lois. I didn’t want to voice it on here for fear of getting jumped on but it just doesn’t add up for me that she was a social worker, apparently in a very abusive relationship (burst eardrum?), with her DC being abused, fostering a very vulnerable teenager who was also being abused but she said fuck all about it until that poor teenager was murdered. Where was her duty of care? I’m sorry but I don’t believe she didn’t have the capacity to get support or was too terrified to leave. If the family friend (Gamiester?) didn’t tell her he caught Sion ‘kicking the daylights’ out of Billie-Jo, why, if he did, again where was her duty of care?*

^This. The wife has a lot to answer for.

Many years later....

I've since re read the book again and for some reason I'd thought Lois was in London that day, she wasn't.

Not that I'm suggesting anything.

@bottleofbeer where was she?

I thought she had been in London but she was not. She was in the Hastings area with two of her daughters.

I'm not saying I think she did anything but if two of their daughters who were with Sion and who never changed their story were not a good enough alibi, why were the other two daughters with Lois never interviewed?

Lois was the one who was pissed off all day, she had two arguments with the au pair, she argued with two of her daughters.

Yet we are told to believe that Lois' bad mood was enough to put Sion in such a bad mood he beat one of the kids to death.

She was far too quick to be convinced he did it. Maybe he was so abusive that she didn't need much convincing.

She refused to allow her daughters to testify because their testimony pointed away from Sion. Wouldn't you WANT the father of your daughters cleared? It's a hell of a stigma for them to live with.

She pushed and pushed for his conviction.

There are two possibilities. Firstly, he was so abusive she truly believed he did it and wanted justice (his daughters all denied DV) Or, she had another reason to point the finger at him.

She was never even looked at, let alone considered. Both Lois and her friends changed their stories numerous times

Hhmm that's strange @bottleofbeer it's always weird when people change their stories or lie and you can't figure out why. It's like when people are having an affair and they lie about where they were and then it makes them look like the murder suspect. You know they know 'something' they're not saying but you can't figure out if it's related to the crime. I see Amanda Knox like that.

If you tell the police stories that are all totally consistent then that is more suspicious than a few discrepancies. No two people remember the same event in exactly the same way. That's normal.

But they changed their stories multiple times and she battled not to have her daughters reinteviewed. Why? They still didn’t change their stories.

They were happy to do the interviews again.

Yeah I wonder what she thought the daughters would trip up on. It's interesting when you say people remember differently. I remember watching a tv experiment where the participants witnessed a fake robbery. Half of them thought they saw robbers wearing sunglasses and the others saw balaclavas with eye holes. Their brains reversed the black and white sections in their memories. Fascinating!

Posey, you are so very right! I'm a criminologist and this is so common.

It's why witness testimony is considered not very reliable. Which does contradict my earlier points, but his daughters were consistent enough to be credible.