I suppose none of this is true either?
As Donald Findlay, the eminent QC who defended Mitchell in court, put it during his summing up: "The question that screams into everyone’s mind is ‘why’? In this case there is no ‘why’." What was Mitchell’s motive?
Detective Chief Superintendent Craig Dobbie believes he has the "why". Softly spoken and bespectacled, Dobbie was appointed head of the murder hunt after Jodi’s body was discovered in the woods near Roan’s Dyke, Dalkeith, hours after she met her death. He fought to solve a crime which lacked critical DNA evidence, finding himself up against a teenage suspect who showed immense cunning under the fiercest pressure.
Clues were emerging about just how dangerous he might be at a very young age. Born in July 1988, his parents Corinne and Philip split up when he was 11. He grew up under the care of his mother and she allowed him to do exactly as he pleased. He lived in a state of near squalor; keeping his own urine in bottles in his bedroom, rarely washing and wearing the same clothes for days on end.
Left largely to his own devices he became defiant, violent and brooding with an unhealthy fascination with knives, the occult and drugs. He was first brought to the attention of the mental health profession aged just 11, following a fight at King’s Park Primary in Dalkeith. Although the incident was just a minor skirmish with another pupil, Mitchell’s attitude was sufficiently troublesome to warrant a referral to a school psychiatrist. However, there appears to have been little further action taken by the education authorities or his parents to curb his behaviour.
When he was 12 he threatened his then girlfriend with a knife because she refused to have sex with him. The incidents went on. When he moved to St David’s High, a music teacher found him trying to throttle another pupil and he was sent to an educational psychologist. He refused the expert’s help. Instead Mitchell became a rebellious, mysterious teenager who was heavily into cannabis and supplied his Goth friends with the drug.
He also appeared to have an unhealthy interest in the occult. The jotters at his Catholic school were daubed with Satanic slogans, and he wrote a school essay containing references to the devil. Yet teachers appeared to have little control over him and he would simply defy their instructions when it suited him.
Even more worryingly, he also acquired a fascination with knives. His older brother, Shane, had a knife collection and Mitchell gathered his own array. At a party six weeks before killing Jones, he repeatedly jabbed her in the leg with a knife he had been using to cut up cannabis.
Although she was clearly devoted to Mitchell, Jones was not his only girlfriend. He had also been seeing at least two other girls and may even have been grooming them to see which would make the most suitable victim.
One of them was Kara van Nuil, now 17, who met him at army cadets in 2003. He wooed her with romantic text messages but their relationship ended abruptly after he followed her into the cadet hut one night, crept up on her, put his arm around her neck and placed a knife to her throat. Later he tried to laugh it off but van Nuil had been terrified. One month later he killed Jodi Jones.
Another of Mitchell’s girlfriends was 15-year-old Kimberley Thomson, from Kenmore, Perthshire who he had been seeing for about a year before the murder. They had met while he was on holiday and kept in touch. Her resemblance to Jones was uncanny.
Mitchell had arranged to go and stay with Thomson for a fortnight shortly after school broke up. At some point, he was going to have to break this news to Jones.
Dobbie said: "There is a potential Jodi found out about Luke’s planned holiday with Kimberley that Monday. I think he told her at lunchtime."
Further investigations were also made into Mitchell’s background and his behaviour.
Dobbie added: "By 14 August our focus was on Luke. He was interviewed again under caution. He was challenging. He was totally in control of himself and challenged the abilities and authority of the police. It was almost like taunts. He had the mental ability to sit and take control of the interview and that’s incredible from someone who has not previously been part of the criminal process, or not come from a criminal family. He was not fazed or shocked or panicking. I have never seen someone so cool and calm and who needed to control the situation."
Yet there was no proof he was the murderer, no killer fact, just an arrogant teenager who seemed to show no grief over his girlfriend’s death.
Mitchell denied the allegations from the outset, but was soon suspected by the family and banned from her funeral. He angered Jodi’s relatives when, as she was laid to rest, he appeared on television to make a public denial. He also visited her grave accompanied by his mother, stubbed out cigarettes and swore at photographers. His boldness sparked strong suspicions of his guilt in the local community and he found he could not return to normal life.
Mitchell was banned from returning to school after the summer holidays and told he would have to be educated separately - away from his fellow pupils. This led to a heated argument between Mitchell, his 45-year-old mother Corinne and the school’s headteacher, and threats of legal action.
In court Mitchell’s defence was that he was at home cooking dinner at the time of the murder. His alibi was his ever-devoted mother who backed up his story. But investigations showed that there had been an exchange of text messages between Jodi and Luke from 4.35pm to 4.38pm on June 30, in which they arranged to meet up.
A knife pouch with the initials "JJ" - apparently a reference to Jodi Jones - and the numerals "666" written on it was found in his bedroom.
Despite his mother’s claims, the evidence of Mitchell’s own brother - who said he had been at home alone viewing pornography - demonstrated that Mitchell had not been in his family’s Newbattle house at the time of the killing, and another witness testified that someone "very, very like" Mitchell was at the Easthouses end of the path with a young female just before 5pm.
Mitchell’s mother also denied the clothes he had been wearing were destroyed in a log burner in the garden of her home within hours of her murder. And it emerged that just days after his girlfriend was brutally murdered, Mitchell bought a Marilyn Manson DVD about the murder of Elizabeth Short. Would a grieving young man who had accidentally stumbled on the mutilated and naked body of his girlfriend get any comfort from such a film?
On November 21, 2003, police felt they had sufficient evidence to submit a report to the procurator fiscal which named Luke Mitchell as the prime suspect for the murder.
On April 14, last year Mitchell was arrested and charged in connection with Jodi’s murder. When police arrived to arrest the teenager they found him sharing a bedroom with his mother. She said she had been comforting him because he was not sleeping well.
Corinne and Mitchell’s 22-year-old brother, Shane, were also arrested and charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. But these charges were later dropped.
The circumstances clearly pointed to Mitchell as the killer. But with no DNA or murder weapon the conviction on circumstantial evidence was by no means a certainty. When the jury went out on Thursday and appeared far from reaching its verdict speculation was rife in the local community that Mitchell would walk free with either a not guilty or not proven verdict. That lack of hard evidence drew criticism, but Dobbie staunchly defends his force’s investigation.
He said: "We have been scrutinised by one of the finest defence lawyers in the country but not one point has been inadmissible."
The case was the largest for Lothian and Borders Police in the past 20 years, leading to the longest single-accused murder trial in Scots legal history.
In the process, little of Jodi Jones’s secrets have escaped the glare of publicity. Her naked, mutilated body has been photographed and shown to witnesses, her text messages retrieved, her family life and sex life discussed and excerpts from her private diary opened to the world and used as court evidence by the defence team. This last humiliation would have "mortified" the teenager, according to a statement released by her mother on Friday. "These were private and should have remained so," it added.
These deep feelings over the exposure the 14-year-old has suffered in death has silenced her family. Instead of giving interviews they have chosen to preserve as much of her dignity as they can by keeping their feelings and the last remaining private shreds of her life to themselves, sharing only a few words and a poem she wrote with the public.
Dobbie himself did not know Jodi. "However, we came to know her, and one thing is for sure, we will never forget her," he said.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/jodijonesmurdertrial/Natural-born-killer.2597278.jp
