WEARING a yellow flower behind her ear, Billie-Jo Jenkins looks at the video camera and tells of her hopes for a future that she would never have.
Quietly confident and looking considerably older than her 13 years, the schoolgirl says that when she grows up she wants to be an actress. Four hours after she and her sister, Lottie, made the home video seen by The Times, Billie-Jo was murdered.
The 35-second footage, which has not been released for legal reasons, gives an insight into the happiness the teenager derived from her friendship with her foster sisters and family pets.
With her hair tied back and dressed for her chores in her mother’s old baggy white jumper — the top she was wearing when her body was discovered — she lists her sisters’ names and describes the family pets. Billie-Jo also names her school and her best friend.
“I like playing different parts,” she says, talking about drama, “I like the attention, I just like the atmosphere.”
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Her stepfather took her to see a drama college in the West End, something that caused his wife concern because the girl was dressed like a young woman.
Billie-Jo had come a long way since her troubled early years in East London. Her mother, Deborah, had a drink and drug problem and her father, Bill, was an unemployed decorator with a history of minor convictions who was jailed for assaulting a police officer. Her parents split up when she was 7 and she was put into care.
Billie-Jo moved in to the Jenkins’s home in East Ham in 1992 when she was 9.