THE investigation into the murder of Billie-Jo was hampered from the start. Suspicion immediately pointed at Siôn Jenkins because he was the last to see the teenager alive and the first to discover her body slumped at the rear of their home.
On the steps of the Old Bailey yesterday, Mr Jenkins condemned Sussex Police as “wilfully blind and incompetent” for allowing the real killer to remain at large because of their “dreadful errors”.
He criticised detectives for being “single-minded and desperate” to convict him “at all costs”. He called for a new murder investigation by a new team of detectives to catch the child’s killer.
His defence case was based on the possibility that she had been murdered by a stranger who found her painting the patio doors. Mr Jenkins, who has insisted that the family had had problems with prowlers, had left her at the house for about 15 minutes while he went with two of his daughters to buy white spirit.
Assistant Chief Constable Geoff Williams said that the case remained open and they would do everything possible to bring the killer to justice.
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Although there was no clear motive for Mr Jenkins to kill the teenager, detectives investigating the case in 1997 explored every facet of his private and public life to try to establish what could have turned a deputy headteacher, a respected member of the Hastings community, into a child killer. Their first breakthrough came when they found 158 microscopic stains of the girl’s blood on his clothing.
His honesty was then questioned when it was discovered that he had lied on his CV. He had not, as he claimed, attended Gordonstoun or the University of Kent. He did not have a BA honours degree, a postgraduate certificate in education, an advanced diploma from the Open University or an MSc from King’s College London.
Police believed that in the days before the murder he had become tense over his application to become headmaster and feared that his lies were about to be exposed. They also speculated whether Billie-Jo, a streetwise and straight-talking girl, knew that her foster father was rumoured to have had an affair with a 17-year-old girl, details of which none of the three juries was told.
His first wife’s accounts of domestic violence led to the theory that Mr Jenkins, a well-built 6ft 2in tall man, was capable of lashing out in anger. Mr Jenkins has denied claims that he had hit his wife.
In 1998, the prosecution secured a conviction after relying heavily on the blood spatter evidence. But the conviction was quashed after his defence team produced experts who showed that the blood could have got on his clothing if it had been exhaled by Billie-Jo.
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The teenager’s lungs were found to be inflated and her airways blocked. It was when Mr Jenkins discovered her, the defence said, and moved her shoulder that the blockage was dislodged and a bubble he said he had seen burst from her nostril spraying a fine mist of blood over his clothes. The discovery of three tiny pieces of “white material”, said to be her flesh, was also rebuffed when the defence produced experts who said it could have also come from the girl’s nose.
At both retrials the defence asked who else could have killed the girl during the 15 minutes for which Mr Jenkins left her alone. A psychiatric patient, named as Mr B, was seen in the area at the time. Despite police twice ruling him out as having an alibi, the defence said that Mr B, who had a fetish for plastic bags, could have been responsible for the shreds of black bin-liner found in the girl’s nose.
Billie-Jo had complained of being pestered as she walked home and of receiving anonymous phone calls at home.
It is possible that the jury ruled out Mr Jenkins because the ferocious beating would have left her attacker covered in blood, rather than the fine particles found on his clothing.
The defence also said detectives had turned Mrs Jenkins against him by saying that only he had a chance to attack the girl and the blood on his clothing proved that he had done it.
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TRIAL AND RETRIAL
February 15, 1997 Billie-Jo, 13, found dead
March 14, 1997 Siôn Jenkins charged
July 2, 1998 Mr Jenkins found unanimously guilty of murder and jailed for life
September 1999 Channel 4’s Trial and Error programme throws doubt on conviction
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December 1999 Appeal against conviction dismissed
April 2001 Mr Jenkins’s legal team present file with new evidence
July 16, 2004 Conviction ruled unsafe over a technicality
August 2, 2004 Mr Jenkins released on bail
April 20, 2005 First retrial
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July 11 Jury fails to reach verdict. Retrial ordered
November 1, 2005 Second retrial
February 9, 2006 Jury unable to agree. Mr Jenkins formally found not guilty