The daughter of an Oxford fellow has been sentenced to life in prison for fulfilling a warped sexual fantasy by mutilating a cat and killing a stranger.
Scarlet Blake, a transgender woman, copied a Netflix “true crime” killer when she skinned a cat and placed it in a kitchen blender while live-streaming herself on the instruction of her American lover, before moving on to murder.
In July 2021, Blake battered Jorge Martin Carreno with a vodka bottle as he returned from a night out, then strangled him and threw his body into the shallows of the River Cherwell in Oxford.
The 26-year-old boasted of the murder to her partner Ashlynn Bell and “revelled” in her crime, returning to the scene twice to take photographs of the memorial left by Carreno’s grieving family, which she used to burnish her “credentials as a killer”.
Blake, seen only as a masked figure on CCTV, evaded capture by the police for two years until a fight led Bell to call Thames Valley police and reveal the identity of the killer. On Monday Blake was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 24 years, after a jury returned a guilty verdict following a trial.
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“Jorge Carreno was taken from his friends and family because you, Scarlet Blake, killed him,” said Mr Justice Chamberlain, passing sentence at Oxford crown court. “It was the culmination of a plan you had been considering and formulating for months.
“During your evidence to the court, you used the language of psychiatry and psychology, and adopted the persona of a cat. You talked about the difficulties you had transitioning since childhood to live as a woman and your troubled relationship with your parents. What you did is not the fault of a society that did not accept you. It was not the fault of your parents. The decision to kill was entirely yours.”
He ruled that the decision to kill was because Blake thought her partner “would find it sexually exciting”, adding: “You said you killed because ‘your lover thought it would be hot’… I am sure you did derive pleasure from killing Jorge, as you did from killing the cat.”
Blake remained emotionless in the dock. The killer’s mother Fang Chen, 60, a cardiologist and research fellow at Oxford University, blew her a kiss as she was taken to the cells.
Carreno’s family paid tribute to an “exceptional” human being who “dreamt of a future where he could make a difference”. One of triplets, he had studied electrical engineering and worked for BMW at the company’s plant in Cowley outside Oxford.
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“The loss of Jorge has not only left an open wound in this family but to all those who had the pleasure of knowing him,” said his mother, Carmen Carreno, who left the courtroom in tears. “It’s left a void impossible to feel. The pain of losing a son and brother in such strife is a trial no family should face. Today his absence leaves a great wound in our hearts. His life was stolen.”
Prosecutors had told the court that Blake killed Carreno, on the first Saturday night after Covid restrictions were eased, because she had a “fixation with violence”. She had engaged in sexual fantasies about strangulation, once consensually asphyxiating Bell until she passed out.
The pair had met on the Discord app, on an invitation-only thread dedicated to “artistically rendered gore”, or self-harm images. Messages recovered by detectives showed Blake and Bell, who advertises herself as an escort in the US, posing with military-grade weapons in photos and discussing killing.
In one message Blake writes: “F*** I need blood, this is bad.” On her phone she kept a photograph of female serial killers, and in one text to her lover she wrote: “I would murder my mum for you … I also want to kill my dad one day … maybe when they are old I can just put a respirator with pure nitrogen on their faces while they sleep.”
Four months before the murder Blake attacked her neighbour’s cat, a “treasured pet”, live-streaming herself skinning it and putting it in a blender so that Bell could watch. The video was set to the song True Faith, by New Order, which featured in the Netflix show Don’t F*** with Cats documenting the case of Luka Magnotta, who filmed himself killing kittens before murdering a student.
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In an attempt to shift the blame for the murder, Blake claimed she was controlled by Bell, and that she cajoled her to escalate her violence to murder — a claim the judge rejected. “She was wanting to make me do this,” Blake said. “She was conditioning me to obey what she wanted me to do.”
She later said in evidence: “She was quite obsessive over how, apparently, I killed someone for her, and how now she’s dating a murderer. She seemed to enjoy it.”
Blake, who carried out her attack in a mask, hood and military-style coat, was caught two years after the attack when Bell told police her former lover had confessed to the murder. That followed a blazing row in Colorado during which a rifle was pulled.
Blake was arrested and a vodka bottle lid that was found on the riverbank next to Carreno’s body was tested for her DNA, the subsequent match placing her at the scene of the crime. The killer had sent the jacket she was wearing on the night of the murder to Bell, who replied to say it had a “serial killer’s musk”.
Blake lived in a detached bungalow in a quiet cul-de-sac with her mother. They immigrated to the UK in the 2000s and Blake came out as trans when she was 12. She received puberty blockers and hormone treatment as a teenager and faced bullying at school, where she was known as Alice Wang.
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Blake, who referred to herself as “us” and “we” in court, said she had a “fragmented” personality like a “pie chart” and meowed at the jury when she explained that she sometimes identified as a cat. Alice, she told the jury, “sort of stopped existing” but another persona, Candy, “is still here”.
As Judge Chamberlain summed up the evidence last week, he said the fact Blake, who was kept in a men’s prison while on remand, was trans had “no particular relevance to this case” but allowed jurors to consider whether, weighing nearly 11st and 5ft 7in tall, she was “physically able” to kill Carreno.
