A cat killer who live-streamed the animal abuse smiled in court after being found guilty of murdering a man four months later as he walked home from a night out in Oxford.
Scarlet Blake, 26, singled out Jorge Martin Carreno, 30, in July 2021 and led him to a secluded riverbank where she hit him on the back of the head with a vodka bottle, throttled him and then pushed him into the River Cherwell, where he drowned.
Blake, wearing a dark suit, showed no emotion as the guilty verdict was delivered at Oxford crown court.
Prosecutors said Blake killed Carreno, who worked at the BMW Mini plant in the city, because she had a “fixation with violence and with knowing what it would be like to kill someone”.
The video of the cat-killing four months before the murder showed Blake saying: “Here we go my little friend. Oh boy, you smell like shit. I can’t wait to put [you] through the blender.”
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After killing the animal, Blake dissected it, removed its fur and skin and put its body in a blender. The New Order song True Faith was playing in the background, which the court was told was in homage to the Netflix documentary Don’t F*** with Cats, in which a man kills kittens before filming the murder of a person.
Blake “boasted” about her actions to others and expressed “her desire to open up a person like her ‘little cat friend’”. She admitted criminal damage in relation to the cat killing.
The trial heard that Blake, previously known as Alice Wang, came to Britain from China at the age of nine, and told her parents she was transgender aged 12. She said it had “caused a large emotional rift” and made her parents unhappy.
Blake claimed to have a fragmented personality, which included being a cat, and meowed at the jury to show how she would interact with friends. “There’s a part that is just a cat, which is strange and that seems to me what the happy part of me is, in that they come out when I am happy,” she said. “With friends I know quite well who are aware of this part of me, I meow at them in greeting.”
The prosecution said Blake had an “extreme interest in death and in harm” and derived sexual gratification from violence and killing.
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During the murder trial, the court was told that Carreno had been out with work colleagues in Oxford city centre and was trying to get home when Blake found him sitting down in the street. She was filmed on CCTV prowling the streets of Oxford seemingly looking for a victim, wearing a heavy-hooded jacket and a facemask, and carrying a rucksack. Prosecutors suggested she was carrying a “murder kit” in her rucksack, including a garrote and leopard-print dressing gown cord.
Giving evidence, Blake denied she was looking for a victim that night and claimed she had gone for a walk because she could not sleep. She said she walked with Carreno to Parson’s Pleasure in the university parks and left him there alive to go home.
“I don’t know how he died,” she said. “I assumed he drowned. It wasn’t something I did. As to how, I still don’t know, I wasn’t there.”
An empty bottle of vodka was found in the river and on the bank near by was the bottle top, which had traces of Blake’s DNA on it.
The court was told that Blake confessed to her former partner, Ashlynn Bell, who lives in the US, that she had killed Carreno with a homemade garrote before throwing his body in the water. Blake said she had made up the details of the killing because Bell wanted her to kill someone after making her live-stream the killing of the cat.
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“I wasn’t interested or willing — it was an awful thought to me,” she said. “In the interest of keeping her happy, because I wanted her to kill me one day, because it’s sexually stimulating for me, that idea. She was wanting to make me do this thing and I was pretty much … well, at a limit after going through the killing of the cat.”
As Blake left the dock, she smiled briefly towards the public gallery. She will be sentenced on Monday.