The man who should have been brought to justice
How Billie-Jo Jenkins' killer still roams free to this day
Billie-Jo Jenkins was murdered.
She was only 13 when she was killed in the back garden of her own home.
There is forensic evidence which points directly at the blood and bone matter coming off her head as she was bludgeoned and landing on the clothing of the person who did it. That same person has no alibi, a history of violent behaviour directly towards Billie-Jo, and was caught lying to the police.
So, why is no one in jail for this crime?
Killer: Unknown
Victims: Billie-Jo Jenkins
Date: 15th February 19971
Location: Hastings, East Sussex
Method of Murder: Bludgeoning
Timeline 29.03.1983 | Billie-Jo Margaret Jenkins is born 1992 | Billie-Jo enters foster care with the Jenkins 15.02.1997 | Death of Billie-Jo 02.07.1998 | Siôn Jenkins found guilty of murder 1999 | Siôn's first appeal is denied 2005 | First retrial 09.02.2006 | Siôn Jenkins acquitted at second retrial 31.01.2022 | Sussex Police announce forensic review
Billie-Jo Jenkins was just a typical 13-year-old girl. That day, she’d been playing her music way too loud. Her foster father, Siôn Jenkins, asked her to turn it down, but she refused2.
The argument didn’t last forever. After all, she had a job to do that afternoon: painting the patio doors of the home in Hastings, while the rest of the family ran errands and had extracurricular lessons. She’d agreed to do it in exchange for some extra pocket money.
Siôn left her painting that patio door when he went to pick up one of his biological daughters from her clarinet lesson, taking her sister with him. They went out and came home, and Siôn went inside to check on how Billie-Jo was doing. He soon emerged again only a couple of minutes later and told the girls to get back in the car. Billie-Jo had made a mess of the patio doors by getting paint everywhere, he said, so they needed to go and get some white spirit3.
They drove to the DIY store, taking a circuitous route. Siôn parked up and then discovered he had forgotten to pick his wallet up when he was leaving the house, so their trip - in the days before smartphones equipped with smart wallets - was a waste of time. They couldn’t buy any white spirit, after all. They drove home, taking a circular trip around a nearby park on the way.
When they arrived back at the home, Siôn again went to check on Billie-Jo.
That was when he found her, dead or dying, on the patio.
He grabbed her, in the process managing to get a fine spray of blood across his clothes and shoes as it was exhaled from her body. He panicked, not knowing what to do; something in his brain apparently told him to go and close the roof on his convertible car, perhaps to avoid a second disaster of the destruction of its interior. He talked to a neighbour who told him to call 9994.
The police came and found Billie-Jo undeniably and irrevocably dead, and Siôn truly began to panic.
Because he knew that if the police looked too hard into him, they were going to discover something startling.
That instead of the 10 O-levels he had claimed to have passed in 1973, he only had 6, all of them a C-grade or below5.
And instead of the English with drama teaching qualification he said he received from the University of London, he had actually studied physical education at the University of East London.
All of which meant that his job - as a deputy headteacher, and soon-to-be headteacher - as well as the lifestyle to which his family had grown accustomed were in jeopardy.
And so he panicked - and his behaviour was said to be so strange that it actually led to everyone, even his own wife, beginning to doubt him. It culminated in his arrest for Billie-Jo’s murder and a subsequent trial that found him guilty. He appealed but the appeal was denied; it was only when he managed to swing a retrial that things began to change.
The jury was twice unable to come to a verdict, thus resulting in his acquittal of the murder - reversing what journalist Bob Woffinden6 had called a miscarriage of justice. It was only tragic that the loss of his wife and family, his reputation, and indeed his job could not be reversed along with that decision in February 2006, nine years after the crime.
Or was it?
Because there was another version told of the story…
When Billie-Jo entered the family that coincidentally shared the same last name as her, it wasn’t necessarily a happy occasion. She was only placed in care because, with her father in prison, her mother was unable to continue caring for her alone. The Jenkins already had four daughters - Annie, 12 in 1997; Lottie, 10; Esther, 9; and Maya, 77. Billie-Jo was the eldest but also the outsider.
The family she had been placed with was far from perfect. The four other girls, and friends of the family, all said that Siôn was a fan of using corporal punishment on his children. Billie-Jo went to school with bruises and scratches on her face and body. She told friends that they had been caused by her foster father.
She had been punched, she said, and held up against a door8. Siôn said he had slapped Billie-Jo once, yes, and sometimes hit the children with a ruler or a slipper to enforce discipline. But his wife Lois went further: she’d seen him beat the children with a stick, and said he once hit her so hard that he perforated her eardrum.
The foster daughter and foster father apparently did not get on well. Once, she had written “I hate my dad (Siôn)” on her hand at school.
On her part, Siôn claimed Billie-Jo was violent and disobedient. He said that “she would simply destroy items of clothing or hurt herself, ripping the heads off dolls… if she was asked to do something she might not do it. And if she did something she might become impatient.9”
Siôn and his wife Lois had argued about Billie-Jo and her behaviour on the 14th of February. When he came home from a trip the next day, he found her playing her music way too loud, and when she refused to turn it down, he was angry. He told her to go and paint the patio doors - a job which she did sloppily, making a mess of the glass.
He left his other daughters in the car as he came back from the clarinet lesson and went to see what Billie-Jo was doing. She was playing on his last nerve. There was an 18-inch iron tent peg lying on the ground. He picked it up and hit her over the head with it five times.
She had no chance of survival from the catastrophic injuries that followed, and died within minutes10.
He went back outside and calmly told his daughters they needed to go back out - they had to establish his alibi. He forgot to take any money with him as he really had no intention at all of making a purchase - it was all a cover. That was why he took such a long route. He wanted to give himself as long an alibi as possible.
When he finally came back to the house, he knew where to find Billie-Jo because he killed her. He went to put down the roof on his car so that he would have a plausible excuse for why her blood and DNA might be found in the car. He did not call 999 for an ambulance even though there was a phone right next to Billie-Jo’s body.
When he answered the door to a colleague in the minutes after supposedly finding his foster daughter’s brutally murdered body, he did not mention anything at all.
When he did finally call 999, they told him to check if she was breathing and put her in the recovery position - and he refused. But when the operator asked if she was breathing, he said, “I don’t know, I haven’t looked”.11
Why would you not do everything in your power to save someone’s life - unless you knew beyond a doubt they were dead, because you had killed them?
There were 158 microscopic spots of blood on his clothing. Later analysis, unavailable at the time of the first trial, indicated that they contained flecks of bone, flesh, and metal from the tent peg. Forensics experts testified that while blood may have possibly got onto his clothing if air was forced from her lungs when he picked her up, the pattern was consistent with blood spatter from a weapon.12
As if this was not enough, Siôn lied to the police: first telling them he’d never gone into the house between the clarinet lesson and the DIY shop, and then that he had been out at the shop for 35 minutes when it was in fact only 1013.
So, how is it that Siôn was retried and then freed, acquitted of the murders? How could he be found not guilty with so much evidence against him?
The first issue is that not all of the evidence was presented. Lois and her daughters did not testify at the first trial. At the retrials, she testified to her husband’s violent behaviour, but the girls did not. The forensic evidence that linked the murder weapon and fragments of bone to Siôn’s clothing was not admitted in his second retrial, with the judge saying it had been submitted too late14.
The dismissal of the first appeal - because “blood spattering would not reach the height on the appellant’s clothing at which spattering was found”15 through innocent means, according to the judge - should have been the end of it. But the same evidence secured him two retrials.
At the first, the jury spent 39 hours deliberating but were unable to come to a majority verdict. In the second retrial, the same thing happened again.
The Crown Prosecution Service has indicated that no further retrials will take place. This means Siôn is, by default, acquitted of the murder16.
But does this mean he is not guilty?
Not according to the law. He applied for £500,000 in compensation in 2008 for his imprisonment between the first trial and the retrials. However, compensation was not granted… because there was no evidence that conclusively proved his innocence17. Ergo, there was no proof that he needed to be compensated for those years in jail.
Siôn Jenkins, now going by Charles Jenkins, remarried Christina Ferneyhough and moved to Hamptonshire18, where he studied a criminology course and wrote a book about his foster daughter’s murder. A book, incidentally, which the police say is full of lies19.
The second charge he faced, for lying on his application to become a headteacher, was allowed to lie on file20. To this day, he has suffered no further consequences than a few short years in jail working on his appeal.
There are currently no plans to reopen the investigation in spite of the forensic review21.
As a final nugget of information - Siôn Jenkins once stood as a Conservative Party candidate in his local elections22, though to no success.
http://www.justiceforsionjenkins.org.uk/timeline.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4400046.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/4468599.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4540967.stm
http://www.innocent.org.uk/cases/sionjenkins/index.html#woffinden
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17496832/billie-jo-jenkins-murder-questions/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4446194.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/116036.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4396998.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/107323.stm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Billie-Jo_Jenkins#CITEREFAdam2016
https://www.channel5.com/show/who-killed-billie-jo
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/billiejo-in-an-extraordinary-attack-on-her-exhusband-lois-jenkins-says-he-was-violent-and-a-liar-466364.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Billie-Jo_Jenkins#CITEREFAdam2016
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4661252.stm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-10940814
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7103748.stm
https://www.channel5.com/show/who-killed-billie-jo
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/125050.stm
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/police-announce-forensic-review-unsolved-22927127
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/4627982.stm