Twisted 16 year-olds Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe sprang from hard-working, middle-class families but were united in evil – sharing a secret “thirst” for witchcraft, torture and serial killers. The pair first became friends aged 11 hanging around together in Warrington, Culcheth and Leigh and chatting online before their friendship was cemented when she joined his school Birchwood High – where Brianna also was a pupil.
But soon their chats and WhatsApp messages descended into “dark fantasies”, as she initiated intelligent “genius” Ratcliffe into her fascination with death and murder.
Aged just 14, self-style ‘satanist’ Jenkinson downloaded an app allowing her access to the Dark Web and “Red Rooms” where she enjoyed watching the torture and supposed murder of real people.
Then aged 15 she fantasised about killing her own friends, before setting her target on Brianna – telling Ratcliffe: “I want to stab her at least once even if she’s dead jus coz it’s fun lol.”
Then the pair acted cruelly acted out that very same fantasy in cold blood and in broad daylight on a terrified, frightened victim who mistakenly believed they were her friends.
Jenkinson lived with her siblings and loving parents in Warrington, Cheshire, but boasted autistic and ADHD traits. Her father is a tradesman and her mother works in education.
One neighbour told the Daily Express: “I never really saw her about with anyone. She looked to me like a loner. I’m not surprised her friendships were online or through her phone. I just thought she was sad.”
But when barely into high school she had already been drawn to the occult and witchcraft, and from there became fascinated with serial killers.
Self-harming with knives, her favourite film was the 2007 gruesome Sweeney Todd, about the fictional ‘demon barber of Fleet Street’ who slit customers’ throats with razor blades and turned their bodies into pies.
She told Ratcliffe: “It’s dark and gory and romantic… I’m watching it for the 9,000th time. You should watch it!”
Jenkinson also researched serial killers including ‘Night Stalker’ Richard Ramirez – who slayed 13 victims – mass murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed 17 men, and ‘Dr Death’ Harold Shipman who killed an estimated 250 people.
She later admitted in court: “I just found it interesting. The different personalities of different serial killers and the different ways they would carry things out.”
Meanwhile skilled kickboxer Ratcliffe’s normal background in Leigh, Greater Manchester – son to a business manager and a graphic designer – was not dissimilar.
He once took part in an Amateur Members’ Associations Kick Boxing Championship in Jamaica in 2018 when he was eleven years old.
While being held in a secure unit since his arrest, Ratcliffe has passed eight GCSEs and been teaching himself A levels in biology, chemistry, physics, pure maths and English literature.
Responding to Jenkinson’s message quip that killing Brianna would be “fun”, Detective Chief Superintendent Mike Evans, head of crime at Cheshire Police, said: “I’m not sure fun is the word, but I think they killed her because they wanted to prove that they could, or that sort of thirst for killing.
“I don’t think there was any motive behind it so possibly, fun? Enjoyment is the right word.”
Police later found the pair had drawn up a “kill list” of four other children before settling on Brianna as the target, with police trawling through hundreds of damning messages between them.
Mr Evans said: “If you can imagine if you download an iPhone, you get about 11,000 pages. So, trying to go through that it wasn’t a case of all sudden, ‘Bang. Here’s these five text messages.’
“It was a slow (process), almost a slow reveal. I do accept now, looking at it, you sort of go, ‘Wow’. There’s not many murders where you get from planning to execution almost documented, word for word.”
But in the end the jury did not accept Jenkinson’s claims that she had no intention of turning her “dark fantasies” into reality – nor Ratcliffe’s claims that he simply played along with them thinking it was a game.
During the trial, Ratcliffe gave evidence by typing on a keyboard in a court side room – with his answers spoken by an intermediary sitting beside him as the jury watched via videolink.
Jurors heard that Ratcliffe had “gradually stopped speaking” to anyone apart from his mother following his arrest, and on top of his autism and he also had ‘selective mutism’.
Mr Evans also poured scorn on the “arrogant” and “warped” pair’s notion they could get away with the perfect murder, adding: “I think they are both really intelligent kids and high functioning.
“I think that’s brought a level of arrogance, or certainly confidence. I don’t ever think they imagined we’d recover those text messages. And I’m not sure they ever thought that we’d knock on their doors.
“Again, I think the whole thing is callous and cold. And that’s probably where I go with that level of arrogance in that they had a plan. They thought through the plan.
“And it was only at the point where they are confronted with evidence that they didn’t know we’d ever have, their world’s fallen apart.
“It’s made me probably reflect a little bit as a parent around, actually, how’d you know what your kids are doing when they are sat with the door shut in their bedroom.”
