In a quiet English town in 1997, 13-year-old Billie Jo Jenkins was brutally murdered on the porch of her foster home.
Her foster father, Sion Jenkins, was convicted of the crime, but after two retrials, he was acquitted in 2006 – leaving one of the UK’s most notorious murders unsolved.
Despite his acquittal, the jury never delivered a ‘not guilty’ verdict, making this case even more perplexing.
Forensic blood spatter expert Adrian Linacre deep dives into the evidence he found for this case on the Crime Insiders podcast:
Professor Adrian Linacre, a forensic blood spatter expert who worked on the case, spoke to Crime Insiders about the “tiny blood spots” on Jenkins’s clothes.
“What we would do with these cases actually, and I was involved in some of this, we do a reconstruction with blood on a surface and hit into it, and you can see the sort of stain patterns you’re going to get.”
Linacre said lab experiments showed that hitting wet blood can cause a similar pattern of blood spots, but an alternative explanation for the blood pattern was raised during Jenkins’s appeal.
“If blood had come out of the nose at the moment of sneezing, almost like dying at that point, could then, as breathing out quickly, have actually created that same stain pattern,” Linacre said.
This alternative explanation was heard by the jury alongside the initial explanation and they were unable to pick between the two theories.
“In the end, blood pattern became almost on trial itself. Hold on, you can account for the same pattern of blood by two completely different ways? That seems odd to us. And essentially, that’s what the jury came up with.”
By Zack Goutzoulas, a Master of Journalism student at the University of Melbourne.