Here’s the whole article from the Times which has probably been posted on here before but for newbies (like me) it certainly provides the other side to the TV documentary- a long read, but with lots of information that wasn’t covered in the documentary.
The murderous art that unmasked a cruel killer
Police investigating the murder of Jodi Jones were shocked by the dark fascinations of her boyfriend. But can the work of musicians such as Marilyn Manson be blamed for inspiring brutality or does it reflect the turmoil of a disturbed mind
Police investigating the murder of the 14-year-old schoolgirl Jodi Jones had a prime suspect — her boyfriend Luke Mitchell. He was due to meet her the night she disappeared and had found her body in the darkness of a desolate Midlothian wood. But to the frustration of the police there was no forensic evidence linking him, or anybody else, to the crime.
To understand the way Mitchell’s mind worked, detectives immersed themselves in the youth cultures of goth, grunge, rap and nu-metal. For the mostly middle-aged officers it was a revelation. Given what they knew about how Jodi met her gruesome death, they became convinced that Mitchell’s musical taste betrayed the mind of a sadistic killer.
It was the suspect himself who sparked this line of inquiry. In the opening days of the investigation in the summer of 2003, as detectives went about their door-to-door inquiries in Dalkeith, Mitchell had spoken to officers in the street about music containing murderous themes. Displaying the arrogance he was to show throughout the case, he asked if the policeman knew the song Kim by the rapper Eminem.
Detectives discovered the song was about somebody murdering his wife. It was impossible to read the lyrics without a shiver of realisation that their chief suspect was a fan: “Don’t you get it bitch, no one can hear you?/Now shut the f*** up and get what’s comin’ to you./ You were supposed to love me./Now bleed, bitch, bleed!” Eminem was not Mitchell’s favourite musician. That honour went to Manson, the controversial American rock star. Mitchell was obsessive about Manson’s music, with its dark subject matter of suicide, violence, satanism and murder. When detectives dipped into the Manson repertoire it only heightened their concerns — and their suspicions. Especially songs such as King Kill 33:
“I will destroy you with one simple hole.
“The world that hates me has taken its toll but now I have finally taken control.
“You wanted so bad to make me this thing.
“And I want you now to just kill the king.
“And I am not sorry, and I am not sorry: this is what you deserve.”
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There was more. Detectives discovered that two days after the killing, having already been questioned and forensically examined, Mitchell wound down by buying and watching a Manson DVD, The Golden Age of Grotesque.
It had a 15 certificate, and he bought it at his local Sainsbury’s along with some family shopping.
Amid darkened scenes illuminated by flickering torchlight, the DVD shows a girl’s naked body lying on the ground. In another part, two other girls are tied up and hooded.
More police research came across Manson’s paintings of the Black Dahlia victim Elizabeth Short, a Hollywood starlet whose murder in 1947 scandalised America. These stopped them in their tracks. The paintings showed injuries disturbingly similar to those inflicted on Jodi’s body — especially the large wounds on the side of the mouth stretching towards her ear, and an injury to the breast. Had the art and music of Marilyn Manson inspired, or even provoked, the most grisly murder Scotland had seen for a generation? Manson’s CDs and those of many other performers who explore horror and darkness are piled high in the untidy bedrooms of tens of thousands of teenagers across Britain. Their parents roll their eyes at their offspring’s musical choices and fashion excesses and shrug. Are goths really any different or more dangerous than other teenage fads from previous generations? After all, parents in earlier times were once scandalised by teddy boys and mods and hippies and punks. Is this really any different? Luke Mitchell’s murder of Jodi Jones has sparked a worried re-examination of these parental assumptions. As Mitchell starts a prison sentence “without limit of time” for Jodi’s murder, the case poses some unsettling questions for parents, politicians and the music industry.
Does macabre and death- obsessed music inspire acts of violence, self-harm and murder? Or is it simply the case that vulnerable and disturbed youngsters are attracted to it? Either way, can this music continue to be made available without any age restrictions — unlike feature films and computer games? Crucial to these considerations is a more difficult question, one that last week haunted the minds of millions of Scots as they watched the closing stages of the trial: what drove Mitchell, a boy too young to shave, to the sadistic murder of his girlfriend?
JODI and Luke both favoured the uniform of the goth — baggy black clothes and facial piercings. Mitchell had a piercing just below the centre of his bottom lip, which he would worry with his tongue, making it bob up and down. Jodi had one on the right-hand side of her bottom lip.
Although just 14 years old, Mitchell was obsessed with nihilism and the occult, particularly as expressed in the music of Nirvana and Manson, as well as nu-metal acts such as Slipknot. He fostered a look similar to that of the Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who was Jodi’s particular idol. Their favourite lyric was Cobain’s: “The finest day I ever had was when tomorrow never came.”
Both teenagers had a taste for the macabre. They would gather in Greyfriars Kirkyard in the centre of Edinburgh — generally regarded as one of the most eerily atmospheric graveyards in Scotland. There they would smoke cannabis — Mitchell always seemed to have a plentiful supply — among the ancient tombstones.
For some of the group that hung around Greyfriars, the surroundings whetted their appetite for horror. One of them was Sonny Devlin, from the Restalrig area of Edinburgh, who at 15 was a year older than the Dalkeith kids. By some grisly coincidence, it was June 30, 2003, the evening of Jodi’s murder, that Devlin and a younger friend chose to break into a Greyfriars tomb known as the last resting place of George “Bloody” Mackenzie, a 17th-century prosecutor of the Covenanters.
They disinterred a corpse and hacked off its head with a penknife. The boys then used the head to simulate oral sex, for the entertainment of their pals. The two boys were later arrested and became the first people in Scotland for more than a century to be convicted of “violation of a sepulchre”.
Mitchell’s friends had long been aware of his fascination for knives and the damage they could inflict.
When he was 12, Mitchell had used a knife to threaten the daughter of a family who were guests in the Mitchell house. He had climbed onto her bed, held the knife to her throat and asked for a kiss.
At an army cadet corps he attended in Bonnyrigg, a lock knife with a six-inch blade that he was carrying was confiscated by Matthew Muraska, the company leader. Mitchell would often show the other boys weapons he had improvised from blades and sticks.
A former girlfriend, Kara Van Nuil, who dated Mitchell for a few months in 2003 after meeting him at the cadets, described how he once grabbed her from behind and held a Swiss Army knife to her throat with the warning: “Don’t move, or I’ll gut you.” Just a month later, Jodi was dead.
While many fans of Manson’s music were happy simply to ally themselves with his idiosyncratic fashion sense and musical posturing, Mitchell went further. Satanic references were scrawled all over his school jotters. One read: “I offer my flesh, blood and soul to the dark lord of hell.” Another jotter had the words “Satan lives” on the front, and the sentence: “I have tasted the devil’s green blood.” On another Mitchell had written: “Evil is the way”.
Occult beliefs also emerged in Mitchell’s school work, causing alarm among teaching staff at his Catholic high school, St David’s in Dalkeith. In an essay called Pain and Suffering, prepared for a third-year English class, Mitchell wrote: “People like you need Satanic people like me to keep the balance . . . Once you shake hands with the devil you then have truly experienced life.”
After the teacher referred him to guidance staff, Mitchell wrote in another essay: “Just because I am more violent than others and cut myself, does that justify some pompous git of a teacher to refer me to a psychiatrist? Just because I have chosen to follow the teachings of Satan doesn’t mean I need psychiatric help.”
There were curiosities about the way he lived at the Mitchell family home, which, according to the wooden sign next to the front door, went by the name of “Bedlam”.
When his scarlet-painted bedroom was searched by police they found 20 bottles of his own urine under his bed. Mitchell’s parents, Corinne and Philip, split up in 1999, and his mother indulged him, giving him money and letting his girlfriends sleep in his room. She knew all about his cannabis use.
Mitchell often harmed himself. Once he scored the satanic number 666 into his arm “for a dare”. A former classmate, Michelle Tierney, later told police Mitchell had stubbed a cigarette out on his hand in front of her. He had then told her he had imagined getting stoned and killing someone. It would be “funny”, he said.
Jodi and her sister Janine had also been known to self-harm. The sisters had had a troubled childhood — their father Jimmy had committed suicide, aged 39, by hanging himself from a tree in the garden, six years before the death of his daughter. In her diary, Jodi had written: “Take the knife. All your pain can be taken by one slit, slit to your wrists. Be free, be happy, just like me.”
According to specialists in the occult, Jodi’s death bore many of the hallmarks of a ritual killing. She was naked but for a pair of socks, her wrists bound by the legs of her trousers. She was strangled, then while she was still alive her neck was slashed more than 20 times. A hole had been cut in her windpipe and the main artery in her neck had been severed almost all the way through. She had multiple injuries to her head, and wounds from her mouth to her ear. Careful cuts had been made around her eyes, as well as deep cuts on her left breast and right arm. The knife had been pushed deep into her mouth.
Few professionals involved in the case had ever witnessed anything so grim. Forensic pathologists concluded that such a murder was extremely rare, and was usually associated with somebody mentally disturbed or high on drugs.
So what was the motivation? Chief superintendent Craig Dobbie, who led the investigation, believes that Mitchell and Jodi had a furious row on the day of the murder after she discovered he was planning to take another girl on holiday. During the trial it emerged that he had been conducting a relationship with Kimberley Thomson, 15, from Perthshire, behind Jodi’s back and they had arranged to spend time together during the summer break.
“I think he told her at lunchtime that day (of her death) and she wanted to see him that night to talk about it so they arranged to meet.”
According to Dobbie’s account, they ended up in the woods between their homes. “A situation developed and she suffered a blow to her face. Her lip is cut. We later found some blood on a tree trunk and the lip bleeds quite a lot when it is cut. I think at this point she turned around and headed eastwards towards home, towards safety. But then she was struck on the head with something like the limb of a tree. Then she was strangled, her head was pulled up and her throat was cut. At that point she was dead.
“After a ‘normal’ murder, the person who committed it is then going to leg it or hide the body. But in this case the body is stripped and cut. Someone is living out a fantasy at this stage. This is something someone has wanted to do. We are now trying to understand the mind of the killer. We know the difference between right and wrong. But this person is outwith that so it is very difficult to understand why. The trial has heard potential influences such as Marilyn Manson ’s depiction of the Black Dahlia.
“Jodi’s breast was cut. Her abdomen was cut, the gash on the face was identical, there was a hole in the forehead. It’s there and we can’t avoid this simulation. This was not about sex, it was about escalating violence and the opportunity to perform injuries. We are not talking about some poor wee soul who some guy has raped. This is most horrific.”
As Jodi’s body was removed by ambulance, Mitchell is said to have sat coolly texting on his mobile. “In 85% of murder cases the attacker knows the victim, the local geography and lives within a five-mile radius,” said Dobbie. “I knew I wanted to eliminate all of Jodi’s male family members and associates, all the males who used that path and all local rough sleepers. Luke Mitchell was part of that group. A teacher from his school quickly came forward and raised concerns about the alarming writings in his jotter. That was worthy of further exploration. Was he into satan or dabbling, looking for an alternative religion or just sticking it up to his teachers? We couldn’t draw huge conclusions but were already learning that he carried knives. Then there was the incredulous discovery of the body.”
By early July, Mitchell had started to emerge as the prime suspect but the investigation was thwarted by a lack of any forensic evidence and with Mitchell’s almost unnatural resilience in the face of intense police scrutiny. What fascinated and frustrated detectives in equal measure was how a 14-year-old could commit such a frenzied attack and yet cover his tracks so efficiently.
More unsettling was the casual, contemptuous way he chatted with police dog handlers about their animals and mocked officers for allowing the bins in the street to be emptied before the search for a possible murder weapon had begun.
“He was always a very resilient, defiant and lippy lad,” said Dobbie. “He was much more confident than you would have expected. He was challenging and he liked to taunt. It was almost as if he was saying, ‘You’ll never solve this’.”
Mitchell was first questioned by police four days after Jodi’s death, yet neither the interview nor a search of his house provided any leads to tie him to the murder. It was the first indication police had that Mitchell would be no pushover. “For his age, he turned out to be a very challenging interviewee. He liked to mock,” said Dobbie. “In the interview he was confident and very controlling. He displayed a high level of intelligence.”
A month later, having exhausted other leads, police questioned Mitchell again. They knew they could only hold him for six hours and so the interview was planned in minute detail but again he proved elusive. “He was totally in control of himself and challenged the abilities and authority of the police. He had the mental ability to sit and take control of the interview and that’s incredible from someone who’s not previously been part of the criminal process or not come from a criminal family. He was not shocked or fazed or panicking. I have never seen someone so cool and calm and who needed to control the situation.”
Despite the lack of physical evidence, the police were building a circumstantial case against him. After collecting hundreds of witness statements they were able to piece together Mitchell’s movements, minute by minute, on the day of the murder and his story didn’t add up. The police report that named the teenager as the sole suspect placed particular emphasis on the fact that it was Mitchell who “discovered” Jodi’s body. It would allow prosecutors to convincingly assert that he had specialist knowledge of the murder scene.
Many psychologists are resistant to the idea that the root cause of Mitchell’s killing of Jodi was his fascination with death and the occult, as expressed through music.
Professor Cynthia McVey, of Glasgow Caledonian University, does not accept the link.
“Certainly if you watch a violent film, you learn the behaviour,” she says. “If you see someone sticking a knife in someone else you would know how to do that and potentially where to strike to do the most damage. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it would induce violent behaviour.”
Her colleague, Professor Vince Egan, agrees, dismissing Manson as “just show business”. It would be foolish, he says, to take action against a form of music or culture because of a crime such as this.
“There were lots of things going wrong in Luke’s life that could have helped contribute to his problems. He was dealing in large amounts of cannabis, carrying knives, he was clearly very alienated,” he says.
Manson’s effect on the behaviour of young people has been examined by Dr Adrian North, a psychologist at the University of Leicester. He believes the music attracts those who are already disturbed.
“We asked people when they had started self-harming and other activities associated with this music, and the answer they give was that the self-harming or whatever came first. What our research showed was that Manson’s kind of music is attractive to people like this.”
Child psychologists such as Dr Jack Boyle agree that the problem arises when the fans are already in a vulnerable state. “If you have a very disturbed individual who may be losing contact with reality because of drugs and he listens to Manson then that is a different issue. Then the music could take on a different meaning entirely and people could misinterpret Manson’s music.”
Psychologists believe more work needs to be done to examine whether the music acts to legitimise the disturbing thoughts in vulnerable youngsters’ minds, giving them a glamorous gloss or encouraging them. Manson himself believes his critics are missing the point. Asked about his fascination with serial killers he once said: “My fascination is similar to that of people stopping to look at car accidents or wanting to go to an amusement park and get on a ride that says ‘Ride at your own risk’. People love their fear, whether they realise it or not. People are afraid of death but love to get closer to it. I think that’s why there is a need for Marilyn Manson in America.”
TO SOME politicians, however, the reality that vulnerable or disturbed youngsters are drawn to music like Manson’s is enough justification for new curbs on it being sold to children. Menzies Campbell, the Lib Dem MP, yesterday called for age certification of CDs to bring them into line with computer games and films.
This weekend in Dalkeith and Midlothian there is relief that the verdict was “guilty” rather than the “not proven” some had feared. Thoughts are with Jodi’s family. Now justice has been done they must try to pick up the pieces of their lives — knowing that one piece will be missing for ever. On Friday Jodi’s mother released a poem her daughter had written.
Entitled “A Thinking Christmas”, it is a touching and childlike depiction of how some children are lucky enough to receive gifts, while others less fortunate do not. But what is likely to linger long in the family’s mind are the poem’s first two lines, which, through murder and grief, have gained an unintended resonance:
“Your fire is nice and warm, Just think — A little girl cold, wet and in the storm . . . ”
Additional reporting: Melanie Legg, Paul Lamarra, Mark Macaskill and Jason Allardyce
