EVIL Luke Mitchell last night began a life sentence for the barbaric murder of his girlfriend, Jodi Jones.
His conviction came 571 days after the 14-year-old, who loved and trusted the monster, was horribly mutilated in an orgy of satanic-style violence.
The jury at the High Court in Edinburgh took just over six hours to convict Mitchell, who was also only 14 at the time of the murder.
His mother Corinne, 45, and Jodi's mum Judith, 39, were in separate parts of the packed courtroom when the jury foreman delivered the majority verdict.
Judge Lord Nimmo Smith had warned he would not tolerate any outbursts.
But Judith could not hold back. She punched the air and screamed: 'Mrs Mitchell, go to hell.'
Other members of the Jones family shouted: 'Yes'.
Mrs Mitchell began to tremble, her hands clasped and head bowed.
Her son showed absolutely no emotion and stared straight ahead - just as he had done all through the nine-week trial.
Lord Nimmo Smith, his voice quivering with emotion, told Mitchell: 'It lies beyond any skill of mine to look into the black depths of your mind.
'I can only look at what you have done. You have been convicted of a truly evil murder, one of the most appalling crimes that any of us can remember and you would rightly be regarded as wicked.'
The sickening details of Mitchell's bloody attack beggar belief.
First, he punched Jodi several times on the face, then throttled her with his hands.
She might have been slipping into unconsciousness when he then forced her to her knees and cut her throat.
Jodi died instantly from the gaping wound, which almost severed her head.
Mitchell then stripped her and scattered her clothes and spectacles around her, using her trousers to tie her hands behind her back before mutilating her body.
He slit her eyelids, being careful not to damage her staring, lifeless eyes, and slashed her right arm twice.
He then cut her left cheek from ear to mouth and inflicted a similar wound on her left breast.
Mitchell ripped open Jodi's stomach in three places and finally thrust the knife into her mouth, piercing her tonsils.
Lord Nimmo Smith told him: 'I have no idea what led you to do what you did.
'It may have been a desire for notoriety, to achieve something grotesque. I leave that to others to fathom.
'But what you did was to subject Jodi to a horrible death - and one can only hope mercifully quick.
'There must, however, have been a time before she became unconscious when she knew that you, her boyfriend, whom she held in affection and trust, whom she went out joyfully to meet, had turned into a fiend.
'She still had her life ahead of her and you snuffed it out. She was loved by her family and you have left them bereft.
'The horror of what you have done has changed many lives and will last beyond any sentence I can pass upon you.'
The judge deferred sentence for three weeks to obtain reports but told Mitchell he would be detained without limit of time.
When the case returns to court, he will impose the punishment part of the life term - the number of years Mitchell must serve before being eligible for parole.
As Mitchell was being led from the dock, a member of the public shouted: 'Hang him.' Still the teenager didn't react.
Detective Superintendent Craig Dobbie, who led the murder probe, hugged Jodi's mother in the courtroom.
She then left the building, surrounded by 20 members of her family.
The verdict drew an unprecedented level of public interest. Outside the court in the High Street, massive crowds gathered and police were forced to cordon off the court entrance with metal barriers.
When Mrs Mitchell departed, about 90 minutes after the trial ended, she sprinted through a gauntlet of hate.
People screamed abuse at the woman who had insisted that Mitchell was at home with her when Jodi's life was so cruelly snuffed out.
She got into a waiting car and kept her head down as it sped away.
At about the same time at the rear of the building, police outriders escorted the departing prison van taking Mitchell to a young offenders' institution.
The case was the longest--running single murder trial ever held in Scotland and the jury were exposed to nightmarish images of Jodi's butchered body.
She had been going out with Mitchell for three months and the couple used Roan's Dyke path as a short-cut between her home in the Easthouses area of Dalkeith and his in Newbattle, Midlothian.
On the night she was killed, they met as usual at her end of the path and started walking along it towards his home.
At aV-shaped gap in the wall which runs parallel to the path - a point that became crucial to the prosecution case - Mitchell lured Jodi over to the secluded woodland on the other side. It was there, for some reason that remains unknown, that the horrific murder and mutilation took place.
Police have speculated that a row began because Jodi discovered Mitchell was two-timing her.
But Mitchell himself is the only person who knows for sure why he inflicted such a barbaric attack on the girl who loved him.
When he had finished inflicting the gruesome wounds, Mitchell sprinted up the woodland side of the wall to his home, only a few minutes away.
Once there, it's believed his blood-stained clothes, including a Parka jacket, were burned in the back garden.
Although neighbours described seeing a fire that night, Mrs Mitchell denied any knowledge of it.
In the wake of the murder, she was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice but that allegation was dropped by the Crown before she gave evidence.
The prosecution case hinged on two vital and compelling pieces of evidence.
Some of Jodi's relatives who were searching for her late at night said Mitchell walked straight to the gap in the wall, climbed over and found her body.
He claimed he had walked at least 40 feet past the gap before his dog began clawing at the wall at the spot where Jodi's body lay on the other side.
The relatives' evidence pointed to Mitchell being guilty because only the killer would have known exactly where her body was.
A passing motorist also identified him as being at Jodi's end of the path at the time he claimed to be at home cooking dinner.
Before the jury of eight men and seven women left the court, Lord Nimmo Smith said he felt he had got to know them well during the long trial.
He added: 'I could not have asked for a better jury. We make enormous demands onour citizens summoned for jury service.
'It has been an extremely anxious case and you have given the greatest of attention throughout and that has been obvious to everybody.
'I know there have been some horrible aspects to the case which you must have found disturbing.
'As a mark of the demands which have been made on you I will excuse you from jury service for 10 years.'
Mitchell was also convicted of supplying cannabis but prosecutor Alan Turnbull QC didn't ask for sentencing on that charge.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/MRS+MITCHELL..+GO+TO+HELL%3B+Jodi+mum%27s+cry+as+Luke+Mitchell+is+found...-a0127488521
