Original subtitles

It's been described by police as one of the most violent murders

in a generation.

This would have been a bloodbath.

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She'd put up an enormous fight.

There was evidence of a struggle. The area was heavily bloodstained.

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This was probably the most shocking

and horrific murder in Scottish criminal history.

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He was a Satan-worshipping, scary, Gothic character.

This is a little village and we've got a devil worshipper.

You can just imagine the fear.

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Mrs Jones, are you happy that justice has been served today?

Dalkeith's the biggest town in this area. Originally a market town,

about eight miles from Edinburgh.

In a sort of semicircle, there's maybe half a dozen

little interlinked villages.

Some of them were mining villages, some of them

grew out of the market town of Dalkeith.

Nothing ever really happens here.

It's an ordinary place with ordinary people.

Teenagers Jodi Jones and Luke Mitchell

lived in the neighbouring villages of Easthouses and Newbattle.

They had been dating for five months.

I met her a few times, not a lot, but I met her a few times.

Typical 14-year-old.

Shy, but not to the awkward stage

and not cocky, just...a lovely, well mannered wee girl.

Jodi and Luke arrange to meet as usual after dinner.

A very, very ordinary Monday. Couldn't have been more ordinary.

As it turned out, it wasn't, was it?

Jodi doesn't arrive to meet Luke and just after 10pm,

her family realise she hasn't been seen since five o'clock.

A search party is arranged to find her.

Luke came to me in a bit of a state, saying, "Jodi's missing!"

And he borrowed the torch and off they went.

Luke meets Jodi's family at the top of Roan's Dyke Path,

a woodland short cut connecting both their homes.

Waiting for him at the top of the path were Jodi's sister Janine,

her gran Alice and Janine's boyfriend, Steven Kelly.

So, they all set off, down the path

and they're just past this break in the wall.

And Luke goes over the wall and he calls out,

"I think there's something here."

The sister's boyfriend, Steven Kelly, then goes

over to the wall and the granny -

well, she wants to see for herself what's there.

And she started screaming.

Jodi had been beaten, her hair had been pulled out by the roots,

she'd been strangled.

Her throat was cut between 12 and 20 times.

She was virtually decapitated.

REPORTER: Jodi Jones was found hidden in woodland on the other side

of a wall running alongside a path.

Tonight, there is a very real deep sense of shock that a crime

like this has happened here.

From the minute the news of the murder broke on the morning

ofJuly 1st, the hysteria,

the relentless media coverage,

the fear, the fact that something like that could happen in this area.

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There was a maniac roaming among us.

Police have staged a reconstruction of the last-known movements

of murdered teenagerJodi Jones.

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I got a call from a police officer.

They wouldn't tell me what had happened, just that they were taking

Luke and Mia, our dog, to the police station and could I meet them there?

Then we were questioned about that night and they tape

your conversations and my tape was marked "Witness"

and I noticed that Luke's tape was marked "Suspect".

It appeared that Luke Mitchell was now prime suspect.

Police believed he had led the search party to Jodi's body.

A location only her killer could have known.

It seemed 14-year-old Luke Mitchell had become the prime suspect

in his girlfriend's murder.

A police search of his house revealed more about his character.

Mitchell had really highly peculiar habits at home.

He was storing up jars of urine in his room.

He was a dope-smoking, kind of feral youth, a scary Gothic character.

They found Satanic slogans on his schooljotters.

And one of the things that made this case seem really scary,

really terrifying, was this emphasis that Luke Mitchell was

a devil worshipper, that he was into the occult.

And he was obsessed by the Black Dahlia murders.

Jodi's injuries were said to have some similarity

to those of a murder victim known as the Black Dahlia,

a young woman who had been mutilated in a ritualistic killing.

The Black Dahlia case was the killing of a young woman called

Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, in 1947.

She was found horribly mutilated.

She'd been severed in two

so the legs and the torso had been separated.

Was Mitchell inspired by the Black Dahlia?

The case against Luke Mitchell was building.

The police were closing in and the press began to name him

as the main suspect.

This stuff was being gobbled up insatiably in broadsheets

as well as tabloids.

It's got a kind of horror movie element to it.

You know, this is about a young girl who's 14

who's found brutally murdered.

And in all that crazy stuff around devil worship and drugs,

and you have a really kind of toxic brew that people

couldn't get enough of.

The press just ran amok.

They were virtually camped outside our door

with their sandwiches and flasks, flinging themselves on my car

when my car left the driveway just to get a close-up of Luke.

There was the story, which became enormous, of Luke Mitchell

being asked not to attend the funeral ofJodi Jones.

We weren't allowed to go to Jodi's funeral and I asked why,

and they said because the family were...

...frightened that we would turn into a circus.

On the day that the funeral happened, he decided to sit

down with Sky News and do an interview.

Sky came to my door and I told them, yes,

we were having a vigil forJodi.

So they asked if they could come in and to witness that.

I thought, what harm can it do? Erm...

In fact, I thought it would do better because there was a whisper

of Luke not caring a jot, and he was unemotional

and he was this, that and the other.

And I thought, well, at least if we show them this, then at least

they know we are thinking about her and we do

have emotions and whatnot. So I let them in.

And basically that horrible little man started

almost interviewing Luke.

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I just say they're being naive, not to believe everything you read

in the papers. It's trial by media.

The interview itself had a rather unpleasant sort of vibe to it.

The police and accusations, and things, I couldn't care about.

It was just...

Just want to find out what happened and who did it.

It felt strange to watch.

There was judgments made about the relationship

between Mitchell and his mother.

It added to the creepiness and the disturbing nature of the story.

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Yeah, the public turned against us with that one.

REPORTER: A 15-year-old boy has been remanded in custody

after appearing in court charged with the murder ofJodi Jones.

Luke Mitchell was finally arrested on April 14th, 2004.

Ten months after Jodi's murder.

REPORTER: At around 7:30, the police arrested the youth at his home

and brought him back here to the station.

His alibi that he was at home cooking dinner was rejected,

and his mother and older brother were arrested.

REPORTER: We understand that she's going to be charged with attempting

to pervert the course of justice in connection with this case.

The final plank in the police case against Luke Mitchell

was that his mother gave a false alibi to protect him.

Innocent or guilt,

there's something wrong with this conviction.

We have a 14-year-old boy, and despite extensive investigation,

there is no forensic evidence to link him to the crime.

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We're going to find somebody guilty, it has to be on the basis of solid

evidence beyond reasonable doubt, that hasn't happened in Luke's case.

We're talking about a person's life

and you need science to put someone in jail.

PHONE LINE RINGS

My name's John Sallens, I'm 27 years a police officer,

most of my time as a detective.

I've worked on many high-profile inquiries,

murders, terrorism, serious and organised crime,

spent most of my time in CID.

My name is Michael Neill.

I started off as a uniformed officer in the north of Glasgow,

trained as a firearms officer during that time, and then moved

into the CID arena.

Spent the majority of my career after that as a detective.

John and I now run our own private investigation company.

With a combined 50 years' experience,

the former detectives have agreed,

for the purposes of this documentary, to re-examine the case

against Luke Mitchell.

The difficulty of being asked to reinvestigate a case that's 17 years

old, and in this case, especially, where someone's been convicted

of that murder and been in prison, I suppose the biggest difficulty

forJohn and I will be to keep an open mind.

It may well be the case

that we think Luke Mitchell is guilty, but we don't know until

both of us have investigated it.

We'll start right at the beginning.

What do we know? The basics. What do we know about this case?

We know Luke Mitchell was found guilty by majority verdict.

14-year-old at the time of the murder, 16-year-old at the time of

the trial, OK? Sentenced to life with a minimum of 20 years.

We are doing things retrospectively now without the full knowledge

of what investigation team carried out.

We are just trying to conduct this investigation based on

our own experience and things that we would have done at the time.

What we've got forensically to tie him to it?

Absolutely nothing forensically. It's a circumstantial case.

You would think, considering the brutality of that murder,

that there would have been something forensically.

Luke has maintained his innocence.

He had the opportunity to say that he was guilty of this and it would

have made a difference to his length of sentence, but he's adamant that

he hasn't committed this murder. Right, OK.

Right, so, why don't we go through there and visit the crime scene?

We'll certainly go out and get a feel for it. We'll do that.

It's a lovely place as well, innit?

Nice wee quiet town.

Don't think we're far away now.

That's it there, that path there. So it is, yeah.

Let's go.

So it's just a straight track up here, all right?

I was a crime scene manager for about five years.

You've got to think like the suspect.

What can I take from this that's going to help me find out

who has committed this crime?

If you can retrieve evidence from the actual scene of the crime,

linking the accused to the crime, it doesnae get any better than that.

Is that it? It is.

Right.

We're just trying to establish exactly where the body was found.

It's hard to see. You're talking 17 years ago. It's this bit here.

See it?

If I lay down, you're going to have to put me in the position.

Hands behind my back? Eh...

Jodi had injuries to her throat area. Her throat was cut.

And she'd suffered slash marks from the right-hand side of her mouth

towards her ear, halfway towards her ear.

There was incised wounds to her forearms, her breast,

her eyelids, her abdomen area, her hands had been tied behind her back

using her own trousers.

It's... We're painting a picture here and it sounds gruesome,

but, trust me, it's horrendous the injuries Jodi received.

Absolutely horrendous.

I'll get you up.

This would have been a bloodbath.

The person that carried out this brutal murder would have

definitely had blood on them, and some defensive injuries.

Jodi put up a fight,

so there was every likelihood that he had scratches and bruises.

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Forensic teams removed more than 100 items of evidence from the murder

scene, including hair, saliva, semen and blood.

People assumed that there must have been masses of DNA that linked Luke

to the case, identified Luke as the killer.

It comes as a bit of a shock to most people to realise there was no DNA

whatsoever to link Luke to the murder, to the murder scene

or to linkJodi to Luke.

So nothing.

To find nothing in such a brutal crime scene as this,

bearing in mind that Luke Mitchell's fingernails were scraped

and they had dirt in them.

If he'd washed, that wouldn't have been the case.

We're talking about a mutilation. I mean, it's horrific.

Absolutely horrific what was taking place, so to get

out of here, get home, destroy everything, every single piece

of DNA evidence that could possibly be on your body,

I find it unbelievable.

There was DNA...

...male DNA at the scene and on the body.

But it wasn't Luke's.

Forensics found DNA on a bloodstain on Jodi's T-shirt.

DNA from Steven Kelly, Jodi's sister's boyfriend.

That implicates Steven Kelly more than it implicates Luke Mitchell

because there was nothing found from Luke Mitchell.

This was the only full DNA profile

they had from Jodi's body or her clothing.

You would have thought they'd have gone straight to his door and gone,

"Er, you have some explaining to do."

Why didn't they do that?

The explanation given by the prosecution in court

for Kelly's DNA was that Jodi had borrowed her sister

Janine's T-shirt that night.

A wider search of the area around Jodi's body revealed

Steven Kelly's DNA wasn't the only male profile found.

Forensic searches from the crime scene found DNA from Jodi's sister's

boyfriend on clothing. But another male profile was also found

in a used condom close to Jodi's body.

That condom was found to have what was described as fresh semen.

The police didn't find the owner of the condom

in the initial investigation.

He was traced three years later in 2006 when his DNA was put

through the national database in relation to a different incident.

It would seem significant in terms of the nature of the crime, given

that it was a young female and there was a condom found with semen.

I think it should have had more significance than it apparently did.

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We've only been here a short space of time.

Straight away, we've spoke about another two potential suspects.

Luke Mitchell was the only member of the search party

to be forensically examined by the police that night.

The visit here today for us is very worthwhile.

The biggest thing for us is if those four people were here and found

that body why was it only Luke Mitchell that was taken in... Yeah.

...to be interviewed?

All four of them should have been treated at that point as the same.

It just seems to be it was only Luke Mitchell.

And at this moment there doesn't seem to be a reason for that.

I sprinted up to the police station.

I asked where my child and my dog were.

I was shown into a room and...

...the sight was just horrendous.

Luke was sitting in a white forensic suit, he'd been stripped naked,

and he just had a tear streaming down his cheek

and his eyes were like saucers.

He looked like somebody had hit him right between the eyes

with a mallet. That's what he looked like. Total shock.

The police would be under pressure from an early stage to make sure

that they identified a suspect and arrested someone,

but it is possible to lose important lines of inquiry by developing

a case theory prematurely.

That early closing of minds

for the possibility of other suspects

can result in lines of inquiry not being taken, which means,

then, that to an extent the investigation becomes

an inevitability in terms of where the finger points.

An examination of the case files reveals an inconsistency

in the stories of how Jodi's body was found that night.

You've got the granny's statement, the sister's statement, the sister's

boyfriend's statement, but the first statement he made bears no

resemblance to the statement that's used at court.

In their first statement, they say that Luke's dog, Mia, was sniffing

the air and was alerted to something. Right?

Which is what Luke says as well. Which is what Luke says as well.

Which would indicate that the dog has found something and not Luke.

But then as they go on and they put the statement they use at court,

the dog didn't sniff the air and Luke went straight to the V,

and it makes it look as if Luke knew where the body was.

It makes Luke Mitchell as a suspect fit.

The defence tried to pursue that, and they read out the sister's

boyfriend's description of the dog, it's an Alsatian, it's a big dog.

Its head was above the height of the V.

That's a very clear description of the dog and how it reacted.

And he put it to the witnesses, "This is what you said."

And they said things like, "I don't remember."

And the first story that they were all telling together

just disappears.

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It'd be interesting for us to have a look through the statements and see

where they start to change.

And if there's anything been suggested to them.

Has it been suggested to them that this is what might have happened?

And they've thought, "Mm, aye, maybe."

Luke Mitchell was 14 years old when he was accused

of murdering his girlfriend.

He was named by the press within days, but not officially

charged until ten months later.

Luke was... When I say he was in the press constantly, I mean,

daily, absolutely daily.

This is five days after the murder, I believe, where we've got,

"Detectives hunting the killer of 14-year-old Jodi Jones were last

"night questioning her boyfriend and his older brother."

And Mitchell's named here.

So, you know, we have the ethical issue

right at the start of the case.

You know, should we be naming a child at this point?

Umpteen photos of him, naming him. Now, bear in mind this is pre-trial.

He had not been convicted. He hadn't even been arrested,

but he was being treated like a criminal.

So, I mean, we've got a picture of Mitchell here.

When you look back on this, it's intensely problematic

for how this case is going to be treated by a jury,

in the eyes of the public.

Why do people think he did it?

Because the police told the press and the press told the public.

You worry about how this whole narrative was being framed

by the police using the press

and what that would mean by the time it gets to court.

That's really what lies at the kind of icky heart of this.

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What intrigues me the most about this case is,

was it the prosecution of a lifestyle?

What I mean by that is Luke Mitchell's case seemed to fit in

with a narrative which was unfolding in the late 19905

and early 20005 where kids were, in effect, almost criminalised

themselves because of their attitudes or their behaviour.

The dope smoking, the violent computer games,

the listening to, you know, music that adults found offensive.

I mean, one of the strange things about this case is the whole

involvement of Marilyn Manson and the Black Dahlia story

being sucked into the narrative of the Luke Mitchell case.

Marilyn Manson was fascinated with the Black Dahlia case.

We know that he painted watercolours of the Black Dahlia victim.

And it turned out the prosecution were trying to claim that Luke

had carried out a copycat of the Dahlia murder from the Manson

paintings because he was obsessed with Marilyn Manson.

Well, if the kid's into Marilyn Manson and Marilyn Manson's

into the Black Dahlia, then, you know, was Mitchell inspired

by the Black Dahlia?

There's a little bit of a problem there or there should have been

a little bit of a problem there because there was no

evidence at all that Luke had ever seen the paintings or that he knew

anything about them.

So they took all the computers that Luke had access to -

none of them had accessed those paintings.

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The whole idea - I don't know how many times this has to come up

in cases like this -

they listen to a particular type of music and that drives

them to murder.

There is no scientific evidence to back up those claims,

wherever they've been made.

But they keep the keep wheeling that old nugget out

because it's sensational.

People don't go out and kill because of Marilyn Manson.

You can't blame Marilyn Manson for murder.

As the re-examination of the case continues, a disturbing piece

of evidence reveals another potential suspect.

We've got another person of interest that absolutely shocked me.

There's a guy by the name of Mark Kane.

He's turned up with scratches on his face.

If Luke Mitchell didn't killJodi, somebody else did.

DOG BARKS

Sound effects! SHE CHUCKLES

In April 2004, Luke Mitchell's mother, Corinne,

was arrested and charged with attempting to pervert

the course of justice.

Eight months later, all charges against her were dropped.

This was caravan sales and the shop sold caravan accessories.

I lost everything.

Started with losing my son, and there's nothing worse,

as a mother, watching your son being taken away from you when

you can't do anything.

You can try - you can try screaming, try shouting, yelling.

Not going to get you anywhere.

And especially when you know he's not done anything wrong

because he was with you.

And no-one listens. No-one listens.

Then that has a knock-on effect.

Well, after Luke was convicted, obviously this was an easy target.

And one night I got a phone call from the police - "Can you come up?"

So I was up here about three o'clock in the morning.

To be honest, all I could do was just sit in my car and just stare.

It was just mind-blowing.

Utter carnage. It wasn't just a couple of broken windows.

It was 40-odd caravans, completely trashed.

So I sold the house.

So now we've got nothing, absolutely nothing.

So I'm living here, not my ideal plan at 61 living with no

electricity, so... no running water, no toilet.

Unfortunately, now my health is suffering because of it.

No, no, you're too big to do that now. You're too big to do that now.

Yes, you are.

SHE COUGHS

In here is what used to be my office,

which is now my bedroom-cum-living room,

which I share with Michael here.

And a few... A few rodents.

Yes.

How long have you lived here?

What are we...? Coming up six years.

Luke and Mia.

An innocent little boy dragged from his home, having done nothing

wrong and then been turned into a monster by the press.

It's just...

...devastating. Completely devastating.

God, he just looks so young in that photo.

Did you ever wonder whether you could do this any more?

Oh, I'll do it. Erm...

It's taking its toll but, yeah, I'll keep doing it until he's out

where he should be. Erm...

Cos I want justice for my boy, end of.

17 years after the conviction of Luke Mitchell, evidence from 2003

reveals another potential suspect who may have been overlooked

by the police.

We've got another person of interest that absolutely shocked me.

See if you go down to number four on that list. Yeah, got it, yeah.

You'll see that there's a guy by the name of Mark Kane. Yeah.

Mark Kane has apparently turned up at his friend's house

the day after the murder.

He's turned up with scratches on his face.

I carried out a wee experiment last night.

I want to show you some pictures, right. First of all, who's that?

That's Luke Mitchell. All right.

Who's this?

I don't know who that is, but he's similar, the hairstyle

looks very similar to Luke Mitchell. That's what I thought.

That's Mark Kane. You're joking, No. How similar are they?

Right.

The whole thing rests on eyewitness evidence, driving by and identifying

a person as Luke Mitchell, and they look so similar.

During the police investigation, eyewitnesses Rosemary Walsh

ancl Lorraine Fleming said they had seen Luke Mitchell

at the end of the path leading to the murder site on the night

of Jodi's murder.

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Another wee trip through to Dalkeith again.

Scott Forbes, the man who was visited by Mark Kane the clay

after the murder, has agreed to meet with the investigators

at the crime scene.

So this will give us a feeling for it now. A proper feeling.

Nothing better than actually speaking to folk direct

rather than reading their statements.

There's the gate there and there's the entrance to the path.

Right.

So what's over here?

So that's the college directly through the trees there?

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So we've got Luke Mitchell staying down there.

We've gotJodi Jones staying up there.

We've got Mark Kane staying over there.

The closest person's obviously Mark Kane.

So you're only talking a couple of minutes to get from there to there.

Definitely.

Tell me how you know Mark Kane, Scott.

As an individual, what sort of person was he?

What makes you think that Mark Kane's involved in the murder

ofJodi Jones, then?

It's part of the same - basically the woods surround this field?

Right.

See, the day you seen him, did he have a knife on him?

Never seen it?

Do you think Mark Kane killed Jodi Jones?

Mick and I would like to have a chat with Mark Kane.

Is it possible for you to arrange a meeting that we could sit down

and talk to him about this in view of the things that you've...

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Mark Kane's dead?

Last year?

I think we need to take a look at these two moped boys.

We've got a witness who sees the moped against the wall

right at the V in the wall at the crime scene.

Sees the moped leaning against the wall but doesn't see them there.

What time was that at? 5:15.

The exact time that Jodi was murdered.

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