Revealed: Brianna Ghey’s twisted teenage killers ‘received nearly £200,000 in legal aid’ while on trial for murdering transgender pupil

The teenage killers of schoolgirl Brianna Ghey have received nearly £200,000 of legal aid, it was revealed today.

Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe were just 15-years-old when they lured Brianna to Culcheth Linear Park near Warrington, where she was stabbed in her head, neck and back with a hunting knife.

The body of ‘timid’ Brianna was found lying face-down in the mud with 28 stab wounds after the ‘frenzied’ attack on February 11 last year.

The pair were sentenced to life with a minimum term of 22 and 20 years. They showed no emotion at Manchester Crown Court when sentences were passed last month.

Now, it has been revealed under the Freedom of Information Act that Ratcliffe’s legal team received £104,237 and Jenkinson received £82,262, making a total of £186,499.

A Legal Aid Agency spokesperson said: ‘Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe did not receive a penny of this money – it went directly to lawyers so the two could have a fair trial and be imprisoned for their crimes.’

Brianna’s twisted killers, described as a ‘danger to society’ by their victims mother, had planned the attack in great detail, with a handwritten note in Jenkinson’s room reading: ‘Saturday 11th February 2023. Victim: Brianna Ghey’.

They then desperately sought to cover their tracks, with Jenkinson posting a Snapchat tribute that called Brianna ‘such an amazing friend’ and ‘one of the best people I’ve ever met’.

On Friday morning Brianna’s mother Esther Ghey and her father Pete Spooner were pictured arriving at court, surrounded by friends and family, where they heard that Jenkinson has finally admitted she stabbed Brianna multiple times.

Brianna was hacked to death with appalling savagery, being left with ‘unsurvivable’ injuries including wounds penetrating her heart, both lungs and major blood vessels.

She had been stabbed to the head, neck, back and chest with enough force to damage the bones of her ribs, vertebrae and sternum. Her jugular vein had also been severed, causing ‘catastrophic blood loss’.

The pair were still only 16 when they stood trial at Manchester Crown Court last November, meaning neither their names nor the schools they had attended could be published. They blamed one another for the brutal killing, but shortly before Christmas jurors took less than five hours to unanimously convict them both.

The following day, trial judge Mrs Justice Yip ruled that their identities should be revealed to help the public ‘understand how children could do something so dreadful’. But after hearing the families of both killers had been subjected to death threats, she ruled that the media could not identify them until today’s sentencing hearing, enabling measures to be put in place to keep them safe.

In a packed courtroom today, Mrs Justice Yip formally stripped them of their anonymity.

It was revealed that for the first time Jenkinson has admitted stabbing Brianna ‘a number of times’, having previously blamed all of the blows on her fellow killer Ratcliffe.

The court heard she has told a forensic psychiatrist that she took the knife from him and stabbed Brianna repeatedly. She also admitted to giving Ratcliffe the ‘instruction’ to bring his hunting knife.

Jenkinson – who was obsessed with serial killers and their methods – planned to take ‘part of her flesh’ as a ‘token’, prosecutor Deanna Heer KC said.

She continued: ‘[Jenkinson]said Eddie had thrown Brianna to the floor and stabbed her three or four times then he panicked and said he did not want to kill her, so she carried on and stabbed her a number of times.

Jenkinson has written another ‘kill list’ since being locked up at a secure unit following the murder, the court heard, naming some of the people responsible for caring for her.

Experts have concluded that she does not – as previously diagnosed – suffer from ADHD or autism, but instead a form of ‘conduct dissocial disorder’. This was all evidence that ‘she knew that what she was doing was wrong’, Mrs Heer said.

The condition entails ‘limited pro-social emotions’ and represents ‘impending’ antisocial behaviour disorder, but does not constitute a mental illness, she said. Ratcliffe’s diagnosis with a ‘mild’ form of autism – made ahead of the trial – still stands, the prosecutor added.

Ahead of the judge Mrs Justice Yip deciding what minimum term the killers should spend behind bars, prosecutor Mrs Heer said she would need to consider whether the murder was motivated by ‘sadism’ and ‘hostility’ at Brianna’s transgender status in determining how many years they must serve.

She highlighted how Ratcliffe – who had never met Brianna before – used ‘disparaging’ language in his messages with Jenkinson, referring to her as ‘it’.

While Jenkinson did not use transphobic language, she said it was the prosecution case that she ‘encouraged’ Ratcliffe to kill Brianna in the knowledge that his ‘attitude’ would make it more likely that he would go ahead and stab her.

She admitted in messages to being ‘obsessed’ with Brianna and told a psychiatrist she had wanted to kill her so they would ‘always be together’.

The judge said there was ‘evidence’ of sadism and transphobia but the issue was whether this was strong enough to lead to an even longer sentence.

‘When asked how many, she answered, ‘A lot.’ She was satisfied and excited by what she was doing.’

Jenkinson told consultant Dr Richard Church that while Ratcliffe ‘didn’t like Brianna because she was trans’, her motivation was ‘quite different’, the court heard.

‘She had enjoyed thinking about the plan to kill Brianna, but her motivation for doing so was that she considered Brianna a friend and anticipated that Brianna was going to leave her and that she wanted to kill her so that she would always be with her,’ Mrs Heer added.

Meanwhile Ratcliffe has stuck to the version of events he gave in court, in which he said Jenkinson had inflicted all the stab wounds to Brianna while he was ‘urinating against a tree’.

Jenkinson has written another ‘kill list’ since being locked up at a secure unit following the murder, the court heard, naming some of the people responsible for caring for her.

Experts have concluded that she does not – as previously diagnosed – suffer from ADHD or autism, but instead a form of ‘conduct dissocial disorder’. This was all evidence that ‘she knew that what she was doing was wrong’, Mrs Heer said.

The condition entails ‘limited pro-social emotions’ and represents ‘impending’ antisocial behaviour disorder, but does not constitute a mental illness, she said. Ratcliffe’s diagnosis with a ‘mild’ form of autism – made ahead of the trial – still stands, the prosecutor added.

Ahead of the judge Mrs Justice Yip deciding what minimum term the killers should spend behind bars, prosecutor Mrs Heer said she would need to consider whether the murder was motivated by ‘sadism’ and ‘hostility’ at Brianna’s transgender status in determining how many years they must serve.

She highlighted how Ratcliffe – who had never met Brianna before – used ‘disparaging’ language in his messages with Jenkinson, referring to her as ‘it’.

While Jenkinson did not use transphobic language, she said it was the prosecution case that she ‘encouraged’ Ratcliffe to kill Brianna in the knowledge that his ‘attitude’ would make it more likely that he would go ahead and stab her.

She admitted in messages to being ‘obsessed’ with Brianna and told a psychiatrist she had wanted to kill her so they would ‘always be together’.

The judge said there was ‘evidence’ of sadism and transphobia but the issue was whether this was strong enough to lead to an even longer sentence.

In a victim impact statement read to the court, Brianna’s mother said the ‘hardest’ thing about her daughter’s ordeal was finding out that one of her killers, Jenkinson, was ‘someone we believed to be her friend’.

She described Jenkinson as: ‘Someone that we trusted. Someone that I was so happy that [Brianna] had, fearing that my child had been lonely. Not knowing that this person had been planning, to not only cause harm, but to take the life of my precious child.’

She continued: ‘All I can think about is that she would have been scared and I wasn’t there for her. She needed me to protect her, Brianna wasn’t a fighter and she must have been so terrified.

‘The day of and the days following 11th of February were and always will be the worst days of my life. I felt like someone had killed part of me, like my heart had been ripped out. I have never felt such grief and I would never wish that pain on anyone else.’

Esther Ghey also told the court Brianna had ‘plans for her future’ she will never be able to fulfill: ‘The fact that Brianna was taken from me in such a heinous way causes a pain that I struggle to describe. No parent should ever have to bury their child. She should have been around for the rest of my life.

‘Brianna had plans for her future which we will never have the chance to support her with. She wanted to go to college and study beauty therapy; she was looking forward to being old enough to have a little job like her big sister. We had also discussed her learning to drive, and she had even picked out which pink car she would like for her 18th birthday.’

She described Jenkinson and Ratcliffe as a ‘danger to society’, adding: ‘The thought of Scarlett and Eddie being released from prison absolutely horrifies me. I don’t believe that someone who is so disturbed and obsessed with murder and torture would ever be able to be rehabilitated.’

Brianna’s father Peter Spooner added: ‘Being a father of a transgender child was a difficult thing to deal with. Without people accusing me of dead naming my child, most of my memories are with my son Brett. Our memories are engraved on my heart. He was funny, cheeky and would pull faces to make me laugh. He was my baby, my only Son and his decision to transition was such a brave and confident thing to do.

‘Even though I grieved the son I lost, I was proud to gain another beautiful daughter. Her appearance changed as she blossomed into a lovely young girl, her eyes were the same, she had my eyes when I looked at her. We were forming a new relationship and these two murderers have stolen that from us both.

‘I hate how Brianna’s life has been brutally taken away from her and she has been deprived of the life she wanted to live. She never had the chance to sit her exams or go onto further education.

‘Now my world has been torn apart, justice may have been done with the guilty verdicts, but no amount of time spent in prison will be enough for these monsters.

‘I cannot call them children as that makes them sound naïve or vulnerable which they are not, they are pure evil, Brianna was the vulnerable one.

‘They were determined to kill and never gave up until they had blood on their hands, my Brianna’s blood.

‘Not an ounce of remorse has been shown from these murderers, putting myself and my family through this awful trial having to hear the details about how Brianna suffered. It is unforgivable.’

In a statement read to the court, Brianna’s stepfather Wesley Powell said: ‘Brianna had a large online following but in reality she was lonely, vulnerable and in need of a close friend.

‘Both Eddie and Scarlett knew this and preyed upon her vulnerabilities, acting as two predators stalking their prey.’

After the victim personal statements were read to the court, Mrs Justice Yip ordered a short break as she said: ‘They were very moving statements. I can feel the emotion in the courtroom.’

At court on Friday Jenkinson’s barrister, Richard Pratt KC, said the teenager now maintains – contrary to what she has told experts – that Ratcliffe was responsible for all the stab wounds.

She said she had confessed due to feeling ‘responsible’ for Brianna’s death, he said in mitigation. But she still accepted her ‘gruesome’ intentions for what she intended to do to her body but for a dog walker stumbling across the murder scene, he added.

Mr Pratt said that he was ‘bound’ to say he had ‘reservations’ about the latest change in her account.

Putting it more bluntly, Mrs Justice Yip commented that ‘quite frankly it’s impossible to believe anything she says’. She said it appeared that in making her confession, having been convicted, Jenkinson ‘wanted to paint herself in as bad a light as possible’.

The judge said that the details of her confession – in which she spoke of wanting to take a piece of Brianna’s flesh as a ‘token’ – would seem ‘completely extraordinary’ were in not for the evidence of her ‘admiration of notorious killers’.

Mr Pratt also said he acknowledged there appeared to be a substantial element of pre-meditation in the murder of Brianna Ghey.

He added Jenkinson had been diagnosed with an eating disorder and a dissocial disorder – a type of personality disorder which he said was ‘significant mitigation’.

He said no-one familiar with the murder could have avoided coming to the conclusion that ‘there must have been something wrong with her’.

The diagnosis – of conduct dissocial disorder with limited pro-social emotion – meant the tragic consequences of her actions could not be ‘fully laid at her door’, her barrister added.

When someone does not have empathy, ‘you don’t have the brake to stop behaviours that harm others because they feel wrong’, he said.

Had this diagnosis been made before the trial, he would have considered whether it amounted to a defence of diminished responsibility, Mr Pratt said.

On behalf of Ratcliffe, Richard Littler KC insisted that Jenkinson’s extensive planning placed her responsibility for the murder in ‘a completely different category’ to his client.

Addressing whether Ratcliffe was motivated by hostility to Brianna’s transgender status, he said the cruel messages he wrote about her should be seen as ‘offensive comments made by an autistic adolescent’.

Mr Littler argued that the fact Brianna was transgender should be ‘immaterial’ to the sentence he receives, saying he would have assisted Jenkinson ‘irrespective’ of whether the target was a boy or a girl.

Reading from the expert report on Jenkinson, he said the new ‘kill list’ written since her incarceration names two or three members of staff at the secure unit. By contrast, the report found Jenkinson said she felt ‘sexually excited’ at killing Brianna and this feeling ‘made her stab more times’.

He said Jenkinson told the psychiatrist that she had meant to hide Brianna’s body in a large pipe at the park.

Mr Littler added that an expert report likened elements of Ratcliffe’s functioning to that of a child of seven or eight. His autism made it harder for him to understand what others might be thinking, or what they planned to do.

The pair’s trial, which concluded days before Christmas, left the nation struggling to comprehend how two children from supportive, stable family backgrounds could have plotted and carried out the ‘savage’ and ‘vile’ killing.

After the trial judge allowed the media to name the ‘warped’ pair, it can now be revealed for the first time that Jenkinson met their ‘trusting’ victim when she was moved to the ‘inclusion unit’ for troubled children which Brianna attended.

The decision to place them together – which came after Jenkinson was excluded from her school for passing drugs to fellow pupils, leaving one in hospital – happened just weeks before Brianna’s murder.

It is now the subject of an independent safeguarding review into whether local agencies could have done more to protect her.

Jenkinson had become fascinated by serial killers including Harold Shipman and Californian ‘Night Stalker’ Richard Ramirez, filling pages of notebooks with jottings about their methods and characters.

Along with Ratcliffe, who was highly-intelligent but socially awkward, she drew up a ‘kill list’ of five potential targets before settling on slightly-built Brianna – who considered her a friend.

While in real life, Brianna suffered from anxiety, didn’t like to go out on her own and only had a small circle of friends, in the virtual world she was on the way to becoming a social media star.

Her TikTok videos showing her styling her hair or lip-synching to pop songs had earned her 30,000 followers, many of them fellow transgender teenagers who saw her as an inspiration.

According to her mother, Brianna was ‘larger than life’, ‘funny and witty’ and ‘usually fearless’.

Brianna’s headteacher described her as ‘iconic’, adding: ‘She was such a huge character in school. Everyone knew who she was and losing her has hit everybody so hard.’

Her brutal and apparently inexplicable killing – on a Saturday afternoon, in a former railway cutting popular with dog walkers – caused waves of outrage and revulsion far beyond her home town of Warrington.

Prosecutors argued Ratcliffe and Jenkinson were ‘in it together’ from start to finish, right from planning the attack to attempting to cover their tracks afterwards.

In the days that followed, a string of vigils were held across the globe for people to come together and express their grief.

Cheshire Police faced public pressure to treat Brianna’s brutal killing as a hate crime. But within 24 hours, detectives had been told about Jenkinson, a local girl who Brianna regarded as a good friend.

Ratcliffe’s arrest soon followed as both had been seen with her in the village of Culcheth that afternoon. Both intelligent and ‘high functioning’, her killers – neither of whom had been in trouble with police before – secretly shared a fascination for violence, torture and murder.

Messages recovered from Jenkinson’s phone revealed she and Ratcliffe had drawn up a ‘kill list’ naming five teenagers they wanted to murder over the preceding weeks.

While Jenkinson was ‘obsessed’ with Brianna, Ratcliffe had never met her before the day of the murder.

His messages were littered with cruel references to Brianna as ‘it’ and dehumanising language.

After a teenage boy they wanted to kill ‘smelt a rat’, the WhatsApp chats showed how they turned their attention to Brianna.

Ratcliffe sent a message to Jenkinson saying ‘yeah, it’ll be easier and I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl’.

Their trial was told it was ‘difficult to fathom’ how two children could carry out such a disturbing crime. After being caught, the killers blamed each other.

But the prosecution successfully argued it was a case of joint enterprise.

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