Thirteen-year-old Billie-Jo Jenkins had been in foster care since the age of two. In 1992, she was placed with Sion and Lois Jenkins, a couple in their late twenties who lived in a large Victorian house at 11 Mews Road in the Old Town area of Hastings. Sion was a deputy head teacher at a local school, and Lois worked in education. The couple had two young daughters of their own and later fostered two more children.
Billie-Jo was described as bright, artistic, and spirited. She enjoyed painting, playing the clarinet, and spending time with her foster family. Despite her troubled early years, she appeared to have settled well into the Jenkins household.
On February 15th, 1997, a cold Saturday, the Jenkins family spent the morning at a nearby DIY store. Around lunchtime, Sion Jenkins returned home with Billie-Jo and one of the younger foster children, while Lois remained in town with the other two girls.
Shortly after arriving home, Sion sent Billie-Jo into the garden to clean a pair of patio doors with white spirit. He then drove to the nearby sports center to collect Lois and the other children.
When Sion returned with the rest of the family around three fifteen p.m., he found Billie-Jo lying on her back in the garden near the patio doors. She had suffered catastrophic head injuries. A metal tent peg was lying nearby, later identified as the murder weapon. She was still alive when paramedics arrived but died at the hospital that evening.
The murder scene was chaotic. The patio doors had been recently painted, and the area was covered in white spirit. Billie-Jo had been struck seven times in the head with the tent peg, causing massive skull fractures and brain injury.
Suspicion quickly fell on Sion Jenkins. Police noted inconsistencies in his initial account of his movements and the fact that he had been the last person to see Billie-Jo alive. Crucially, he had been the first to find her body.
In April 1997, Sion Jenkins was arrested and charged with murder. The prosecution argued that he had killed Billie-Jo in a moment of rage, possibly after an argument, and then attempted to stage the scene.
In July 1998, after a five-week trial at Lewes Crown Court, Sion Jenkins was convicted of murder by a majority verdict of 10–2. The jury accepted the prosecution’s case that Jenkins had killed Billie-Jo with the tent peg and then driven away to establish an alibi. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty years.
Jenkins maintained his innocence from the outset. His legal team argued that the prosecution’s key forensic evidence—alleged blood spatter on his clothing—was unreliable.
The prosecution claimed that more than 200 tiny blood spots on Jenkins’s clothing were high-velocity impact spatter, consistent with him having struck Billie-Jo. However, defense experts, including renowned forensic scientist Dr. Michael Baden and later Professor Jason Payne-James, argued that the spots were more likely to have been caused by Billie-Jo exhaling blood through her nose as she lay dying, a phenomenon known as “expirated blood spatter.”
In 2004, the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial, citing concerns about the reliability of the blood spatter evidence. In 2005, after a second trial ended in a hung jury, a third trial in 2006 again resulted in a hung jury.
In February 2007, the Court of Appeal quashed Sion Jenkins’s conviction, ruling that the blood spatter evidence was no longer safe to rely upon. He was released on bail after serving nearly ten years in prison.
Sion Jenkins was formally acquitted in 2007 when the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to seek a fourth trial. He had spent almost a decade in prison and lost his career, marriage, and reputation.
In the years since, several individuals have been investigated or named as persons of interest. These include a local man known to the family who had previously been arrested on unrelated sexual offences; a homeless man who had been seen in the area; and various transient figures who frequented the Old Town. None of these lines of inquiry produced sufficient evidence to bring charges, however.
More than a quarter of a century later, the crime remains unsolved, and the true killer has never been brought to justice.
Crime Immemorial 