A former best pal of “devious” Jemma Mitchell – who killed and decapitated her friend – has told how she used to stay at her flat until she saw she was “a snake”. Keren Gjuretek told the Sunday Mirror: “It’s awful to think that could have been me.”
Keren, 20, was close to Mitchell for more than two years after the pair met at a Christian conference in London in 2018. She cut ties with Mitchell, 38, after realising she had been secretly chatting up her boyfriend.
Keren said: “We were quite close friends, I would say best friends. We would call and talk every day. We ended our friendship because she tried to steal my boyfriend. She’s a nice person but there was something extremely weird about her.
“I’m just thinking about the times I was alone with her… I slept at her apartment. It’s absolutely awful to think that could have been me.”
Mitchell was sentenced on Friday to a minimum of 34 years after being found guilty at the Old Bailey of murdering and decapitating 67-year-old Mee Kuen Chong in June last year.
In the first sentencing of a murderer in a British court to be shown on TV, Judge Richard Marks KC called Mitchell “extremely devious” and said her crime was “profoundly shocking”.
Two weeks after killing Mee Kuen, Mitchell drove nearly 200 miles to Salcombe in Devon to dispose of her badly decomposed body in woodland. It was found by holidaymakers. Her head was discovered nearby a few days later.
A trained osteopath and self-styled “healer”, Australian-born Mitchell once boasted online of award-winning skills in human dissection. The jury saw CCTV of her dragging a suitcase thought to have contained the body of devout Christian Mee Kuen.
The prosecution said Mitchell, who befriended divorcee Mee Kuen at a church group, murdered her and then forged her will to claim most of her £700,000 estate.
Keren, now a full-time mum living in Dublin with her three-month-old baby, said: “To be honest I’m not surprised, I had an odd feeling about her. She creeped me out, the way she’d ask questions.
“She was constantly going behind my back but extremely sweet to my face – she was like a snake. It just shows you never know your friends.”
