One killer called the other a “sociopath”; while her partner-in-crime said she was “not a normal person” who would “joke about dead babies”.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the girl and boy who murdered Brianna Ghey were firm friends, having met at school aged 11.
They were close enough to trust each other to keep their terrible secret: that they – two 15-year-olds with no previous convictions and apparently conventional home lives – were going to murder Brianna in February this year.
At first they planned to give her a cocaine overdose, before deciding they could not afford the drug. “Let’s just stab her. It’s more fun,” said the girl, known as X to protect her identity, in one of thousands of text messages exchanged before and after the murder.
Though she had no previous convictions, Girl X did have a history with illegal substances, having been excluded from school for giving drugs to a younger pupil.
Why she and the boy – named Y – targeted Brianna is still not clear, even after a three-week trial in which the children gave evidence and blamed each other for the stabbing in Culcheth Linear Park in Warrington.
She was not their original target. There were four boys they discussed killing instead, starting in November last year. One was a boy Y described as a “nonce”. Two others were enemies of Girl X.
Another was “M”, a rival for the affections of a girl boy Y liked – he was still trying to pluck up the courage to ask her out, even after the murder, as he realised it was almost Valentine’s Day.
The defendants seemed to take delight in plotting gruesome ways of killing the boys. “If I do end up killing M, I have a really sharp blade, the same one that Sweeney Todd uses,” wrote X, who later described Sweeney Todd as her favourite film. “If we kill M can I keep some things, a couple of teeth and an eye?” she added.
Whether X used her “really sharp blade” to kill Brianna on Saturday 11 February was never established. A chef’s knife was found in her bedroom, along with a handwritten murder plan, but only her own blood was detected on it.
Forensic analysis proved, however, that a hunting knife bought for £13.50 by Y on a skiing holiday in Bulgaria was certainly used in the murder, and that he had handled it.
Yet X’s DNA was not on the hunting knife. And while Brianna’s blood was on Y’s shoes and coat, there was not a speck of it on what Girl X was wearing. But the jury was asked not to decide whether she cleaned herself up more meticulously or did not take part in the stabbing. Instead, they had to be clear she helped to plan and carry out the “frenzied” attack.
The prosecution suggested X primed Y to be her “assassin”, noting that she had saved his phone number on one of her electronic devices as “Tesco John Wick”, a disparaging reference to a trained killer in a Hollywood film franchise. Cross-examined in court, the girl insisted she had done that not because she wanted Y to be her hitman, but because “he looked like a less good version” of the character, played by Keanu Reeves.
Brianna was introduced into their conversation on 15 December last year, as someone X was “obsessed” with. The girls had become friends after Brianna complimented her eyeliner, X later told police, and would hang out together after school.
Yet on 23 January this year, X claimed she had tried to kill Brianna with an overdose of red ibuprofen tablets. The jury was shown a message from her that read: “I gave her some today that should have been enough to kill her … but she didn’t die.”
The court heard how this may have been no fantasy. Brianna was very ill around that time, her mum told police, and vomited what she thought were grapes but may in fact have been the tablets. X denied she poisoned Brianna, and she saw the murder victim take the pills of her own accord in a supermarket toilet.
Y suggested she try a different tack, perhaps spiking a McDonald’s milkshake with sodium hydroxide.
On 26 January, the defendants decided they would first kill a boy known as E, stabbing him in what X described as “a hidden spot nobody goes to in Linear Park”. They ultimately decided it would be better to hang him. X asked whether Y had any rope, which he then searched for online before concluding it was too expensive at £12 plus postage . Asked why she wanted Y to buy rope, X told the jury she also could not afford it, and intended to use it to kill herself, not M.
The court heard they decided to murder Brianna only after they failed to lure E out using a fake Instagram account created by X in the name The Cum Lord. As Y was again searching for rope on the internet, X said: “If we can’t get E tomorrow we can kill Brianna.”
Boy Y agreed, saying: “Yeah, it’ll be easier and I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl” – one of many instances where he referred to Brianna, who was transgender, not as she but “it”.
X arranged to meet Brianna on Saturday 28 January but Brianna cancelled at the last minute because of a family meal. The defendants met up in Culcheth Linear Park anyway, in what Cheshire police viewed as something of a “dry run” for the murder two weeks later.
They left little to chance. X wrote out the plan in neat, tiny handwriting. Then, on 3 February, 10 days before the killing, she took a photo of it and sent it to the boy, known as Y. It was headed: “Saturday 11 February 2023. Victim: Brianna Ghey.”
It then read: “Meet [Y] at wooden posts 1pm. Walk down to library … bus stop. Wait until Brianna gets off bus then the 3 of us walk to linear park. Go to the pipe/tunnel area. I say code word to [Y]. He stabs her in the back as I stab her in the stomach. [Y] drags the body into the area. We both cover up the area with logs etc.”
The pair carried out the plan almost to the letter, though no one else was in earshot to hear the code word – “gay” – or see which of the teenagers stabbed her where.
In the immediate aftermath of the murder, X sent a message from Brianna’s phone to herself saying: “Girl where are you?” A clear attempt, the prosecution said, to “set up an alibi” and distance herself from the stabbing. It was X who told Brianna to only buy a single bus ticket to Culcheth that day: a “sinister” instruction which demonstrated she never intended Brianna to return home alive, the jury was told.
The teenagers did not manage to move Brianna’s body off the top path at the park, which follows an old railway line, because they were disturbed by a couple walking their dogs.
Kathryn Vize, who rang 999, said she initially thought they were being pranked by the teenagers, thinking they had left a blow-up doll in the park. But the truth was terrible: Brianna lay there face down in the mud, having been stabbed 28 times. She was bleeding to death, Y’s hunting knife having severed her jugular vein and even cut through her chest bone and ribs.
Vize saw X and Y running away. They were prepared for a quick getaway. “Make sure to wear clothes and shoes you can run in, just in case,” X texted Y as they plotted the murder.
They were then caught on various CCTV cameras and video doorbells making their way to their respective homes, where they resumed their WhatsApp conversations. When news of the murder began to spread, they shared updates, feigning ignorance and shock at the attack. But by 11pm the mask slipped when X asked Y if he had any “anxiety about getting caught”. Y replied: “Probably.” X responded: “You’re not going to get caught don’t worry. Police are shite here.”
At 7.30pm the next day both were arrested – partly, it seems, prompted by a phone call made by X’s mum to the police, after her daughter admitted she had been with Brianna shortly before she was killed. Brianna had “gone off with a lad from Manchester”, X claimed.
Shortly before their arrests, X sent a message to Y telling him that her mum had spoken to the police. She told him: “Make sure story adds up say to police everything we met Brianna at half 1 walked to linear and sat and chilled on the bench … then Brianna looked at her phone and said she was gonna meet some lad and walked off …”
This was the story X stuck to in her first police interview, before detectives confronted her with the evidence against her – notably the text messages – and she started answering “no comment”.
Boy Y gave police five full interviews, blaming X from the start. She had told him to lie about a lad from Manchester, he said, insisting the truth was that she stabbed Brianna while he had his back turned to urinate against a tree.
By the time she gave evidence, X had changed her story entirely – perhaps after seeing the forensic evidence that could not connect her to the hunting knife. Y did it while her back was turned, she insisted. She only lied to “defend” him, and also because she knew all those messages on their phones “didn’t look good”.
The jury were told that both defendants had been diagnosed with various degrees of neurodivergence since their arrests. Y had autism spectrum disorder and selective mutism, which meant he no longer spoke to anyone except his mother and was allowed to type his answers in court. Girl X had “traits” of autism and ADHD, the court heard.
Jurors were told these diagnoses could affect the way the children spoke or reacted to questioning. The girl cried a little while giving evidence as she described the aftermath of the killing. The boy showed no emotion throughout. In court, their parents watched the proceedings in horror, with Brianna’s family relegated to the public gallery and overspill court.
Ultimately, in the face of such compelling evidence, the jury decided both teenagers were lying.
They will be sentenced next month.
