A girl and boy aged 15 have been sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in detention for murdering a mother and daughter as they slept in their beds.
A jury convicted the girl last month of the double murder, after she had initially pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The boy admitted both murders on the first day of the trial.
The teenagers, who cannot be named for legal reasons, stabbed and smothered Elizabeth Edwards, 49, and her daughter Katie, 13, to death at their home in Spalding, Lincolnshire, on 13 April this year. They then shared a bath, had sex and watched the Twilight vampire movies. Both were 14 at the time of the killings. They are believed to be the UK’s youngest ever double-murderers.
Sentencing both to life, Mr Justice Haddon-Cave told a packed courtroom at Nottingham crown court that the killings were “a terrible crime with few parallels in modern criminal history”.
Mr Justice Haddon-Cave said the murders had been “brutal … almost in the form of an execution.”
He told the pair: “Both of you are perfectly intelligent and knew exactly what you were doing – either of you could have backed out at any time but you were selfishly determined to do it together.” They had “revelled” in their actions, the judge added.
The judge said that people would “struggle to comprehend” how the pair could have committed the crimes. The answer he said lay in their “toxic” relationship, “a hermetically sealed, pathetic world of your own of deep, deep selfishness and immaturity”.
He said: “This has been, on any view, an exceptional, and exceptionally distressing case.”
Mr Justice Haddon-Cave said “The sentencing starting point for a murder committed by a child was 12 years’ detention.” He pointed out that their case was “substantially aggravated” by the fact that it was a double murder, that their victims were asleep and must have “suffered terribly” in the moments before their deaths.
Had they been adults, he said, “you may have been facing the whole of your lives in prison”. He added: “I sentence you as children, which you are. I sentence you in hope for you and society, rather than expectation of failure.”
Summing up the case before he delivered his verdict, the judge said the teenagers had met at school and started a relationship 12 months earlier. They had quickly become obsessed with each other, he said, and the relationship became sexual. Both had troubled upbringings, which the judge said he had considered in mitigation.
They had hatched a “half-hearted plan” to kill themselves by taking an overdose after the murders, he said, “but [the girl] decided she didn’t feel like it”. Instead, they opted to watch another Twilight film.
Karen Thompson, deputy chief crown prosecutor at CPS East Midlands, called the murders “one of the most distressing and disturbing cases that I have ever encountered”. Speaking outside the court after the sentencing, she said: “Our deepest sympathies are now with the extended family and friends of Elizabeth and Katie Edwards as they attempt to come to terms with this horrific crime.”
DCI Martin Holvey, of the East Midlands major crime unit, said: “This has been a rare and unprecedented case and everybody who has listened to the details as they have emerged throughout the trial will, I am sure, have felt the same sense of shock and disbelief.
“The planning that went into the brutal murders of Elizabeth and Katie as they slept in their beds was cold, ruthless and chilling, as was the lack of remorse shown by the two juveniles afterwards.”
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