VIDEO footage has been released of police interviewing two youths convicted of murdering Brianna Ghey in Culcheth.
Eddie Ratcliffe told police under caution that he saw co-accused Scarlett Jenkinson stabbing the 16-year-old Birchwood schoolgirl in Culcheth Linear Park on February 11 last year.
He suggested Jenkinson had invited Brianna, who he had never met before, to meet up and go to the park, and suggested an area near a bench.
He said: “I turned away to go to the toilet behind a tree. When I turned back around I saw X stabbing Brianna. Brianna was on the floor.”
Ratcliffe told detectives he then went to check if Brianna was alive and put his hands on her, which is how they came to have blood on them, and then followed Jenkinson as she ran away after seeing a member of the public nearby.
He also told police he did not see the knife and did not know what Jenkinson did with it afterwards.
The same day, Jenkinson was also questioned by detectives and claimed they were both with Brianna at the park and she was ‘very happy’ and ‘really smiley’, but then abruptly ‘stormed off to meet a boy, 17, from Manchester who was picking her up in his car’.
She was told by police her phone and messages would be analysed by them, but she denied there was anything on the device to do with Brianna’s death.
She then made ‘no comment’ to further questions.
In a follow-up interview, Ratcliffe, who is seen hugging a football to calm him, said that he thought Jenkinson was ‘messing about’ in messages about killing.
He mentioned that she had been ‘talking about murders for ages’ and ‘mentioned about being a satanist’.
When asked by a detective why he brought a knife to the scene, he said he never brought a knife with him when Brianna was stabbed.
The trial heard a hunting knife, with Brianna’s blood on it and Ratcliffe’s DNA on the handle, was found in his bedroom at his home.
He told police: “I never tried to murder anyone. It goes against everything I already know and believe, everything.
“It stops anything I want to do in the future. I just never tried to do anything like what’s happened.”
Detectives then begin to question him about the hunting knife police had seized from his bedroom.
His solicitor asks for a break, and when the interview resumes he replies ‘no comment’ to all further questions.
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