The Murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins

The Silent Evidence's Podcast

Billie-Jo Jenkins was born in London in 1983. She had a difficult childhood, as her parents struggled with alcohol addiction, and each spent time in prison during her childhood. Billie-Jo spent much of her childhood raising herself and her 2 younger siblings, resulting in her growing up fast and taking on many of the responsibilities that would normally fall upon the adults in a household, such as doing the laundry, cooking the meals, and making sure she and her siblings got off to school. During her parents bad spells, she and her siblings were passed around various family members, and as a result, they never developed any real sense of belonging. Social services decided to intervene, and by 1992 all 3 kids were placed into foster care.

Sion Jenkins was the deputy head teacher at Billie Joe’s school in the town of Hastings in southern England, a school at which all 4 of his biological daughters, Maya 7, Esther 9, Lottie 10 and Annie 12, also attended. Billie-Jo and Annie were friends, and Sion knew her as a feisty, sometimes aggressive girl, but a girl who was also intelligent and thoughtful, and who would thrive in the right environment. He and his wife Lois, a social worker, decided to put themselves forward as foster carers for Billie Joe. Their coincidentally shared surname suggested a union that was meant to be.

Although it took a little bit of time for her to settle into her new environment, she eventually became as much a part of the family as the other 4 children. The family were described as being a good church going family, with solid Christian values, and Billie-Jo mellowed in her new environment, in which love and affection replaced the neglect she had experienced throughout her young life.

But The Jenkin’s idyllic family life came crashing down one February afternoon in 1997 when Sion and the girls returned home to find Billie-Jo lying dead in a pool of blood in the back garden having been repeatedly battered around the head with a blunt object.

Suspects emerged and the finger would be pointed at a local mentally ill man with a plastic bag fetish, a notorious serial rapist operating in the area, an unidentified neighbourhood prowler, and at Sion Jenkins himself.

What would follow would be a series of twists and turns, disputed evidence, and collapsed trials. This is the case of the officially unsolved murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins.

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