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00:10I'm David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology, and for over 30 years, I've
00:17investigated the phenomenon of murder and what it is that might motivate someone to kill.
00:27Every murder case is different, but time and again, a deadly pattern emerges of warning
00:34signs and red flags.
00:40In this new series, I investigate some of the UK's most harrowing murder cases to understand
00:48how and why these terrible crimes occur.
00:54This is Murder UK.
01:12Jaden Parkinson was born in 1996 in Folkestone, a coastal town in the south of England.
01:22From a young age, she had energy, determination, and was full of questions.
01:36She was proper cute.
01:40She'd follow me everywhere, everything was what, why, when, ow.
01:44You couldn't shut her up from the time she got up, to the time she went to bed, to be
01:47fair,
01:48all the way through her life.
01:51The youngest of three children, Jaden was born to parents who had an increasingly difficult
01:57relationship.
01:58That means Jaden is only seven years old when her parents separated.
02:08He got custody of the youngest, which is her brother and her.
02:17When her parents split, Jaden and her brother went to live with her dad in Lancashire.
02:24But she was still close to her mum, Samantha, who lived in Didcot in Oxfordshire, and later
02:30returned to her care full-time.
02:35That then started the ball rolling with courts, and yeah, I was allowed to keep her.
02:42Now, with full custody of Jaden, and a chance to make a fresh start, Sam enrolls her daughter
02:48in Didcot Girls' School just a few miles away.
02:54I met her first of all at school.
02:58She was very loud, funny, and I said, oh, what's your name?
03:05And she was like, I'm Jaden, with a little smile.
03:10She was a very girly girl like me.
03:12I think that's why we got on so well, because we loved hair, makeup, hair dye.
03:16She'd always be smelling the perfumes and spraying them all over herself, picking up the
03:21makeup.
03:23She was the only real good best friend that I had.
03:29Jaden was a headstrong kid.
03:31She wasn't balancing coming forwards either.
03:33She would tell you how it is.
03:36She had loads of friends, quite an eclectic mix.
03:41And then she met Ben.
03:44And it all went downhill from then.
03:48Ben Blakely is the older brother of a friend of Jaden's.
03:53He's a bin man, five years her senior, and with a history of drug use and petty criminality.
04:02I think it was when we was at the park one day.
04:06She says, I like this older guy.
04:10I was like, okay, what's his name?
04:13Like, what's he like?
04:15And then she told me Ben Blakely.
04:18And I must have been silent for about five minutes, because I didn't know what to say.
04:24And then I was like begging her.
04:27I was like, please, Jaden, please do not go there with him.
04:33Ben's family lived around the corner.
04:36All her mates lived in that vicinity sort of thing.
04:40The first time I see Ben, he rode past on a bike and he called her Jade.
04:45I was like, who's that?
04:47And she was like, don't worry about it, it's some rat.
04:49I don't know what made Jaden fancy him.
04:52I really don't, because there's nothing much to look at.
04:58There was things on the internet.
05:01The police were looking for a group that were on a train.
05:06They bottled some kid because the lad had said something to his cousin, a female girl.
05:13So he bottled him.
05:16I suppose Jaden liked the idea of him being a bad boy.
05:22And I was trying to tell her, like, how bad news he was.
05:27Jaden is just 15.
05:30An age when emotional maturity is still developing.
05:35And despite warnings, she begins dating Blakely,
05:38a man five years older who's already showing patterns of coercive control.
05:47She was a child.
05:49He was 20 years old, five years older than her.
05:53He had had relationships before.
05:56So I can imagine it was an incredibly exciting but difficult time for her.
06:03She was absolutely besotted with him.
06:05She'd do anything for him.
06:08But it isn't long before the psychological impact begins to show.
06:14Early indications of coercive control starting to emerge.
06:20She started wearing make-up.
06:21She started wearing nice clothes.
06:24He literally drained her personality completely.
06:31When we think about the red flags that were definitely there.
06:35Definitely there.
06:36Right from the beginning of this relationship.
06:39You know, we have to look at it in context.
06:41So, Jaden was just a child.
06:44She had quite a chaotic life herself.
06:48You know, lots of different things were happening for Jaden.
06:51And not all of it was good.
06:55We went to the shop once in the town.
06:58Clothes shopping.
07:01And I said, oh, look at this top.
07:03And the first thing she took around and said to me was,
07:05Ben won't like me wearing that.
07:08He can't tell you what to do.
07:10Like, you're your own person, Jaden.
07:13If you want to wear that top, you wear it.
07:17And she didn't buy it.
07:19She said, he won't like me wearing that.
07:21It's not the right top.
07:22And that's when it finally dropped.
07:24I was like, he's controlling her.
07:31When a teenage girl with quite a chaotic family background
07:36meets an older man who's cunning and conning,
07:41the risks there are quite enormous.
07:44Because what starts out as infatuation on the part of the teenage girl
07:49can quite quickly become a form of psychological entrapment.
07:54And the older partner in particular
07:57will begin to exploit the imbalance between them
08:02within that relationship.
08:08I was in the flat and she come up
08:11and she had a big mark on her face.
08:12I was like, what's happened to you?
08:14She was like, nothing.
08:15I was like, get here.
08:17And she was like, nothing.
08:18I was like, who's punched you?
08:19Ben.
08:22I went running down the stairs.
08:24You touch my daughter again.
08:26You'll breathe the day you ever met my family, trust me.
08:31It was the worst move I could have ever done
08:33because that made him then isolate her from me.
08:39I don't think you ever become used to
08:42or accepting of violence towards you,
08:47especially sadistic violence.
08:50I said to her, if he's hitting you, this isn't normal.
08:55This is not love.
08:57And she just said, but I love him and he doesn't mean to do it to me.
09:02He just gets angry sometimes.
09:04I said, that's not love, Jayden.
09:06I said, he's controlling you and he doesn't want you to have anyone.
09:09He wants you all to himself.
09:12Blakely's behaviour follows a classic pattern of coercive control.
09:18His threats escalate into acts of psychological terror
09:23designed to keep her compliant and afraid.
09:29We had a pregnant cat.
09:31Good lucky.
09:32It transpired that he killed the cat and showed her
09:35and said, if you don't behave, this is what's going to happen.
09:40In abusive relationships like this,
09:44coercive and controlling relationships,
09:47the victim will often adjust their behaviour
09:50to prevent them being harmed any further.
09:54And often, adjusting their behaviour will mean they are isolated
09:58from their family and friends,
10:00and that makes it much more difficult for the family to intervene
10:03to try and help the person within that relationship.
10:15I wanted to shake her.
10:17I wanted to shake some sense into her.
10:20We fought over him.
10:23That's why I put my foot down and said,
10:25I'm not having this no more.
10:27She was stealing out of my flat,
10:29taking things and going and selling it for his drug debts
10:32or to get him drugs.
10:35And you could visibly see her getting thinner and thinner
10:38and more dowdy, more...
10:41Not her.
10:44He's just had, I don't know, some hold over her.
10:58After a series of confrontations with her mother
11:02about her relationship with Blakely,
11:05Jayden moves out of her mother's flat
11:07and in November 2013 moves into a hostel in Oxford
11:13for troubled teens.
11:14That hostel has since closed down.
11:17But a month later, in December 2013,
11:21Jayden meets up with Blakely
11:23and does not return to the hostel.
11:30I didn't know she was missing until seven o'clock that morning.
11:34When one foot forward rung me saying,
11:36have you got Jayden with you?
11:38I was like, no.
11:40I dropped her off with you yesterday.
11:42I've not seen her since.
11:45Sam phoned me and said, have you heard from Jayden?
11:48I was like, no.
11:49I went onto Facebook to see if anyone had seen or heard from her.
11:54But nothing.
11:5517-year-old Jayden is missing
11:58and family and hostel staff are seriously concerned for her safety.
12:02Police weren't listening to me.
12:04I gave them every phone number that I could think of,
12:07every address.
12:09Me and her, to them, were just another pain in the backside.
12:14That kept ringing and she's just another annoying runaway.
12:19Until Chris would come back to work.
12:28So I was the head of the Major Crime Unit at the time for Thames Valley Police.
12:32And I was asked to review the missing person case.
12:36It's not that uncommon for cases involving troubled teens
12:41to be seen as low risk.
12:45Jayden's case was viewed simply as her being a runaway as opposed to someone who was,
12:52well, in immediate danger.
12:54And a week passes before there's a full missing persons investigation launched.
13:01As an investigator, you're coming up with what we'd call hypotheses,
13:04and looking at what are the likely possibilities of what's happened to Jayden.
13:08And I had three.
13:09One was that she'd gone missing of her own will and she didn't want to be found.
13:13The second one was that she had been taken, abducted, seriously harmed by somebody.
13:18And the third one was that she had been injured and hadn't been found and wasn't able to get any
13:23help.
13:30CCTV shows Jayden leaving the hostel on Tuesday the 3rd of December with Ben Blakely and then with him at
13:40Oxford Station.
13:41For the police, it's a vital clue and a chilling moment when she's clearly under his control while she's still
13:51being seen as just a missing teenager.
14:02There was CCTV footage of Jayden with Ben Blakely.
14:06They went to Oxford Railway Station that afternoon and they were seeing them to get on a train, go through
14:11the barriers, and they got a train to Getcock.
14:14Jayden can be seen walking nervously a few paces behind Blakely.
14:22The last CCTV that we had of Jayden with Ben was that afternoon when they got to Didcot and walked
14:31to the station and then that's the last time she was seen alive.
14:43Seven days after Jayden is last seen on CCTV leaving Didcot Station with Ben Blakely, police formally escalate the case.
14:52She hadn't been seen or heard of for a week, so I was very concerned.
14:56It's very difficult for a young person or an adult to go missing without leaving any sort of what the
15:02police would call a footprint.
15:03So that might be a financial footprint or contact with their friends, social media, all these sorts of things.
15:10You would expect to see something in that time and there was nothing.
15:14As time went on, you know, it became more unlikely that she was going to be found alive, so it
15:20was about finding her and finding out what happened to her as quickly as we could.
15:27Detectives comb CCTV to piece together the timeline.
15:32Six hours after Jayden is last seen with Blakely, he's filmed alone, a gap that raises serious alarm.
15:44The second trawl of CCTV showed Ben Blakely coming back from Didcot, through Didcot Railway Station, um, later that evening.
15:53Very concerningly, he was on his own. She wasn't with him.
15:59We started to build up a picture of Ben Blakely, so yes, he had previous convictions for theft, violence.
16:05There had been previous incidents with ex-partners.
16:08But more importantly, it was about how he'd been behaving towards Jayden.
16:12By now, a clear picture is emerging.
16:17Blakely's control over Jayden didn't stop when she moved into the hostel.
16:22In fact, as her friend Kaylee knew all too well, the coercion continued behind closed doors.
16:31She said to me, Ben's been really nasty to me.
16:37I was like, what do you mean?
16:39He's trying to even control me whilst I'm here at the hostel.
16:43He just said, I can't go out of my room. I have to pee in a bucket.
16:47I have to do as I'm told.
16:49And my first reaction to that was, I just grabbed her and I just hugged her and she cried and
16:55I cried.
16:56We cried together.
17:00As the investigation deepens, detectives begin to understand the extent of Blakely's coercive control.
17:08He had made Jayden's life intolerable.
17:16Blakely had a history of violence.
17:19He had a history of violence in his relationships.
17:22He had a history of control.
17:25And he had a history of not responding well to rejection.
17:32Investigators uncover that early in their relationship, Blakely introduced another form of abuse.
17:40Image-based sexual blackmail.
17:45She had reported to the police that he had taken indecent images of her coming out of the shower.
17:51And he had threatened to distribute those on social media.
17:55So that's a matter that was already being investigated by the police.
18:01That must have been terrifying.
18:04Terrifying for her.
18:05Because, you know, you put pictures on social media, they're there forever.
18:10Forever.
18:11And if she's named, if people recognise her, how do you live with that?
18:18He kept lots of things in the, you know, in his bag of tricks to make sure she stayed in
18:25his control.
18:31By the time Jayden is living in the hostel, she's desperate to escape Blakely's control.
18:38And as a criminologist, I know that's both a turning point and also the time in which the victim is
18:46at the greatest risk from the partner that she's trying to flee from.
18:53Some call this the separation-instigated violence phase, when an abuser's loss of control can trigger their most extreme and
19:03dangerous behaviour.
19:04For someone like Blakely, that looming rejection would have felt intolerable.
19:11The police also later discover that just as she's trying to leave Blakely, Jayden makes an important discovery.
19:21I woke up to about 50 missed calls.
19:24Mum, Mum, you've got to ring me. Please ring me.
19:27I've got something really important to tell you.
19:30I went and met her on the 3rd.
19:32Me and her uncle.
19:35Um, outside one foot forward.
19:37We went and took her into the pub.
19:41I've got something to tell you.
19:43I'm pregnant.
19:44I was like...
19:47What?
19:48So I'm pregnant. I was like, whose is it?
19:50She's like, who do you think it is?
19:52I was like...
19:54Whoa.
19:57She was adamant that she wanted to keep it.
20:00She was glowing. She was absolutely chuffed.
20:06I drop her off at one foot forward.
20:12I never saw her again.
20:18Although Jayden seemed genuinely happy about the pregnancy, detectives learn she had made a firm decision.
20:26She no longer wanted Ben in her life.
20:30This act of independence can be a dangerous trigger for controlling partners,
20:36who view rejection as a direct threat to their power.
20:41She was adamant at that point, and she didn't want to be with Ben.
20:49Days into the investigation, police learn that Jayden had told Blakely she was pregnant, and that she no longer wanted
20:57him in her life.
21:00His response was immediate and terrifying.
21:05Prior to her going missing, we know from the staff at One Foot Forward, he'd been very aggressive to her
21:10down at the phone.
21:11He'd threatened her.
21:13I believe that after I left her, she rung Ben in front of One Foot Forward staff, telling him she
21:22was pregnant.
21:24He threatened to chuck her off a bridge to kill her and it.
21:31Despite the danger, Jayden wants to speak to Blakely about the pregnancy, perhaps believing that openness might calm the situation.
21:42Young victims often feel morally obliged to do the right thing.
21:49So much pressure is put on young women to take this kind of moral high ground when they get pregnant.
21:59You've got to tell him, you've got to give him choice, you've got to, you know, include this father.
22:07He had a history of getting girls pregnant and then behaving viciously after he finds out that they're pregnant.
22:16Jayden couldn't have known that.
22:19So it was quite a dangerous thing for her to do, to tell him, but she probably thought she was
22:25doing the right thing.
22:30Within 48 hours of the police's full search, eight days after Jayden vanished, there's still no sign she's alive.
22:40But CCTV confirms Blakely was with her the day she disappeared.
22:47Detectives now turn to the public for answers.
22:55So my appeal to the public of Didco is if you saw Jayden on her own or in company with
23:01anybody else after that date, please come forward and let us know.
23:06It will be really important and significant in this inquiry.
23:10Despite the media coverage, cases like this rarely generate solid leads.
23:16Public appeals often go unanswered or unverified.
23:22But this time, one call changes everything.
23:27The first big breakthrough was a taxi driver.
23:29So a taxi driver contacted the inquiry team and said that he picked up a mail from a rural location
23:36in Didcot in the early hours of the morning in the timeframe that we were talking about.
23:43And this guy had a suitcase.
23:45He helped put the suitcase into the car.
23:48But he was now very concerned, of course, because of all of the media attention.
23:52He started to wonder if there was something more sinister to that suitcase.
23:57The taxi driver reports picking up a man matching Blakely's description at 1am on December the 10th.
24:07He's carrying a suitcase and then he's dropped off in a remote location outside East Hagborn.
24:15When we looked at who made the telephone call, it was Ben Blakely's phone that had made that call. He'd
24:21used a false name.
24:22So I was now convinced that Ben Blakely had made that call to the taxi driver and it was Ben
24:28Blakely that was in that vehicle.
24:32Eight days after Jaden Parkinson disappears, detectives now have evidence of classic post-crime behaviour from Blakely.
24:42Strategic movement, concealment and deliberate secrecy.
24:47Police have sufficient grounds to arrest him in connection with her disappearance.
25:03You were the last person to be seen with her alive. Do you have any information as to her whereabouts?
25:10If I did, then I did it.
25:13The CCTV confirms Jaden was last seen with Blakely.
25:19There's a taxi driver that links him to a late night journey and he's carrying a suitcase.
25:27It's enough to deeply alarm detectives and Jaden's mother.
25:34When they arrested him, we were told we'd done a check system for proof of life.
25:42And all ten checks have come back with nothing.
25:48And that I was to expect the worst, but hope for the best.
25:57Blakely's arrest marks only the beginning.
26:01Detectives are now focused on building a forensic picture,
26:05determining whether Jaden is dead and, crucially, if she is where her body might be.
26:20We had 23 crime scenes in the end.
26:23So these are all places where we believed at some point Ben and Jaden had been,
26:28and areas where there could be significant evidence.
26:32One of those places was called the Spooky Barn,
26:36which is an old dilapidated barn in a field where Ben and Jaden had previously met.
26:44I asked for the police body recovery dogs to go into the barn,
26:49and they indicated very clearly there had been a body inside the barn,
26:55and just outside there was a coffee shop serviette outside on the ground.
27:02The dog indicated on that that there was traces of a dead body on the serviette.
27:09The case against Blakely is gaining momentum.
27:13As police carry out door-to-door inquiries near the isolated barn,
27:18they make a discovery.
27:21One of those addresses that the officer called on
27:26was transpired to be Ben Blakely's grandparents.
27:31And we had released to the media the fact we were looking for any witnesses.
27:36He'd seen a guy in the early hours of the morning with a blue suitcase.
27:39And when they knocked on the door, his grandmother said,
27:43his first words were, have you come about the suitcase?
27:47Eleven days after Jaden vanishes, police searched the home of Blakely's grandmother,
27:53just minutes from the farm where they believe Jaden may have been killed.
27:58There was a suitcase in a shed that she said Ben had collected from her a few days before.
28:04He'd come in in a rush saying, I need a suitcase.
28:07He'd emptied the contents out on the floor and just taken the suitcase.
28:11He had then returned two or three days later with a suitcase and thrown it into her shed.
28:19It was covered in mud.
28:21I now believe that was the blue suitcase that the taxi driver had described that man carrying when he picked
28:28him up.
28:30It was then sent away to be examined forensically at the laboratory.
28:36Blakely still refuses to talk to detectives.
28:39But for them, silence from a suspect can often say a lot.
28:44The grandparents also described the fact that spades were missing from the house and they'd been returned.
28:52They were also covered in this thick clay.
28:55Two garden spades are recovered from Blakely's grandparents' shed and both are covered in thick clay.
29:03We'd also found some witnesses who described both Ben and his brother Jake in the time period we were interested
29:13in on bikes covered in mud.
29:17Witnesses placed both Ben and his younger brother Jake together covered in mud and riding bikes in the crucial window
29:26of time.
29:27The focus of the investigation suddenly widens.
29:31For detectives, the idea of Jake being involved is unsettling.
29:37He'd once been friendly with Jaden.
29:41He was at the boys' school, so the girls that she was hanging around with knew of Jake.
29:46Because to where Ben went most of the time, Jake was off with him.
29:50Them two were thick as Eves.
29:53Jake was mild-mannered and softly spoken.
29:58He was in fact almost the mirror opposite of his far more domineering brother.
30:04But in very controlling dynamics like this, often the weaker personality can be drawn to the more dominant figure.
30:14That dominant, submissive dynamic and imbalance can create a coercive pull.
30:22The less assertive person often follows the lead, even when they sense it's wrong.
30:31There was a lot of publicity, of course, by this time.
30:33Everybody knew that Ben had been arrested.
30:35And then we received a telephone call saying, I think he's got clothing.
30:38He's asked me to wash it.
30:39He's tried to dump some of it.
30:42Jake was in the background of that call, begging her not to call the police.
30:46And the police attended and I instructed that he was to be arrested at that point.
30:52The tipster tells police Jake tried to get rid of muddy clothing, asking someone to wash or dump it.
31:00With Jake heard pleading in the background, detectives move quickly.
31:06Both brothers are now in custody.
31:10So Ben Blakely was charged with murder.
31:13And his brother was charged with murder and perverting the course of justice.
31:24Detectives still don't know where Jayden's body is.
31:28The working theory, she was killed, placed in a suitcase taken by taxi and buried on the outskirts of Didcot.
31:37But with so much open countryside, finding her feels like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
31:47I then asked the RAF to do some aerial photography, which they did, because statistically people that are murdered are
31:54either buried, put in water or set on fire.
31:57In this case, because we had the soil and the suitcase, I believe she'd been buried.
32:01So they did overhead photography and identified ten areas where there had been significant soil moved in a relatively short
32:12space of time.
32:13And they were areas of interest now.
32:17After ten days of searching, the police find Jayden's body hurriedly hidden in a shallow grave.
32:26It's a discovery that confirms her loved one's worst fears.
32:33We're whittling it down to probably five or six areas.
32:38The last area that we were concerned about, if you like, was the church in Didcot, because that was one
32:44area where there was evidence of a grave that looked like somebody had walked around it.
32:48But, of course, you would probably expect that to be the case in a graveyard.
32:54The footprints surrounding the grave in All Saints Church Cemetery on the outskirts of Didcot, initially dismissed as nothing unusual,
33:04suddenly take on new meaning.
33:07Jake Blakely begins talking to police.
33:12Jake then came forward and said he believed that the body of Jayden was in his uncle's grave.
33:2815 days after Jayden disappeared, the police received chilling news.
33:34Her body may be buried in a grave, but not just any grave, but a grave linked to Blakely's uncle.
33:43And the cemetery was quickly sealed as a crime scene.
33:49It was very difficult because it was about protecting the crime scene, but also respecting the fact that that's where
33:56people were buried.
33:57Sealed off, detectives must proceed with extreme care, preserving potential forensic evidence that could tie the Blakely brothers directly to
34:09the burial.
34:10In cases like this, even the smallest trace can prove critical.
34:17So the tent is erected, the forensic archaeologists will guide the search teams into the removal of the soil.
34:23Then the excavation starts taking place.
34:27It didn't take long before, as they were excavating, they started to see the flesh and then it became evident
34:36there was a body that had been dumped into the grave.
34:42After ten days of searching, the police find Jayden's body hurriedly hidden in a shallow grave.
34:50It's a discovery that confirms her loved one's worst fears.
34:59I remember Sam finding me telling me they found Hayden's body.
35:12And I just said, being serious.
35:17And I remember I just cried and cried and cried.
35:23And when I got off the phone, I just screamed and I fell to the floor.
35:29When they found her, she had a vest on, that was it.
35:33He'd taken all her jewellery, all her clothes, a bra because it had met underwire, so that she couldn't be
35:42found by metal detectors.
35:46We never found Jayden's clothing, but he tied her legs up behind her back with her underwear.
35:55He'd done that to put her in the suitcase and then he'd literally thrown her body out of the suitcase
35:59to cover up her body.
36:02Jayden's body stripped, bound, and buried in a shallow grave within a graveyard kind of tells us a great deal,
36:12I think, about Blakely's psychology.
36:16You know, this isn't about concealing the body in plain sight.
36:20This is about trying to order what has been a disordered situation.
36:26This is about trying to bring out of chaos some semblance, as he would see it, of behaving appropriately.
36:37In criminological terms, this is sometimes called staging, where the killer arranges the scene not just to mislead,
36:47but to reclaim a sense of control over what's just happened.
36:57She was subject to a forensic post-mortem examination.
37:00The body is very valuable forensically, and obviously a massive part in determining how that person lost their life,
37:09you know, what was the cause of death, and then the linkage between those factors to the suspect.
37:18I had to go and identify her body on the 20th of December, and it was at 11 o'clock
37:23in the morning.
37:25I remember sitting outside this green room, and as I walked through the door, I remember her being there.
37:30I could see her out the corner of my eye.
37:33And we walked around like that, and I sat down, and I couldn't look up at her.
37:42And they identified her because we both got the same tattoo.
37:46Jayden's body shows signs of a brutal attack.
37:50You could see the bruise on the side of her head, where he'd stomped on her head.
37:55She had marks around her neck, and it turned out that he'd straggled her three times,
38:00two times he'd brought her around, the third time she didn't come round.
38:02She didn't come round.
38:03She was dead.
38:06The results of the post-mortem that she had suffocated, she had marks around her neck,
38:13which were consistent with somebody grabbing her around the throat,
38:16and the pathologist believed that she'd been asphyxiated, said she'd been strangled,
38:21basically.
38:22She also had quite significant bruising to her eyes,
38:26so it would appear that she'd been assaulted as well prior to being suffocated.
38:35Jayden was murdered on Wednesday the 3rd of December 2013,
38:39the same day she met Blakely to tell him she was pregnant.
38:45He kept her death a secret for nearly two weeks,
38:49a level of control and deception that reveals not panic, but calculation.
38:56He killed her, and he, you know, he made a decision to do that,
39:02but even after he'd killed her, where we would expect to see fear, guilt, remorse,
39:09none of that, none of that at all.
39:12Armed with all the evidence, the eyewitnesses, the suitcase and the spades covered in mud,
39:19and the information from the post-mortem on Jayden's body,
39:24police were finally able to fully support murder charges against Ben Blakely.
39:32Just a few weeks before his trial, he spoke to a priest and a chaplain actually was in the prison,
39:40and gave him a letter and said,
39:42I was responsible for Jayden's death.
39:44So this was the first time that he'd taken any responsibility.
39:48But there's a twist.
39:50Blakely insists it was an accident.
39:54He was adamant that it was an accident.
39:56He didn't mean to do it.
39:58But there was no chance he was getting away with that.
40:01No.
40:06In many coercive control cases,
40:09minimizing responsibility is a common tactic,
40:13an attempt to rewrite the narrative and regain control.
40:18As the trial approaches, Jayden's loved ones endure unbearable grief.
40:24Her father dies suddenly, just days before proceedings begin.
40:29And still in court, Blakely shows no remorse.
40:36When I first walked in, he looked at me, like a really angry face.
40:46And then he came up to the glass and started banging on the glass,
40:50started shouting.
40:53She was calling me a bitch and all that horrible stuff.
40:57He was an animal from the start.
41:00Well, in 32 years in the police,
41:03and lots of court cases,
41:04I've never, ever seen anybody behave in the way in which he behaved.
41:08It was absolutely shocking.
41:10He was threatening witnesses, shouting, being aggressive.
41:15He's certain to stab the prosecution barrister.
41:20He was using really, really, really foul language,
41:23the worst sort of language you could imagine.
41:29Blakely continues to claim
41:31that what had happened to Jayden was accidental.
41:35However, the prosecution places its evidence in front of a jury
41:39that's been asked by the defence to believe that this wasn't murder.
41:45He said it was an accident.
41:47He had grabbed her around the throat.
41:49She'd fallen off a bridge.
41:50He had tried to resuscitate her, but he couldn't.
41:55OK, so it's an accident then.
41:56Well, why didn't you call an ambulance?
41:57Why didn't you tell somebody what happened?
41:59Why didn't you phone the police?
42:01Because these are all significant things.
42:04What you also can't get away from,
42:06and what still wasn't clear from what he'd said to the chaplain,
42:10was why had the body recovery dogs indicated
42:15there had been a dead body in that barn,
42:17so I believe she was killed in the barn.
42:22We found Jayden's bracelet in the bushes,
42:25which indicated she'd been dragged through the undergrowth
42:28and then dragged across that field.
42:37In court, it's revealed Blakely first hid Jayden's body near a barn,
42:42then returned days later with a large suitcase.
42:46He put her inside and then took a taxi,
42:50which he booked under a false name,
42:52a calculated act of concealment.
42:57So he put her in the suitcase,
43:00dragged it across the field.
43:02The taxi driver picked him up,
43:03helped him put that suitcase in the back of his car,
43:07and he stated in court that it was very heavy,
43:12and he commented because they both had to toy it in.
43:17He was like,
43:18oh yeah, my girlfriend's chucked me out,
43:20it's all my worldly goods,
43:21and that wasn't, that was my baby in that suitcase.
43:30Ben convinced his younger brother Jake to help dig a grave,
43:34telling him it was for a dead cat and dog.
43:38Jake would later be sentenced to three years
43:42for helping cover up the crime.
43:45When the jury delivers their verdict on Ben,
43:49they reject his defence entirely,
43:52and he's found guilty of murder.
44:00Ben Blakely was sentenced to life in prison
44:04with a minimum of 20 years.
44:08It's not enough.
44:09What he got was not enough.
44:14He's took two lives.
44:16He should be in there for life.
44:21This was a case dominated by coercive control,
44:26the coercive control of a vulnerable teenage girl
44:30by an older man.
44:32And the triggers that are going to lead to Jaden's death
44:35were her rejection of that older man
44:39and her pregnancy.
44:41Now, the consequences of that coercive control
44:47were, of course, deadly for Jaden,
44:50but for her family, their grief remains.
44:53Their grief is lifelong.
45:06I don't want any other parent to go through what we went through.
45:09It's horrendous, and it breaks families.
45:15She's that kind of girl that would open her arms to anyone.
45:20She sees the good in everyone.
45:24I'm never, ever, ever going to see her again.
45:28Because he took her away.
45:32She just wanted a guy to love her.
45:35She wanted to be a mum.
45:38That's what she wanted.
45:41And she'd have been a really good mum.
45:46Yeah.
45:49Yeah.
46:13yeah.
46:13A.
46:13Yeah.
46:18Yeah.
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