Rotten Mango - #343: Teens Kill Transgender Classmate To See If “It” Will Scream Like A Girl Or Boy
Episode Date: March 10, 202415-year-old Eddie comes home from his jog – changes out of his soiled clothes – and starts googling on his computer: HOW TO COMBAT ANXIETY. He’s waiting for a text message from the girl he l...ikes - but it’s not her. It’s a former classmate of his – Scarlet. The message reads. “My brother just told me not to go to Linear Park because a woman got stabbed there.” Eddie replies: “Jesus – really?” She responds: “Yeah, they say it’s murder…” He lets the news sink in—someone was murdered at the very park that he had just been to… When the realization of that hit, Eddie would do two things. One, he would hide the 5-inch knife in his room; it was covered in blood. And two, he would never speak again. Full Source Notes: rottenmangopodcast.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Ramble.
Barbine Barbu.
15 year old Eddie is trying to keep his mind together.
Honestly, he's trying to get a grip.
He is a world kickboxing champion for his age group
when he was just 11 years old for crying out loud.
I mean, he's thinking to himself,
come on, get it together.
So to keep himself busy, I mean, honestly,
to keep his mind from falling apart, Eddie goes on a jog.
It was more like a sprint at the local park called linear park and he is just plagued by all of these
Negative thoughts all week and he just wants to distract himself
Because every second of every single day for the past seven days his eyes are glued to his phone non-stop. He's just waiting
Essentially, it's almost Valentine's Day.
He's 15 and the girl that he likes
still has not texted him and it's driving him mad.
I mean, what does it mean?
Eddie comes home from his jog,
he changes out of his soiled clothes
and he starts Googling on his computer.
How to combat anxiety.
All the while, he's checking his phone nonstop.
He's tapping on the screen
just to see if he missed a notification, he's checking the button on this side to make sure
it's not on silent mode. Ding! Eddie rushes to click open his messages. It's not her.
It's an old classmate of his named Scarlett. She texts, my brother just told me not to
go anywhere near linear park because a woman got stabbed there.
Eddie's fingers hover over the keyboard.
Jesus, really?
Yeah, they say it's murder.
Holy crap!
Eddie puts his phone down and he just, he lets the news sink in.
Somebody was murdered at the very park that he had just been to.
When the realization of that hit, Eddie would do two things.
One, he would hide the five-inch knife in his room that was covered in blood.
And two, he would never speak again. We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten Mango to
support both the Point Foundation and Peace in Mind.
The Point Foundation is America's largest scholarship-granting, non-profit organization
for post-grade school LGBTQ students.
Peace in Mind is an England and Wales-based fundraiser started by Brianna Jai's mother
of today's case, Esther Jai.
Now, in remembrance of their daughter, she has teamed up with Mindfulness in Schools
Project, who provides curriculum for students and training for teachers with the sole focus of bringing mindfulness into the public grade school community.
This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten
Mango's growing team of dedicated researchers and translators and we would
also like to thank you guys, our listeners for your continued support as we
work on our mission to be worthy advocates of these causes. Now as always
full show notes are available at Rotmangopodcast.com.
Before we get into today's case, though, I do want to note some very important disclaimers.
Today's case revolves around a hate crime committed against a young member of the LGBTQIA
plus community. Brianna Jai was targeted in part because she was transgender. So if this
is a topic that is very difficult to listen to, please
go take care of yourself, get some rest, get a comfort meal, watch some happy show, and I'll
see you in the next one. Now with that being said, I want to make it explicitly clear that Brianna's
pronouns have been and still are she, her. However, there will be moments in this episode where I
read to you text message evidence where a killer does not use her proper pronouns.
I think if I were to fix the incorrect pronoun usage, it would no longer really even be considered
evidence some of the text messages.
I think the only way to highlight the cruelty behind the motive of the murder is to keep
them as they are.
So I will be reading them verbatim, especially because this person, the killer, Eddie Radcliffe, is trying to appeal his sentence. So hopefully
this is a reminder of what kind of person he is and what he did. So with that
being said, let's get into it. The new transfer at Birchwood Community High
School was a little weird. I mean, yeah, she had an obsession with eyeballs.
It was kind of like this unspoken rule
amongst all of her peers.
Don't look her in the eye.
Like if you're passing her in the hallway,
if you glance up from your desk in class
and she's looking at you,
don't look her directly in the eye.
There's just something not right about her eyes.
I mean, don't get me wrong, they're beautiful,
they're totally fine, everything's okay,
but she just had this weird thing with staring.
You know how you can tell when somebody is watching you?
Well, students would look up and from across the cafeteria,
there would just be a set of deep blue eyes
staring directly at them.
It felt like she was peering into their souls,
it was creepy.
And she was known for having this little journal that she would carry with her
everywhere. If you opened it up to a random page, you would likely see doodles of
Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, the serial killer. She thought it was
particularly fascinating that Richard Ramirez had gouged out one of his
victims' eyeballs and placed them in his jewelry box.
The eyeballs were like his souvenir,
they were like his trophy.
The new girl would go around telling people
that she could talk about Richard Ramirez for hours
and the eyeballs that he took,
she could talk about it for days.
She was weird, but she only stayed for 10 weeks.
Within 10 weeks, the new transfer's locker
would be cleaned out,
her desk would be emptied,
and the administrators put the school on lockdown.
Nobody was allowed to talk about the new girl anymore.
But in the hallways, while the teachers weren't listening,
the students would huddle together and whisper,
Did you hear what happened to her?
I heard she's friends with Eddie Radcliffe.
15 year old Eddie Radcliffe is standing in court.
He hasn't said a single word to the judge
since the trial started.
He won't talk.
Instead, he stands up and he holds up a sign above his head.
It reads, not guilty.
Eddie Radcliffe was pleading not guilty
to the murder of 16 year old Brianna Jai,
a transgender high school student
that he had at a local park,
stabbed her and left her for dead.
There was a text message read out in court
that Eddie sent to a friend just before the murder.
The text read,
I wanted to see if it would scream like a boy or girl.
And another text would read, I wanted to see if it would scream like a boy or girl. And another text would read, I wanted to know what size body part it had.
And he's a holding sign saying not guilty.
Exactly.
So, I mean, it was pretty rare for Brianna to leave the house,
but when she did, she always let her mom know.
So Brianna's doorbell camera catches her leaving the house
on February 11th around, this is in 2023,
February 11th, 2023, around 12.45 PM.
And just from looking at Brianna,
I mean, she seems to kind of give the gray, gloomy weather
some color, her red hair, it's pinned straight
down to her waist and it's like radiant, it's popping.
And she's wearing this fluffy white coat that matches her white knee-high socks.
She's got this pink and white checkered bag and even her phone case is pink.
Now as she walks and opens the gate to the sidewalk, she sends a message to her mom.
Dogs are locked up, gonna go meet a friend.
Brianna likely felt like she's on some sort of mission.
I mean, she's following the instructions clearly,
but it just feels, it just felt tedious
and it didn't make any sense.
She had to walk 25 minutes to the bus station,
even though there's a bus station
three minutes away from her house.
She was told to walk 25 minutes to a different one.
Then she had to wait another 30 minutes
at that bus station before number 28 bus pulls up
The bus is fairly empty only about eight people are on board
She pays for her ticket and then she sits down through this 15 minute bus ride on a route
That's gonna drive past her house
Hmm, so she went further and then you drove back. Yeah. So she went 25 minutes into direction
A, but she's trying to get to direction B. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't make any sense. I mean,
what was this all for? You can tell by the CCTV footage that Brianna is a little bit
nervous. She's texting on her pink cell phone and she's giving a rundown of the whole day
to her best friend Amelia
Brianna is very anxious. She's never rode the bus alone let alone from a bus station 25 minutes from her house
So she's quickly sitting down in the seat closest to the bus driver closest to the front doors like the safest seat
And she puts a little bag on her lap and she texts Amelia her comfort person
And she's joking to Amelia that the bus is
driving so wonky, like side to side, it's going to tip over before she even makes it
to her destination. She's feeling really anxious about this. At 1.41pm as the bus drives past
her house, Brianna texts her mom. I'm on the bus by myself. I'm scared. And her mom texts,
oh, well, that's good. And then hugs.
So even from that one text,
Brianna could tell that her mom was very proud of her.
She's taking these big steps
to confront that anxiety head on that day.
She could practically hear her mom being like,
this is a big breakthrough.
This is really good.
And honestly, it kind of was.
I mean, she bought a bus ticket by herself.
She boarded the bus by herself,
and now she's gonna go meet a friend all on her own.
I mean, honestly, this is a pretty big deal.
But it would be the last exchange ever
between Brianna and her mother.
Brianna would have little more than two hours left to live.
She would be found dead with injuries to her back,
her chest, her head, and with a total of 28 stab wounds.
Her pink blood-stained phone would be found in a drain, reportedly lighting up with messages
from her friends.
They would read,
Girl, where are you?
And another one would read,
Girl, is everything okay?
Some teenage girl got killed near Linear Park.
It's on the news everywhere.
Most of Brianna's friends remember Vivitly,
maybe two Vivitly where they were and what they were doing on February 11th. It was the day that
Brianna was taken from them. So it's very hard to forget. 15 year old Scarlett, she grabbed her
phone and she started tapping away. She's texting a ton of her friends that live nearby. My brother
just told me not to go to Linear Park because a woman got stabbed. The text message seemed calm, but honestly, Scarlett was freaking out. She's texting everybody
she knows trying to check up on them. I mean, the park is so close to her house. Everybody
in this part of town went to that park. It is the place to go. Her parents had just been
at that park with their dog. I mean, she had just been there not too long ago. It's like
everybody she knew had been at that park.
Scarlett turns off her Minecraft game
and starts her Google searching.
Linear park murder.
Colchith linear park.
Birchwood woman stabbing.
Woman stabbed in park.
Scarlett pauses on a headline, reading it carefully,
double checking.
Women involved in linear park stabbing is alive
and taken to hospital in air ambulance.
She starts sending the articles to all her friends. They're alive, they're alive-stabbing is alive and taken to hospital in air ambulance.
She starts sending the articles to all her friends.
They're alive, they're alive, whoever it is is alive.
Another reply comes in.
No, the police just confirmed the death of the woman found with serious injuries.
Scarlett just stares at her phone.
I mean, she's not really sure what to say.
So she just hesitates and types back, okay, when do you think they'll find
out a name? And then she goes right back to her Google search. In the middle of her investigations,
she gets a reply from a friend, Jesus, really? And she quickly responds, they say it's murder.
And he responds, holy crap. Scarlett goes back through her searching, but there's just something that's bothering
her.
All of her friends, except one, she's heard from.
But maybe that's not that big of a deal, right?
I mean, she did say that she was going to go meet a boy from Manchester, but just in
case Scarlett texted her friend Brianna, girl, is everything okay?
Scarlett likely thought, if Brianna doesn't respond, she could at least go check up on
her.
They don't live that far away.
Meanwhile, Brianna's best friend Amelia lived three hours away and she just opened one eye.
She was feeling so drowsy all day and she's contemplating, should I go back to sleep and
nap some more?
But instead, she rolls over, she grabs her, and she's smiling and she's gonna text Brianna back,
but you know, because Brianna has been so anxious
about riding the bus earlier that day,
but she, you know, hopefully had a safe journey
and Amelia was excited to ask her about it,
because they're basically sisters.
Even though they never physically met in person yet,
they talked on the phone every single day,
like hours a day.
They would get ready on FaceTime.
They would tell each other all of their secrets.
They even planned to rent an apartment together
after they graduated high school.
So Scarlett was texting-
Eddie?
Eddie, right?
Yes.
And Scarlett also was texting Brianna and Brianna didn't.
Yeah, Brianna's not responding.
Scarlett's texting everybody because, you know,
when you're in high school and you find out
that someone got stabbed at a place that you all frequent,
I mean, she's just spreading the news. Everybody's texting everyone at this point.
But Brianna is the only one not responding to her.
And it's making her really anxious.
Same with Amelia. Amelia doesn't really know what's happened at the park because she lives three hours away.
But this is her best friend. and she hasn't responded. Last she heard from Brianna, she was on a bus by herself.
She was anxious, nervous, and then she got off
at the bus stop and we don't know really what's going on.
They were gonna meet later this year,
so Amelia was like counting down the days
for when she was finally gonna meet Brianna in person,
but right now she's counting down the seconds.
Why isn't Brianna texting her back?
It had been like eight hours since they last texted.
They never went this long without texting.
Has she heard about the news?
No.
So Amelia sends another follow up text.
She's worried, but she's trying not to sound paranoid. And she's thinking it's probably nothing.
Maybe she's also taking a nap to lighten her anxiety.
Amelia texts jokingly,
girl, you better not be dead.
Amelia, like the rest of the world,
would not find out the truth until later.
At 6.25, the following evening,
Scarlett chooses her favorite photo of Brianna
to upload to her Snapchat.
In the photo, Brianna is wearing a brown striped sweater,
her trademark round glasses,
and she's holding like this half-eaten candy bar and she's smiling at the camera.
Scarlet writes, rest in peace. Brianna was one of the best people I've ever met and such an
amazing friend. It is so sickening what got done to her. It is absolutely sickening.
There's a lot of information that you can gain about a person through their eye contact, to her is absolutely sickening.
There's a lot of information that you can gain about a person through their eye contact
or their lack thereof.
So it may vary across different cultures, but in the United States, it is the norm to make
regular eye contact with the person that you're speaking with to show them that you're interested
in what they're saying.
If someone is never quite meeting your eye when they're talking to you, you might find them to be distrustful. You might at least think that they're maybe a little bit socially awkward. You're going to think something. Or if someone holds your gaze for too long, if the eye contact is too long, too frequent, it's a different kind of unsettling. I mean, it's such a subtle thing that humans subconsciously pick up on. There is no rule book. It's just a matter of seconds.
When someone holds eye contact for too little or too long,
our brains register, oh my God, something is weird.
So then is there a correct amount of time
to hold someone's eye contact?
Actually, apparently there is.
Research has revealed that the average preferred duration
for eye contact is about 3.3 seconds.
Now you have about like a 0.5
to a full second grace period. So as long as you're anywhere between like the two to four
seconds of eye contact, you'll be fine.
That is very true. Now you think about it, like more doesn't mean better.
No, and it's, it's so, we don't even have like a set timer in our bodies. We just kind
of know. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, you just
Yeah, look away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting. Everybody has similar timelines for that. Yeah. Yeah
It doesn't like drastically change per person. It's very interesting
Now katharine vise made eye contact with a ton of people on february 11th 2023
Now it's a little damp that afternoon,
but Catherine and her husband,
they're walking their dogs in the local park
called Linear Park.
I mean, it's called like a gem of a dog walk.
The locals called it that.
They love walking their dogs there.
Now the couple, they pass by and smile politely
at dozens of other people jogging, walking their dogs,
biking, playing with their friends.
I mean, it's not a quiet time at the park, but the park is interesting because it
never feels overcrowded even though there's a ton of people.
Interestingly enough, the park was actually built on abandoned railway lines.
So the paths would divert, they'd come together, there's steps and benches
just placed randomly around the park.
There's partially hidden wooded areas.
It's, it would probably be a very sinister place
at three in the morning,
but it's pretty peaceful and private during the day.
It's very busy, but it's also very secluded all at once.
So if you go to the main areas, there's so much action.
But if you kind of travel off the broken path,
it can get very secluded very quickly.
But as the vice couple turn the corner, they see in front of them a young man
hunched over putting a leash on his fluffy white dog.
They take a step forward, ready to continue their little walk.
But this one step is enough for them to notice that the way that the afternoon sunlight is reflecting off the leash,
that it's not a leash. It's
a knife. Another step forward and their eyes travel downward and they realize that is not
a dog. It is a girl wearing a fluffy white coat. They just walked into yes, and she's covered in blood
Suddenly the man that's hunched over stands upright. He makes eye contact with them briefly
It's so quick the eye contact is like two seconds not even maybe like a half a second
Catherine's not even sure if their eyes really met and he quickly pulls his hood up to hide his face away
And then he starts stumbling away. He starts running off
That's when another figure stands up over the lifeless body on the ground.
And this one is smaller than the first.
And she catches Catherine's attention.
It's a high school girl.
She just looks so out of place in this wild scene.
I mean, she looks like she should be at school.
She looks like she should be at the mall with her friends or playing monopoly at home and
Her eyes slowly meet Catherine's and the girl doesn't look scared. The girl doesn't look shocked her face is blank
I mean it's free of any emotion. She's just staring
Unblinking I mean her eyes are wide. She's got this heavy dark makeup around them
Catherine wants to look away, but her brain is not even registering
what she's looking at or even who she's looking at and what's going on. But there is just
something about this girl's deep blue irises that keep her from pulling away. One Mississippi,
two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi, seven Mississippi, eight
Mississippi, eight full seconds.
They just stood there for eight seconds? Eight seconds staring at each other, frozen, and the girl doesn't even look scared.
She doesn't look shocked. She's just staring at her while standing over a lifeless body.
Those might have been the longest eight seconds of Catherine's life. staring at her while standing over a lifeless body.
Those might have been the longest eight seconds of Catherine's life.
It was long enough for even Eddie, who had fled the scene immediately, to notice that
he was running away by himself.
He turned around and he saw his accomplice standing near the couple.
What the hell is she doing?
Why is Scarlet not coming?
In the UK, there's a game called Knock Knock Ginger. I don't know why they called it that,
but it's a game that we're all pretty familiar with,
to some extent.
So it's called Ding Dong Ditch in America.
The rules of the games follow.
Step one, find the target house.
The only condition is the resident must be home.
Step two, you sneak to their front door and you ring the bell. Step three, before the door opens you run and you hide. The
objective being that the resident's gonna open the door, see that nobody's there,
they're gonna look around very confused and you're gonna be giggling to
yourself in the little bushes. Residents of Birchwood were used to getting
ding-dong-ditched. It's a small town. I mean, the high schoolers, they don't really have a long list
of fun activities that they can indulge in at night.
So they go knock, knock, ginger or ding dong ditch.
One resident late one night gets a knock at their front door.
They walk over and they look through the people.
Nothing, it's just dark outside.
They're like, this is strange.
I mean, I could have sworn
that I heard someone knocking on the door.
So they turn the lock, grab the handle, swing open the door, and the resident freezes.
It's like a cold wind just came into their house.
It's so unsettling.
It's so unnerving.
That is not how you're supposed to play ding dong ditch.
Because there on the street, standing there in the dark with nothing but the streetlight
illuminating her is a girl.
She's just staring at the resident.
She's not hiding.
She's just like Chucky.
She's just standing on the street
staring directly at the resident.
You mean like she's not standing in front of the door?
No.
But all the way back on the street.
On the street, past the driveway.
Ran the doorbell and ran out and just standing in the middle of the street. Yes staring. Yes
Okay, that's creepy exactly. You're supposed to hide and it's supposed to be he he the resident doesn't know who did it
She's just staring at the resident
That's not how you play ding dong ditch
That was scarlet's favorite way to play though
Well, that is her game.
That's her game.
Oh, that's crazy.
Like she's trying to intimidate and freak out the people.
Exactly.
Now, have you heard of what seatbelting is?
It's a form of abusive bullying
where someone grabs your backpack straps from the front
and yanks them all the way down to the ground until you fall.
It causes you to not only fall, but it forms these really intense rug burns under your
underarms if they pull too hard from all the force.
Brianna is sitting in the school's inclusion unit.
It's like a class dedicated to helping students who need extra support or students who are
about to get suspended.
It's such an odd mix of students in there, I'm not gonna lie.
I mean, some students are placed in the inclusion unit
for having behavioral issues,
like displaying aggression and having tendencies of violence.
Like they're about to get suspended from school,
that's why they're in that unit.
And then other students are there
because they're very socially anxious
and they're nervous to be in a full classroom.
Like I'm sure it's different by school
and case by case basis, but ultimately,
you could end up with the biggest bullies in the school
who are incredibly aggressive,
and then you could end up with all the socially anxious,
more timid students in the school who need a safe space,
all in the inclusion unit.
It's just kind of odd.
Kind of.
Yeah, now Brianna is there
because the school administrators thought
that she was too socially anxious.
She wasn't as active or outgoing
and loud as they wanted her to be.
And it's believed that Brianna was seat belted
and beaten by a gang of school children.
It's alleged that the kids would throw bottles at her,
call her names and if that's true,
I mean, yeah, I would be socially anxious too.
I mean, I think anybody would be.
But one day, a new girl, a new transfer from a different school, walks into the inclusion study
and sits down right next to Brianna.
She's got a stack of journals and pink gel pens and these deep blue striking eyes.
And she looks at Brianna, leans over and says,
I like your eyeliner.
Brianna smiled.
That night, Scarlett would go home
to text a friend from her old school, Walmart John Wick.
Yeah, that's the name on her phone.
I mean, well, in the UK, she had him under Tesco, John Wick,
but it's kind of like saying Walmart, John Wick.
And if you don't know,
John Wick is the movie series of an ex-hipman,
but his real name, Walmart, John Wick, is Eddie Radcliffe.
She would text him, I'm obsessed over someone I know,
but I don't have feelings for them.
She's called Brianna, and I don't know how to explain it.
Also, she has a DICK, LOL.
That's what she text.
What?
Very interesting.
Now, a little bit about Brianna.
I mean, I think the best way to sum it up
is her childhood, is why would you have
a black PlayStation controller when you you have a black playstation controller
when you can have a pink one? Like it's not only a very valid question, but it's a very
good question. Brianna was putting another coat of pink nail polish onto a playstation
controller and it's a whole process, you know, because you have to wait for the paint to
dry and then add another coat and then you don't want to get it into like the crevices
or get it too thick with the polish
and then the polish has got to be soft
But it's worth it because everything in Brianna's room had to be pink like it's a non-negotiable
Her fluffy eye masks her bags her clothes her bed sheets everything is pink
She would even ask her mom Esther like when I turn 18. Can you buy me a pink car?
Brianna was getting bullied at school, but when she came home, she tried her best to be uplifting.
She would post these TikToks of herself
getting ready for school.
She would make her uniform cuter by pairing it
with like these cute blazers or the knee-high socks
or headbands, and she would always put these pink
little bows in her red waist-length mermaid-looking hair
and she would lip-sync to these very popular songs on TikTok.
Brianna actually managed to build a tight-knit community on TikTok. She made a lot of friends on
there. She found a lot of safety and familiarity in the online transgender communities, but she
also contributed heavily to it. She would talk to online friends that she's never met before
and help them with everything
that they're going through.
I mean, she knows how hard it is to be transgender and to even the potential of making it 1%
easier for someone else to go through the same thing that she went through, she was
going to spend all day helping them.
She would help them find doctors in their area.
She would try talking to them about embracing their style.
She would give insight on hormone treatments.
That was her mission, just to make people happy.
One of the toughest experiences to go through is they say,
it's to be someone's strength when you're at your weakest.
And it seems like that's what Brianna did every day.
A friend of Brianna said, I mean, it's very obvious that she was struggling
with mental health and being bullied online and in real life.
You know, there's no denying that, but she kept going
and it didn't never stop her from doing anything.
After school, Brianna would go on her phone
and see all the people that needed her support.
And she would be that support.
She would FaceTime her friends
and she would practice gymnastics on FaceTime.
Like she would do those backflips in her pink room.
And every time she would fall flat on her butt,
she and her friends would just start bust out laughing.
Or if she noticed that one of her friends
wasn't having a good day,
she would try to FaceTime them
and do all these silly little things
to just try and make them laugh. Instead of drinking apple juice, cause she would have like FaceTime them and do all these silly little things to just try and make them laugh
instead of drinking apple juice because she would have like apple juice in a cup. She would pour
them into little shot glasses and pretend to take shots of them. I mean just so she could get a smile
out of a friend who really just didn't feel like smiling that day. That was her goal. That's her
ultimate plan and the minute that she would get a smile out of you, she'd make you sit
down and you would be her guinea pig for a new makeup look that she's trying.
But I imagine that it would be very hard to say no to someone like Brianna.
She is the friend, they say, that would spontaneously decide to go to the market in her Barbie pink
pajamas to buy hair dye and then start dying her hair a completely new color
at 3am on a school night.
Like that's the amount of fun and life that she had.
Brianna also never took the easy way out.
So from what I can gather, from never having met her, from what I can just gather online
reading about what everybody said about her, it feels like she was someone that faced everything
head on.
She lived and loved very
intensely and I know that sounds cheesy but just like hear me out. She was incredibly vulnerable
but also very fearless at the same time. So for example, she was hospitalized for an eating
disorder and she struggled immensely with her relationship with food. But at the same time, her favorite food was Domino's pizza.
And so she would always try to face these difficulties and these fears and she would
scream down the stairs, mom, can we have Domino's tonight?
And it's like she just wanted to do everything that she could to try and live the way she
wanted, no matter what.
I mean, she just had this way of pulling people in towards her and she wasn't
really outgoing. She's not really this crazy loud person. She was just actually very anxious and shy,
but she had this energy about her that was so contagious that people were naturally drawn to her.
One friend of her said, she made me feel unstoppable as a trans girl and she made me feel really pretty
because I don't know, she would never let me put myself down. And she made me feel really pretty because I don't know,
she would never let me put myself down.
And it just takes someone really, really special,
I think, to be able to do that.
And maybe that's what attracted Scarlett to Brianna.
Scarlett was absolutely fascinated by Brianna.
They would go to McDonald's after school
just to hang out and talk.
And they both had a lot in common.
You know, they both bonded over their anxiety,
eating disorders, but also makeup and clothing choices.
Scarlett would just stare at Brianna's eyes
every time she talked.
And there was just something about Brianna
that made Scarlett feel a lot of emotions at once.
Jealous, excited, obsessed, angry.
I mean, she couldn't really quite put her finger on it,
but she was obsessed.
There were rumors circulating at the high school
about the new transfer, Skylet.
People said, yeah, not only is she obsessed with eyeballs,
you know she's a Satanist, right?
She apparently does these blood rituals
and she's asking some of the others
to join her this weekend as she sacrifices a goat.
I don't even know what that means.
Other students alleged that they saw her post a video on social media.
Yeah, it was of herself stabbing a couch with a bloody knife.
I don't know if it's real blood.
Others would just say, I don't really like her energy.
I mean, she always talks about killing goats and she likes making a lot of dead baby jokes
that just aren't really funny.
The nicer students would say, I mean, she's definitely not a normal person, right?
But probably the strangest rumor was that Scarlett had to transfer from her old school
because she poisoned a classmate.
Some of the other students thought it was pushing it a bit too far.
They're like, well, that doesn't make sense.
We can't just spread rumors like that.
What do you mean she poisoned a classmate?
If she poisoned a classmate from her old school,
wouldn't they expel her?
Wouldn't she be in big trouble?
How could she just transfer to our school?
We don't know if Brianna heard these rumors.
But if she did, Brianna was also the type to ignore them.
People spread rumors for all sorts of nasty reasons.
Brianna herself had been on the receiving end of these fake false rumors, and it wouldn't
be right for her to treat someone else differently because of these rumors.
It just, to her, seemed like a different form of bullying.
Like there was no truth to it.
I've been trying to look a little bit more put together in these videos for you guys
and recently I've gotten a few emails asking where I've gotten my tops from and first of
all thank you guys so much you guys are always so kind and it's like an unexpected smile
to my day but I have to be honest I need to give credit where credit is due.
The truth is I am not that fashionable I just found a really good stylist thanks to Stitch Fix.
Stitch Fix is an online personal styling service and Stitch Fix is so fascinating. Stitch Fix
will connect you with a stylist who will get to know your style, size, and budget and will
help you put together your dream wardrobe that's within your budget. The best part about having
a stylist is not only does she save me so much time, but she saves me so much from a headache.
You know those mornings where you just feel so overwhelmed,
your elbows deep in your closet,
digging through piles and piles of clothes,
and you're starting to freak out
because you gotta leave the house soon,
but nothing makes you feel comfortable and confident.
That would happen to me approximately four times a week.
I would get so stressed out,
especially because I know you guys are probably thinking
about a million other things at the same time time and that is why life feels so much simpler
now that I have my stitch fix stylist. All I did was send her my measurements,
briefly tell her about the vibe that I'm going for and I let her know my ideal
budget. Now whenever I need to refresh my wardrobe, my stylist sends me five
pieces that she handpicked just for me plus she sends outfit recommendations and
pro styling tips and I'll just go through the clothing items she sends me.
I keep what I like and I just ship back the rest.
Shipping returns and exchanges are always free,
and the best part is, this is not a subscription service.
I make orders whenever I want, however I want,
so that it always fits my needs.
There's no feeling like the confidence boost
that you get when wearing the perfect outfit,
and for me, that wouldn't have been possible
without my stylist from Stitch Fix. Style that makes you feel as good as you look.
Get started today at stitchfix.com slash rotten. That's stitchfix.com slash rotten.
Stitchfix.com slash rotten. Hey friends, this is Jen Hatmaker, your happy host of the For the
Love podcast. You may wonder how I got into this podcasting thing. Well, I'm a speaker and an author
who has happened to write a few New York Times bestselling books that really resonated with a
pretty large community of women. And I thought, how great would it be to drop into the ears of
this growing community every week via the magic of podcasting? So that's what we did. And I'm
delighted to say we've been able to spark a bit of delight and uncover some hope and talk with great people about the big and small things that we care about
and that affect our lives on the daily. So I'm thrilled to invite you to join me every Wednesday
for new episodes of the For The Love podcast where you'll hear the most incredible conversations
with some of the best people on this planet. We're going to bring you moments of connection
and laughter and hot takes on the things we care about going on in the world. So listen to and follow For the Love with Jen
Hatmaker, a Four Eyes Media production presented by Odyssey. You can get it on the Odyssey app or
wherever you get your podcasts. Esther Jai, Brianna's mom had just gotten home from work.
She put her work bag down and she hears her youngest daughter screaming for help. So she throws the Esther Jai, Brianna's mom had just gotten home from work.
She puts her work bag down and she hears her youngest daughter screaming for help.
So she throws the rest of her stuff down, races up the stairs taking two steps at a
time and she flings open the door to Brianna's room and Brianna is laying in a fetal position,
clutching her stomach, shaking in pain, sobbing.
She's crying and she screams, Mom, I think I'm gonna die. Brianna had struggled with self-harm before
and Esther was likely concerned that Brianna
had hurt herself somehow.
But Brianna continued to scream and cry,
Help, don't leave me, don't leave me, it hurts.
Esther had never seen Brianna like this before.
I mean, she had never been a sickly child
like this was out of the norm.
She notices that Brianna is clutching her stomach and Esther is flipping through all of the possibilities
in her head. I mean could it be appendicitis maybe? Apparently the pain of
appendicitis is so intense that it causes people to not even be able to sit up
straight because they're in so much pain. Esther pulls out her phone and it's
about to call an ambulance but before she can, Brianna grabs her wrist and gets up and throws up all over the floor.
Shortly after, Brianna starts feeling much, much better.
And Esther is wiping up the vomit and she notices that there are small specks of red in it.
She assumed they were grape skins.
Maybe Brianna had gotten ill from eating too many grapes?
Or maybe it was like
a stomach bug? Because these are the only logical explanations of what happened, right?
Too many grapes? Because it's- she's in high school. It's not like someone would poison
her. Scarlet texts Eddie a picture of a handful of small red tablets. By the way, do you die from eating these?
Because I have a plan if you do.
Scarlett had given Brianna a ton of tiny red pills telling her to take it.
Telling her it's going to get her high, but she has to take quite a bit of it.
Eddie glances at the picture and texts back.
It's dangerous, yes, but I'm not sure how many would be lethal.
You know that girl I mentioned?
Brianna?
I'm still trying to kill her, and the easiest way is a pill overdose, don't you think?
Plus, people already know that she's depressed and shit, so nobody would get sus.
But for some reason, she's got a high tolerance.
Like I gave her some of these today, and I thought that should have been enough to kill her.
Scarlet carried on about her day, feeling a bit frustrated.
She was less upbeat than usual.
She spent all day checking him on Brianna,
periodically asking her about the pills.
Did you take him?
Did you take him?
Ding!
Eddie opens his text and he could basically
feel Scarlet's excitement through the screen.
Brianna's ill.
Those tablets I gave her might be slowly killing her.
Scarlet's 15, 16 as well?
15.
It was Ibuprofen.
Yeah.
What?
She said it was working.
Eddie responds, try doubling the dose.
That should at least put him in a coma, misgendering.
Scarlett had given Brianna a handful of the Ibuprofen,
telling her to take it because it's gonna get her high.
But in reality, she was trying to kill her.
This would be the first of three attempts on Brianna's life.
So Scarlett and Eddie, they're tossing and turning in bed
because it just doesn't make sense.
I mean, it should have worked.
That should have been enough ibuprofen.
So they grabbed their, yeah.
I remember earlier you were saying
there's a new girl in the school, right?
It's Scarlett.
Right.
And a week later she was gone.
10 weeks.
Oh, 10 weeks later.
10 weeks.
She's only there for 10 weeks.
So two and a half months.
And this is all unfolding within two and a half months.
Like multiple attempts.
Multiple attempts.
I mean, most of it starts unfolding,
like the minute that she meets Brianna,
not necessarily that she's trying to kill Brianna the minute she meets her, but this like weird obsession with her, I wouldn't say it's an
obsession in the traditional sense. It's not like she was like, I can't, like I need to stalk her,
I need to know her movements everywhere she goes, but it is a very strange relationship she's developing.
Yeah, so the first text you mentioned, it was really odd. She said, I'm obsessed with her.
Yeah.
Okay.
Like when you hear that, you assume like, oh my God, I think I'm in love.
Yeah.
But then later she gets really upset because she thinks that Brianna is prettier than her.
So I really, I was having a hard time trying to, I think later at the end of this
episode, you're going to start to realize the only answer
to all of this could be pure evil and transphobia,
because other than that,
it's very hard to unpack everybody's motive in this.
So just like hold on to your seats
because it gets weirder, it gets more confusing.
So they grab their phones from the nightstand and they text each other at night.
Eddie, I want something to pour into her drink that's easy to get.
Something that's odorless and is going to kill her quickly.
For the next hour and a half, Eddie lays in bed researching toxic substances.
He sends this.
You can buy it at Tesco, the grocery store.
It's very dangerous stuff. Skylake clicks open the photo.
Sodium hydroxide, lye, the stuff that you use to make soap.
It would have to be consumed fast enough though
since it's an acid.
You would have to force her to drink it.
Unfortunately, I can't find how fast it kills
but I think it kills pretty fast.
If you were to drink lye,
it would turn your entire insides into literal soap. The lye is basically would turn your entire insights into literal soap.
The lye is basically an acid.
It's extremely corrosive.
It burns all the way down into the stomach.
If you pour flaming gasoline down your throat and then swallow a six-inch knife afterwards,
that's what it would feel like to drink a lot of lye.
It's like liquid lava fire, just going down your throat.
You can feel where it is in your body because the minute it touches any part of your insights, down your throat, you can feel where it is in your body
because the minute it touches any part of your insides, your stomach lining, you can
feel it.
It's going to start dissolving you from the inside out.
Scarlet thought the idea was perfect.
She could just put it into Brianna's McDonald's milkshake after school.
Another text comes in from Scarlet.
Eddie opens it up and this time it's a picture with a pair of scissors and a tissue with blood on it.
The message reads, I'm gonna eat human flesh.
Eddie smiles.
Cause Scarlett and Eddie,
they have a very unusual relationship.
They actually started off despising each other.
They were 11 when they first met, so four years ago,
and they did not get along.
Eddie was a world kickboxing champion for 11 year olds,
for his age group, and he started training
since he was like nine years old.
And you know, typically being good at any sport.
Is he actually?
Yeah, he actually is.
Yeah.
And like typically being good at any sport,
it guarantees like high school popularity,
but not really for Eddie. Eddie just kind of kept to himself, And typically, being good at any sport, it guarantees high school popularity.
But not really for Eddie.
Eddie just kind of kept to himself, to the point where people thought, he's like a really
weird robot, a weird robot with a mustache.
He started growing a full blown beard when he's like 13 years old.
It was a lot.
But other than that, he was a top student.
He did well in all his subjects.
He wanted to go to university to study microbiology,
and absolutely nothing, nothing would get a rise out of him,
at least not at school.
I mean, who knows what's going on at home,
but at school, I mean, everybody said Eddie
was like this emotionless robot
that he didn't even have voice inflections.
He would talk like this, he would talk like this,
and then this is how he responds to everything.
Even if you tell him something wild,
he would just respond like this, everything is monotone responds to everything. Even if you tell him something wild, he would just respond like this.
Everything is monotone.
There is no emotion.
This is his excited voice.
This is his sad voice.
This is his planned voice.
This is his voice.
You would just see him walking around with his dark coat, long hair, never talking to
a single person in the hallways.
Just very quiet.
If you were in class and the teacher has their back turned and someone throws a piece of paper at the teacher's head
and they start screaming, who did this?
You guys tell me right now who did this?
I'll wait.
If someone points at Eddie, even though it was not Eddie,
Eddie would have zero reaction.
He wouldn't say, no, that's not me.
He would just be like, okay.
It's kind of scary.
Yeah, he would study at school.
He would study at home, play video games.
He just really didn't interact with anyone,
except Scarlett and Scarlett at school.
She was loud.
Do you guys want to sacrifice a go with me?
I'm serious.
I'm doing a blood ritual this weekend.
I mean, it makes sense that these two hated each other.
Scarlett saw Eddie as this weird socially awkward kid
and Eddie saw Scarlett as this obnoxious weird kid.
They instantly had a strong distaste for one another,
but they were always in the same class
and in the same groups as each other.
The forced proximity made them see each other
in a different light.
They realized, you know what,
maybe we do have a lot in common.
Scarlett started texting Eddie almost daily.
I'm gonna stab your grandma, I'm gonna stab your grandma.
I'm gonna fuck your cat.
That's just how Scarlett talked, apparently.
Eddie didn't seem to mind it.
In fact, he seemed to at least like it to a degree
or thought it was humorous,
like it was a sight of Scarlett that only Eddie got to see.
Interestingly enough, Scarlett had a boyfriend.
That's not Eddie.
And Eddie has a different girl that he's interested in, both of which have no idea about these
text messages or their dark interests.
They do not talk like this with their romantic interests.
Scarlett's boyfriend seemed completely in the dark about all the disturbing things that
she was into.
It's said that the two of them actually seemed like every other normal high school couple.
They would go to the park and go on walks and take cute Polaroid pictures with each other and from the outside
They seemed somewhat normal and stable
Except for the fact that Scarlett carved her boyfriend's name into her arm with a knife
So yeah, I mean like I said, I don't know really how to dissect these people, but Scarlet
is kind of crazy.
Scarlet describes Eddie as trustworthy, a sociopath, someone who doesn't have any emotions
or at all, has a good sense of humor though, very, very smart, like genius level smart,
but socially very awkward, gets anxious a lot.
Eddie said about Scarlet that he's not really sure
how to describe her personality,
but she's definitely not normal.
So it looks like they're both on the same page.
Neither of their descriptions are glowing reviews
of one another.
I mean, not really the kind of comments
that you would want to hear about yourself.
Socially awkward, sociopath, not a normal person.
I don't know how to describe her.
But Scarlett and Eddie, they thought it worked for them. They just had like the right amount of
understanding. They had just the right amount of respect for one another and it worked.
Eddie opens up a message to a text that he got from Scarlett. This one, he'd been anticipating.
He asked Scarlett for advice on how to ask his crush out. And he felt like, you know,
I'm just so awkward. I'm so nervous. I mean, I just need help. He wouldn't even be able to start a conversation with the girl of his interest.
Eddie opens up the message and Scarlett texted him. Eddie, there's nothing to worry about. She's not going to think you're weird.
Show her that you care for her and give her support. She's going to know and she's going to rely on you and open up to you.
He said, well, what if she, what if she replies? What do I do then? I mean, I've been trying this for
the whole day. Scarlett reassures him that it's all gonna be fine, but he knows
it's not fine. There's another boy that literally likes the same girl as him,
Mark. And if Mark gets to her first, then what is he gonna do then?
Eddie starts sharing his anxieties with Scarlet
and she reassures him, we could just kill Mark.
We could just kill him.
Eddie considers it for a moment and then he responds.
You mean cut his heart out and then cook it
and feed it to your dog?
That's not what she said.
Yeah. Okay.
Eddie would take Scarlet.
The more you think about killing,
the more likely you are to kill someone.
I mean, it's hard to say if they knew the other party
was exaggerating or lying.
One would imagine that the lies were so obvious
that there would be no question about it,
but maybe, maybe they believed each other's lies
because it made it easier to believe their own.
Eddie and Scarlett, they had their own idea of ideal selves,
like visions of who they wanted to be
and they start projecting it onto each other.
So the way that I see it, let me try to simplify it,
is let's say there's two people.
One of them is studying to be a doctor.
That's what they go around telling everybody.
But you know that they're never actually gonna get there
because they're not actually ever studying. They're. But you know that they're never actually going to get there because they're not
actually ever studying.
They're just so busy telling everyone they're studying.
They're just saying that they are.
And it's like they're more married to the idea of getting the respect of being a
doctor or getting the respect of studying to be a doctor than actually wanting to be a doctor.
That's one person.
The other person is starting their own business, but they have done nothing, like no real work
to do anything.
All they do is post on Instagram about all their meetings.
But what meetings?
There's no business.
Now, if either of them talk to anybody who knows them, it's going to be the same thing.
They're not going to be treated as a doctor or a business owner because they're not one.
I mean, they're so far from it.
They haven't even taken the first step to become one. But when they're around each other,
the wannabe doctor pretends to be a real doctor.
That they've already studied,
they've already become a doctor,
they're already licensed, they're practicing.
The wannabe business owner pretends to be
a Fortune 500 CEO.
And that's how they talk to each other.
In this kind of bizarre, I don't wanna say fantasy land because that makes it seem like they are detached from reality and don't know what they're doing
But they're not but it is
Fantastical it's definitely a fantasy
They talk about how stressed they are rent all of these things, but it's all fake
Scarlett always wanted to be treated like an evil cold-blooded killer, so she texted Eddie already killed two people, you know
But who knows it could be more
Scarlett told Eddie she was having these weird dreams
Maybe they're more like hallucinations. Perhaps they were flashbacks of what really happened
She told him I hallucinated that I was covered in blood and
It was this guy named Landon and I was covered in Landon's blood and I could hear him scream and choking on his own blood
and I just saw myself standing over his body with the knife in my hand
smiling and holding the knife
She would later tell Eddie that she thought she did in fact kill a man named Landon and these were not just
hallucinations that her brain made up
Scarlett with text, do you know what the red rooms are?
Scarlett told Eddie that she downloaded Tor and started going on the dark web.
She said she's a huge fan of the red rooms, which side note if you don't know what the red rooms are
it's like a torture rooms allegedly on the dark web where you can pay money and someone will kidnap someone and torture them while
live streaming it. It's like a snuff film in the making.
Someone is going to die.
There will be bloodshed.
It's really gruesome and it's also questionable if they exist.
So she texts him.
I love watching torture videos, real ones on the dark web.
I like this stuff for a while and I'm just happy because I finally found a good red room.
No, OK, side note, by the way, you know how I said I don't know if these exist?
These types of videos do in fact exist. I think the red room concept is unclear. Like if you can
live stream it and actually bet Bitcoin or whatever cryptocurrency to make acts of torture happen,
that is what is debated. The existence of snuff films and stuff like that, I mean, those are very much true.
There was one video that was recently making its rounds, not even on the dark web,
a video of a cartel who had amputated a victim's arms and had skinned his entire face off while he
was still very much alive, and they continued to torture him in various ways while he was
screaming and they were listening jamming out to music is how it's described
So that wasn't even on the dark web. So perhaps she did find some of these videos
I just don't know if it was in a red room setting and
In return Scarlett let Eddie be whoever he dreamed of being which is someone who absolutely did not care and was willing to kill anyone because
Why not? He's just bored.
Eddie would show off his knife collection and these throwing stars that he had, like
you know those metal star shaped daggers that you can throw at things and walls?
He was so desperate to be bad and Scarlett just accepted it.
People would later comment that it's so interesting that they found each other, you know, in
this small town, because in this small town of Birchwood, there's only 10,000
residents, and one of them would go by the Instagram handle, the Come Lord.
He was on Instagram, the Come Lord, in reaching out to a high schooler named Eric.
The Instagram account is reaching out to Eric, asking him if he wants to meet in the woods
at the local park, linear park.
They're like-
Where's the com Lord?
It's like an anonymous Instagram account in Birchwood.
It's like a fake account
and he's reaching out to a high school boy named Eric
and is like, meet me in the woods.
It'll be fun, trust me.
The Instagram-
And Eric is just a random kid?
Yeah, same school, random kid.
The Instagram account is promising Eric whatever he wants in exchange for showing up to the park.
Eric opens up the DMs from the cum lord.
He doesn't know who this person is, and he's like, this is sketch.
He blocks the cum lord.
And Scarlett and Eddie are pissed.
They're like, damn it, they lost him.
So Scarlett and Eddie had been going through the trouble
of creating a fake Instagram account called the cum lord.
And they were trying to specifically lure Eric out.
All because they wanted to petrol bomb him.
What is that?
It's like a Molotov cocktail,
which is essentially a DIY fire bomb.
It's really dangerous.
Typically it consists of highly flammable liquid inside of a glass bottle.
You stick a flammable fabric shoved into the opening.
Someone lights the fabric on fire and you have an undetermined random amount of
time for the fire to reach the inside.
Typically nothing happens typically, but we don't know because there's no
oxygen in the bottle.
But once someone throws it, the fuel, the fire,
it goes flying, splattering everywhere,
and it's really dangerous.
They wanted to throw a Molotov cocktail
at a high school boy named Eric, a fellow student.
They just didn't like him.
But they can't ask him to come to the woods themselves
because he knows they don't like him.
So why would he go to the woods with them?
So they created this fake Instagram account
to lure him out into the woods
so that they could Molotov cocktail him.
They wanted to record the whole thing
and post it on every social media platform
because they thought it'd be hilarious.
But Eric did not bite their bait.
He blocked them.
Skylet and Eddie, they're really disappointed.
And honestly, they're very upset
because this is the fourth person they tried to kill.
And it fell through again.
There were three people before Eric
and there would be one more after Eric on their kill list.
October 2022, Scarlett and Eddie made a kill list,
a list of names of future victims, people
they wanted to kill.
There was no particularly good reason anybody was on that list.
I mean, not that there ever is an appropriate reason, but it could be something as trivial
as liking the same girl as Eddie.
Remember how Eddie had a crush?
Well that guy, Mark, liked the same girl.
For that, he was on the kill list.
They planned to chop off Mark's Achilles heel, chop his tongue off so that he
can't run or talk. Yeah, they wanted to torture him and Scarlett had an idea. She said, if we kill
Mark, can I keep some things? I'm going to keep a couple of his teeth and his eyeballs. I don't know
how I would cut out the eye though without damaging it or get the teeth out, but we should torture
him before killing him. Sometimes their target on the kill list changed, but the conversations were always the same.
Eddie would try to bring Scarlet back down to Earth. We can't just go and kill everyone that
you hate for the sake of it, okay? One guy was on Scarlet's kill list because he almost got her
expelled from school. Scarlet wanted him dead, gone, right now. Eddie tried to reason with her
over text, calm her down.
He responded, well, you can't just do that.
First, you have to lure him out depending on what excuse you use.
It can change the plan.
Like maybe you use drugs to overdose him.
If you said you were going to give him some drugs,
you could drug him.
Or if you invite him someplace, you could always assassinate him.
Well, I just want him dead ASAP.
Then you distract him, Scarlet, and I'll go from behind with my knife and then I'll stab him in his neck. Scarlet texts, okay fine, promise that
you're definitely 100% gonna go through with this. Scarlet waits for Eddie's text. Ding! If the plan
and timing are good, then yeah, I will. The two would even search for rope on Amazon
to strangle victims with,
but they concluded that $17 for rope was way too expensive.
Scarlett would keep brainstorming without the rope.
She would write down on a piece of paper,
okay, give them alcohol with sleeping pills,
slit throat, dismember body,
place pieces in black trash bags, bury
bags 7 feet underground, bones included in the bags. Yeah. That was her initial plan
that she wrote down on a piece of paper. And the kill list was ever rotating. Scarlett
was in charge of picking the victim and her mind changed every day on who quote deserved it.
She would pick some random small trivial arbitrary reason that someone needed to die
and then it was settled. She and Eddie would go about planning or fantasizing about the murder.
How long was it from like when did they start? October to February so like a month to February 11th
February, so like a month to February 11th. So like three to four months.
Yeah.
Wow.
Now one day in January, Scarlett texts Eddie
and she's complaining.
I think Brianna is prettier than me.
Eddie responds, but is it a feminine boy?
He uses a shortened version of that.
Or is, or a insert transphobic slur.
He followed it up with, I mean,
prettier than you, but it's a boy.
Scarlett told Eddie that she was getting nervous
and stuff around Brianna and she wasn't sure why.
She said, she's really different.
I'm kind of obsessed.
Eddie responds, tell me how you feel
when you interact with it.
Scarlett said, well, I get nervous and stuff. Eddie takes a moment to think
before responding and he says, I don't think you're necessarily in love. I think
you're more curious and intrigued by it's unnatural nature. You find it
interesting because the majority of people aren't trans. It's like you're
going to a funeral and one person is wearing pink. You're gonna be fascinated by their difference.
And somehow, Scarlett's jealousy,
fascination, obsession for Brianna
and Eddie's transphobia combined
would make Brianna their next target.
Scarlett made plans to meet up with Brianna
so that they could kill her.
At 11.25 a.m., Scarlett text Eddie,
I'm so fucking pissed.
Brianna just last minute said that she can't come
because of her stepdad's birthday dinner.
Let's kill her tomorrow instead at 6pm.
I don't wanna wait, I just want her to die so badly.
I wanna done ASAP.
I wanna see pure horror on her face
and I wanna hear her scream.
Eddie texts back, well I can't, not tomorrow,
because it's a school night.
Scarlet was annoyed with him, but she texted him a firm date, February 11th, 2023, mark
it on the calendar.
It's going to be February 11th.
We're going to kill Brianna.
Have you ever seen the movie Sweeney Todd?
It's like a musical, okay, but the plot of it is a bit violent.
It's a violent musical. It's about a man named Sweeney the plot of it is a bit violent. It's a violent musical.
It's about a man named Sweeney Todd,
who is played by Johnny Depp.
He shows up at a pie shop in London.
The pie shop is called Mrs. Lovett's Pie Shop.
But most locals in London,
they call it the worst pies in London.
They're disgusting.
They've got flies flying all around them.
But when Sweeney Todd walks in,
the pie shop owner instantly recognizes him.
You're the barber, aren't ya?
Benjamin Barker, you have to be.
Benjamin Barker was the local barber
who was exiled from London.
So one of the most powerful judges in London
decided that he wanted Benjamin Barker's beautiful wife.
So he came up with this random excuse
to have Benjamin Barker banished from London.
And once he was gone, his wife was all alone taking care of their one-year-old daughter. The judge invites her to a party, essays her,
she ends up self-exiting because of all the trauma she endures and the judge formally adopts
the barber's daughter. What kind of movie is this? It's a musical. Yeah. And now Benjamin
Barker, the barber, is back to get his revenge. Basically, he's gonna kill anybody who stands in his way.
He kills his victims with the barber's razor, slitting their throats, and he gives Mrs. Lovett,
the pie shop owner, all the bodies to bake into her pies.
It's cheaper than purchasing real meat for her meat pies, so she takes it,
and apparently it's a hit because everybody starts showing up to the bakery for more pies.
They can't get enough of these human meat pies. The meaning of the musical is basically dwelling on a dark past
and horrible injustices and seeking revenge for those horrible injustices are ultimately
going to destroy you and everyone around you. At the end, Sweeney Todd, the barber, he ends up dying.
But that's not the moral of the message that Scarlett cared about. Okay. She didn't even care
about the music. She was obsessed with the killing scenes Scarlett cared about, okay? She didn't even care about the music.
She was obsessed with the killing scenes.
There's about 11 throats that get slit in the movie and she texted a friend saying,
He kills people with one of the sharpest blades in the world.
One slit, slice things good, very deep.
It's really good and dark and gory and romantic.
I'm watching it for the 9000th time.
You should watch it too.
She would post Sweeney Todd clips to her social media accounts and mainly they were just compilations of the kill scenes.
She said it was her favorite movie of all time.
If she did indeed watch it 9000 times, the movie runtime is about an hour and 59 minutes.
If she watched it 9000 times, she spent about 18,000 hours watching the movie, or two full years
of her 15 year life.
And normally I'd say 9,000 times sounds like she's just exaggerating, right?
But she seems like she would have watched it 9,000 times.
Yeah.
Or at least a few hundred times.
We're not exactly sure how many times she rewatched it,
but we do know that rewatching Sweeney Todd
was what Scarlett wanted to do the night of February 10th,
the night before Brianna's murder.
She texted Eddie, I'm excited as fuck.
Eddie texts back, why?
Oh yeah, I forgot.
She texts, I'm watching Sweeney Todd again,
you should watch it. I can't, I can't
watch romantic movies.
See, I don't even know which one's more chilling. The one that say that I'm so excited or he's
saying that, oh I forgot.
He forgot.
Yeah.
What?
He's like, I can't watch romantic movies. Well, make sure you wear clothes and shoes
that you can run in just in case. What knife are you bringing tomorrow? The hunting knife that I showed
you in person? You should bring a knife too if you want to stab her because I'm
not gonna throw my knife at you. After those text messages, Skylette picked up
one of her journals to write in. If you were to flip up in a page and take a
quick glance, I mean it looks like any other high school girls journal. Pink
and blue gel ink with those little squiggly lines
and hearts doodled all over the page.
Scarlett's handwriting is very small and squished together,
so if you just glanced at the journal from maybe a few desks down
or from across the classroom, you would have no idea what she wrote.
But her little journal would have some of the most atrocious things in there.
If you flip the journal to a random page, you might land on Jeffrey Dahmer's page.
And just to give you a refresher, Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer, cannibal, necrophiliac,
meaning that he likes to have relations with deceased bodies. He was probably most widely known for
obviously the heinous nature of his crimes and the fact that he chose very specific,
he chose a lot of POC victims, but he also wanted to create love zombies.
He would kidnap victims, drill holes into their skulls
while they're still alive and try to pour acid
into their brains because he wanted their brains
to be turned off that he could control them just physically
and they would still be alive.
Where he could do whatever he wanted with them.
He was trying to create zombies, love zombies.
He was also very keen on keeping trophies.
The police found five severed heads in his kitchen.
But Scarlett had a page in her journal
in purple and pink gel pen that read,
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, squiggle, squiggle.
First line, gay, intelligent, very, very,
killed 17 boys and men, organized,
disorganized serial killer, not sociable,
sad that everybody leaves him usually disposed of bodies in a disorganized, badly way.
Next slide reads,
Dismembered bodies? Smart.
Alcoholic. Smoked weed.
When he's close to being caught, he usually panics and makes up a strange but smart and believable story to prove his innocence.
Disorganized. Made 14 year old, his own zombie with a drill.
Etc.
High IQ. 14 drill. Etc.
High IQ, 145, Genius level.
Side note, his IQ was not 145.
Most reports say that I was closer to 120.
So definitely not 145.
But I digress.
The page continues.
Loved getting roadkill and dissecting it.
Lonely, wants love, attention, affection from other men but never works out and they end
up dead.
Arrested, got beaten to death in prison. Last words? wants love, attention, affection from other men, but never works out and they end up dead, arrested,
got beaten to death in prison.
Last words?
She never wrote them, but allegedly they were.
I don't care if I live or die, go ahead and kill me.
If you flip to another random page in her journal,
you'll find John Wayne Gacy's page, The Clown Killer.
He had at least 33 victims and he was a sexual sadist.
On his page, Scarlet wrote,
33 victims, killed victims by strangling. Last words, kiss my ass. But her favorite was Richard
Ramirez, the night stalker, the one that took the eyeballs. She wrote on his page, the night
stalker, squiggle, squiggle, characteristics, rape, robbery, mutilation. Richard Ramirez quotes,
heart, big deal, death comes with the
territory. See you in Disneyland, which is
what he said when he was sentenced to death.
There's a list of all the quotes that he
said that she apparently really liked.
You maggots make me sick. I will be
avenged. Lucifer dwells within us all. I've
killed 20 people man. I love all that blood.
I love Satan. You know who I am, don't you?
I'm the one they're writing about in the
newspapers and on TV
Richard Ramirez was her favorite. He had over 15 victims and he was I mean
He would drink his victims blood by blending them up in his juicer
He was he would write messages on the walls and pentagrams to taunt the police
He's the one that gouged out the victims eyeballs and put them in his jewelry box as a trophy.
Scarlett would tell everybody around her, I could talk about him for at least two hours,
including quotes and dates and stuff.
But Scarlett felt like there was a fundamental difference between them and her.
Unlike those serial killers, she was going to get away with it.
The day after a teenage girl is found dead at the local park,
Scarlett's life starts spiraling out of control.
Scarlett is staring down at her phone
and she has a new message from a stranger on Facebook,
a stranger.
It read, is that your friend who got hurt?
Who was with you yesterday?
At the park?
I saw you at linear park.
Your friend's face looks familiar.
Scarlett could feel the blood pumping in her ears. at Linear Park. Your friend's face looks familiar.
Scarlett could feel the blood pumping in her ears. Who could have seen her together with
Brianna at the park? She tried to think of all the people they came across. Was it that
full-grown man playing hide and seek? It was John and Christina's turn to hide. Their
kids started counting and they're playing hide and seek.
It's a classic.
I mean, it's winter times
that the air is crisp
and the kids are just getting their energy out.
John wanted to stay close by,
but still kind of hide.
So he stood behind the trunk of a tree
and he would poke his head out
so that he could keep an eye on his kids.
From his hiding spot,
John looks around for his kids
and he's watching them.
But he sees someone in his peripheral vision.
He turns his head and he sees a young teen girl.
And the other, he couldn't really make out
if Eddie was a boy or a grown man.
I mean, something in the way that Eddie carried himself
just gave off like man-child energy.
John watches them as they start climbing up the steps
towards the trail, towards John.
Their heads are swiveling back and forth.
It's like they're scanning for someone or looking for forth. It's like they're like they're scanning
for someone or looking for someone. It feels like they're also playing a game of hide and seek.
It seems like they're looking for John. So John pulls his gaze from them and glances back at his
own children. And when he turns back around in the direction that they were, they have now reached
the top of the stairs and are now eye level with him. He makes eye contact with the both of them.
The boy looks away, but the girl keeps staring.
She just had these deep, intense blue eyes that he would never forget.
There's just something very dark about them.
John feels unsettled, so he calls for his kids and they start making their way down the
stairs and off the trail.
And then they see another teenager, a young girl on her phone sitting on a bench.
He can't help but notice that she had this beautiful waist-length red hair that made
her look like this real-life mermaid, like Ariel, and she had this very light presence
compared to the other two.
But it seems like the three were friends, it looks like they were at the park together,
but the energy was just so off
Earlier that day before John found them while playing hide and seek before he stared into Scarlett's eyes
Eddie and Scarlett had two bottles in their hands
Eddie had a Coca-Cola bottle Scarlett had a Dr. Pepper and they're checking out at the Sandsbury supermarket
They were gonna go over the plan one last time get her her to the park, isolate her. That's the plan, right?
And when Skylet says the code word,
Eddie's gonna take out his knife and slit Brianna's throat.
Does that sound good?
Sure.
And don't forget Eddie, the code word is gay.
Now, Brianna is starting to get a weird feeling
about all of this.
Probably not a dangerous feeling
because this is her friend,
but it was just odd, it's frustrating, it's weird.
I mean, Brianna agreed to meet up with Scarlett
at the park to do cocaine for the first time.
She was more peer pressured into it,
so she was really nervous about it.
I mean, for one, they're gonna do cocaine
for the first time.
And two, Scarlett said she was bringing a guy friend
that Brianna had never met.
Brianna was socially anxious,
so she didn't know how she felt about it.
And maybe it was the fact that they were planning
on doing drugs, Scarlett was having Brianna jump
through a million hoops that day.
There's a bus stop less than three minutes away
from Brianna's house that would have a bus
taking the same route, but no,
Scarlett told her, absolutely not,
you cannot go to that one.
You have to walk over a mile, walk 25 minutes to the Birchwood train station and get on a bus from there.
Why do you think she made her do that?
Okay, so some netizens suspect it was a power thing. Other netizens think that she's so dumb that she thought this was like a way that killers go about misleading the police.
This was like a way that killers go about misleading the police.
Okay, I can see that. Yeah. Yeah. Cause she's like analyzing all the killers and she thinks she's doing something.
Okay.
But she's not because there's CCTV footage everywhere.
Yeah.
So it really doesn't matter what bus stop that she gets on.
It's not like there was a CCTV dead zone at that bus station.
Now Scarlett tells her, good, there will probably be not as many people and get on
bus number 28 and ask for a child single ticket to Colchith library.
Brianna wasn't even used to catching a bus on her own, she was way too anxious for that.
This is all so strange but maybe there's a logical reason behind it?
Because Scarlett has been nothing but pretty kind to Brianna, so she went according to
the plan.
She walked 25 minutes to the Birchwood train station,
waited another 30 minutes for the bus to arrive, bus 28.
That's the one that she gets on.
Then when the bus came,
Brianna gave the driver her ticket and boarded.
The bus ride itself was only 15 minutes long
and Brianna would watch it pass her house on the way.
Then at 1.53 PM, Brianna meets Scarlett and Eddie
at the bus stop. It's Brianna's
first time meeting Eddie and maybe she got a strange energy from him. Or maybe she thought
that Eddie was shy too because Eddie distanced himself from the two girls. He keeps walking
further away from them. If a stranger walks past, they could possibly, reasonably guess,
that Eddie was not part of the group.
It was like 50-50. He's walking so far behind them. I mean, it's just weird. It's more like he's stalking them. He's like walking behind.
Scarlett seemed too distracted to try and calm down Brianna's uneasiness.
I mean, everything would have to go according to plan.
Scarlett even texted Eddie the itinerary for that day, the schedule.
It was handwritten on a piece of paper and at the top it read, The Murder Plan.
Time. Saturday, February 11th, 2023. Squiggle.
Victim. Squiggle. Brianna, Jai.
Plan. Squiggle. Meet Eddie at Wooden Post at 1pm. Check.
Walk down to the library at the bus stop. Done.
Wait till Brianna gets off the bus. Check.
And done.
Then the three of us will walk to linear park.
Currently in progress.
Once they get to the park, it does seem like the three of them feel a bit more comfortable
with each other.
They would periodically joke around, talking, and laughing with one another.
But Eddie seemed to resort back to hanging back and doing his own thing.
Like he might laugh for two seconds and then he would go back and do his own
thing. And now they just had to focus on the next best step.
Go to the pipe or the tunnel area,
a secluded area in the park that they had scoped out before this murder.
So far that part's not going well.
Brianna is starting to feel off about the whole thing and they could sense it.
They were supposed to meet up with a drug dealer to purchase the cocaine,
but Scarlett and Eddie just seemed like they were thinking about something else. They they could sense it. They were supposed to meet up with a drug dealer to purchase the cocaine, but Scarlett and Eddie just seemed like
they were thinking about something else,
they were doing something else,
I mean, the whole energy was off.
Brianna Snapchatted Scarlett while they're together.
Girl, I'm gonna wait where I am right here
until we have the drugs.
I'm way too anxious for this.
This is not going according to plan.
Scarlett starts going on her phone
and is furiously typing,
sorry, it's Nathan, the drug dealer.
Insinuating that she's having a very intense conversation with Nathan, the drug dealer,
likely to ask, where are you Nathan? Where are the drugs?
But she's not texting anyone. She's just texting herself.
And Brianna is not buying it. I mean, it's so obvious that Scarlett is messaging herself.
At 2.30pm, Brianna sends a message to her best friend,
Amelia, who lives three hours away.
What do you mean she's messaging herself?
She's like, oh, this is what Nathan said.
And she's just like-
Oh, she's fake texting.
Fake texting herself.
Yeah.
There is no drug dealer.
Who is Nathan?
There is no Nathan.
This is all just to lure her out to the park.
And she's catching on.
So Brianna
texts her best friend Amelia, who lives three hours away and says, Scarlett is so weird.
Girl, I think she's pretending to have a dealer. Not going according to plan. At 301
p.m., Scarlett texts Nathan, the supplier, just the word hurry. And then she looks at
Eddie and she coughs.
Eddie knew exactly what that cough meant
because along with the murder plan note,
the picture of the little handwritten note
of the murder plan, Scarlett had texted Eddie,
reconfirming everything just to make sure
he didn't forget anything.
She said, grab onto Brianna and slit her throat.
When she starts to fall, stab her in the back
and then pass me the knife.
I wanna stab her at least once,
even if she's already dead, just because it's fun, LOL.
Eddie responds, okay, then let's have two code words.
One for me getting the knife ready
and then the other one for me stabbing.
Scarlett says, okay, for getting the knife ready,
I will look at you and I'll cough.
And then for stabbing, the code word will be gay.
Before Brianna could even register what Scarlett said, because why did she just say gay?
What just happened?
Eddie throws her onto the floor and stabs her three to four times.
They're in like a semi-secluded area in the woods.
He looks down, there's blood everywhere, he starts to panic. Scarlett snatches the knife from him and just goes into a stabbing frenzy. Brianna
raises her arm to try and defend herself, but the knife slashes through the
tendons in her hands and her wrists and at any moment Scarlet can stop. She can
drop the knife. Instead, she plunges it down, fracturing Brianna's wrist bones.
She brings the knife all the way back up and back down again, and the stab passes through
Brianna's upper arm.
She could stop now.
Brianna has been nothing but kind and compassionate to her.
This was her friend who refused to believe murders who was on her side.
Instead, Scarlet plunges the knife back down, leaving Brianna's wrist gaping open.
And at this point, Brianna manages to escape from their grip.
She gets up and she starts running up the stairs in front of them.
She's trying to get to safety, flags someone down,
but she makes it halfway up the flight of stairs when she's pulled onto the ground again.
And at any point, they could have stopped.
But they stabbed Brianna 28 times,
14 to her head and neck, 14 to her chest back inside.
She was stabbed with enough force to fracture her ribs, vertebrae, and sternum.
One stab would reach a depth of at least 5 inches and it penetrated into her heart.
Her throat and lungs had been punctured, her jugular vein and neck arteries were both severed.
These are the two biggest veins and arteries in the body and if severed
you could die within five minutes and that's being generous. Many of the
stab wounds had caused damage to her bones including her chest bones, her ribs.
They would require considerable force to inflict those levels of injury. And
because of the location of where she was in the park it took police and
paramedics 20 minutes to get her. There was no direct path and she was pronounced dead at 402 p.m.
45 minutes after the visus, the couple stumbled upon her.
The couple watching the couple were the one that caught the police.
Yeah.
And the couple saw them.
Yeah.
And gave their description and everything, but they had already run off.
Now in the U S there is a 40% chance that you can get away with murder.
The UK has just reported an abysmally low rate of solved crimes.
We don't have the exact reputable stats for murder clearance rates, but we can imagine
perhaps it's similar to the US.
Which means, all Scarlett and Eddie had to do was make sure that they don't end up in
that 60%.
After they take off running from the park, Scarlett and Eddie both took separate routes
to get home.
Eddie hops on a bus, but he would make a few crucial errors in the first 24 hours.
Or really even like the first hour.
When Eddie boards the bus, he looks down and he notices blood on his hands.
He had already tucked away his bloody knife, but the hands are stained red.
He's seen on bus CCTV wiping his hands.
It's kind of an odd movement.
Then he starts pulling down his sleeves
to hide his hands from the view.
Eddie gets home at around 4 p.m.
and he patiently waits for the right moment to text Scarlett.
By this point, Scarlett has already been home.
Instead of taking a bus,
Scarlett ran all the way back to her house
since she lives pretty close to the park
and she had a few things that were top priority.
Scarlett took Brianna's phone.
She uses Brianna's phone to text herself.
Then Scarlett uses her own phone to delete a Snapchat thread
and then walks over to a nearby drain on the way back
to her house and tosses Brianna's pink phone in.
Very quickly, she was was home safe and sound
playing Brianna's favorite video game. It's said that Scarlett doesn't even really like this game
that much. Minecraft.
It seems like both Eddie and Scarlett's family did not notice anything odd or alarming about them, which I think is more odd and alarming.
But if we analyze their phone and internet activity, there is a lot going on.
Ding!
Scarlett would get a text message on her phone from Eddie.
So Scarlett, how's your cat?
Good, LOL, how's yours?
It keeps trying to purr.
Aw.
An hour later, Scarlett texts Eddie again.
My brother just told me not to go near Leonair Park
because a woman just got stabbed there.
I'm so sorry, do they both actually have a cat?
Yeah, they do, I think so.
So they are talking about their cats.
Yes, but I wonder if
it's code word for something or if that's their alibi to just be like, no, I was at home playing
with my cat. Eddie texts back, Jesus, really? Yeah, they said it's murder. Holy crap. The text
messages read like two high schoolers just finding out some local news. Their screenshotting, linking
news articles.
First news article is,
women still alive and taken to hospital via a helicopter.
Then at 7.18,
another news article is shared in the messages.
The headline reads,
police confirmed death of woman found with serious injuries at park.
Scarlett asks Eddie,
when do you think they'll find out a name?
At the same time, Scarlett's phone is making searches for Brianna on Snapchat.
She's watching her old videos.
But by 11pm that night, a few very interesting, very fascinating conversations are had between
Scarlett and Eddie.
Eddie texts Scarlett.
Do you know what my favorite quote is?
If you wish for peace, prepare for war.
The quote is originally in Latin.
Essentially, it means you have to be prepared to fight a war when necessary because that's the only way that you can achieve peace.
Skylete text back at 11.11 pm. Do you have any anxiety about getting caught?
Probably. You're not going to get caught. Don't worry, the police are shit here. I haven't been caught yet and I'm a lot less smarter than you. Yeah.
Phone records show the two of them reading any
and all press reports on the killing that they could find.
And all Scarlett could do was look up articles
about the stabbing at the park, send them to her friends,
text her friends about the stabbing in the park.
There was just one friend that she did not message
that night, but was always on the back of her mind.
February 12th, the day after, Scarlett texts Brianna.
Girl, is everything okay?
Some teenage girl got killed near Lunar Park.
It's on the news everywhere.
And why did you ditch us for some random guy from Manchester?
Like what the fuck, that is so fucked up.
So you were saying she didn't text her the first day.
No.
She texted everyone else.
And then texted her the second day and she's creating this alibi because she thinks,
oh wait, maybe Brianna's family knows that she's going to come meet with me.
Yeah.
So now I need to make it seem like she ditched us for some guy from Manchester,
throw the police off.
And literally someone saw her?
Yes, and not only that, it's like,
I don't understand the whole cat thing.
So she's like texting about the cat
almost as if she's creating the salad by like,
we're both home with our cats.
And then later that night, she's like,
are you anxious about getting caught?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So it's like, does she think that the police
are gonna check her phone
or does she not think that they're gonna check her phone?
Exactly.
Meanwhile, Brianna's sister, Alicia is home
when she hears Sirens going off in the distance. This is Brianna's sister, Alicia, is home when she hears sirens going off in the distance.
This is Brianna's older sister, and the sirens are getting progressively louder.
But instead of passing through and fading off again, it sounds like they're getting
closer and closer and closer, and then suddenly it stops.
And then there's a knock at the door.
Alicia swings open the door and she sees two police officers standing there.
They look disturbed, they look shaken up.
Can I help you? Is everything all right?
The police ask if they can come inside.
I mean sure, what's going on though? Is my mom okay?
We need to speak with the whole family.
Is there anybody else in the house?
Yeah, my sister Brianna is in her room.
The two officers glance at each other and they look very uneasy about that comment.
Are you sure your sister's in her room?
Alicia was certain, like Brianna is almost always home,
she's a homebody, but just to get some peace of mind,
she's like, yeah, she's always home, but I can go check.
She goes to check, she knocks on her door
and there's no response.
And she feels like this anxiety inching up
just bigger and bigger and she flings open the door
and Brianna wasn't home
and she wouldn't be coming home because her life was cruelly taken from her.
It took the police less than 24 hours to find who they were looking for. They took witness
statements, collected local doorbell and dashcam footage, CCTV footage. The last people to be
seen with Brianna were Scarlett and Eddie. They both fled the park after she was found stabbed. I mean, it's very obvious
that they were involved.
February 12th at 7.30pm, just over 28 hours after Brianna was stabbed, police arrest both
Scarlett and Eddie. The two of them had very interesting reactions to the arrest. Scarlett
looks straight at the officer, her face looks damp, but she has no tears, she's not actively crying, she does have a little bit of snot running down her nose, and she
asks, how come I'm a suspect? How come you're a suspect? Yeah, is it because I'm the last person
to have seen her? Is that why? The police just kind of stare at her, like she has no emotions on
her face as she's asking this, She's just staring straight at the officers,
almost as if she's challenging them.
Meanwhile, Eddie is forced onto his knees.
His hands are behind his back
and the officer with the body cam footage walks in
and says, are you Eddie?
Yeah.
His voice is super monotone.
No voice inflections, anything.
Just, yeah.
Robotic.
The officer reads him his rights and Eddie stands up
and he just mumbles in a robotic tone.
I can explain.
Within 48 hours of Brianna's murder,
the Cheshire police would be the ones doing
a lot of explaining.
They told the media and press, and I quote,
there is no information or intelligence
to suggest this was a hate crime.
By this point, the police had already read a ton
of the transphobic messages between Eddie and Scarlett
and they believed because the two had a prior kill list
that did not include transgender people,
Brianna's murder was not a hate crime.
They weren't targeting Brianna specifically
for being trans, that's what they said.
Brianna's lifestyle, they said, made her more vulnerable.
They said because she's anxious and she stays indoors a lot and is just a very quite vulnerable
individual, that's what made her relatively easy in terms of accessibility for the killers.
That's what they said.
And the media ran with it.
The media ran with it's not a hate crime and started committing hate crimes of their own.
Yeah.
In initial media reports,
many news networks dead named Brianna,
which means you use and refer to someone by their old name
that they no longer go by, which is incredibly offensive.
Additionally, some publications even stated
that Brianna had been living as a girl for several months.
That's what they said.
Who says that?
Living as a girl for several months.
Some headlines would switch
between ignoring
Brianna's trans status or they would just refer to her only as quote transgender girl.
While they also insisted in the same article, quote, there's no evidence of her murder
being a hate crime. A lot of netizens said Brianna was being killed and bullied once more
after her death by mainstream media. Now, as for the two killers, because they were minors at the time of their crime,
their identities were not initially released to the public,
but the judge decided to lift it and release their names
because they were already somewhat circulating on TikTok.
People were doxing them on TikTok.
Their names were later released and they became two of the most hated people in the UK.
Now before Eddie stops talking, he does a lot of talking. He blames the whole thing on Scarlett.
He said he never tried to murder anyone because, and I quote, it just goes against everything I
know and I believe, you know? One of the first things investigators noticed even during Eddie's
arrest was that he had a ton of tiny scratches and cuts all over his arms, face, and hands, even one near his eyes. And they're like, where did you get those?
Various reasons. Some were self-inflicted because, you know, I was stressed about an
upcoming exam. This one on the right arm was from chopping limes. Interesting. He said he was
chopping a lime when the knife slipped and it cut his arm. But the cut was on his right arm and
Eddie is right-handed so he just decided to chop limes with his left hand.
And what about the cut near your eye?
Oh, that was my cat.
He claimed that day he went to the park
to admire the trees,
but he had this sudden overwhelming urge to urinate.
So he went behind a tree to pee for about three seconds,
and when he was finished,
he turned around and saw Scarlett stabbing Brianna.
And he played zero part of this. He was absolutely innocent. He said he frantically asked Scarlett,
what are you doing? Why are you doing this? Scarlett told him bluntly because she tried
to break me and my boyfriend up. It's unforgivable. But that doesn't really make sense, does it?
Because the police found pants and a jacket in Eddie's room splattered with Brianna's
blood, as well as the blood soaked knife found shoved into his closet.
But Eddie sat there in the interrogation room.
He was allowed to hold a blue stress ball
to keep him from his stress, I guess.
He said he was just so panicked and stressed
and in a state of shock.
And the police said, well, what about the blood on your clothes?
Eddie claimed he went over to see if Brianna was still alive
and so he touched her and he got the blood on him.
He said the blood was on his clothes, shoes and hands
because he was checking for a pulse.
But that can't be true because blood splatter analysis
showed that Eddie would have had to been close up
when Brianna was stabbed.
And what about the knife?
Eddie had an excuse for that too.
He stated he actually never took that knife
out of the house ever.
He came home, washed his hands,
and for some reason he touched that knife,
and his hands weren't fully washed of blood,
so it transferred onto the knife.
Okay, what about the messages
where you're both talking about murder?
Eddie claims he just wanted to impress Scarlett.
He said that Scarlett had told him in person
that she was gonna write a book,
and I guess this was like their way of like method acting
So for her writing he said he just wanted to impress her with his knowledge
You guys were specifically talking about ways to preserve Brianna's body parts after the murder
Well, I thought I thought Scarlett just wanted to learn about preservatives. I didn't agree with anything
She said in those conversations. I mean nothing was really a plan. It was just me joking
I don't tend to speak to said in those conversations. I mean, nothing was really a plan. It was just me joking.
I don't tend to speak to people until I get used to them anyway."
Eddie said he thought everything Scarlett was saying was just a made-up fantasy.
He just went along with it because he wanted to impress her and he wanted a friend.
That's it.
Now, about the crazy transphobic messages, Eddie said,
It was all a joke.
I was just picking up what I've learned from people.
You know how people talk about other people?
I just pick it up and I use it.
Why would you just simply do what they do?
I have insufficient knowledge about myself
to be able to tell you why I copy what other people do.
He also claimed that he knew gay and bisexual people.
So, okay, yeah.
I mean, the police were not inclined to believe anything Eddie was saying.
So at that point, he just stopped saying anything at all.
He stopped talking to anybody except his mother before the trial.
He was diagnosed with selective mutism.
Now just a quick disclaimer, selective mutism is a very real thing.
Selective mutism is an anxiety condition where the sufferer is capable of speech and understanding language
But is incapable or unable to in certain situations
That typically deal with extreme loss or grief or stress
They can't talk in front of strangers
Sufferers said it feels like a switch suddenly flips and they can't speak even if they want to and they just want to like grab
Out their throats and they're trying to push the words out. It's so frustrating and it's even more frustrating
because it only happens in certain situations so people feel like you're faking it but they're not.
Now the condition is relatively rare and it's found in less than 1% of the population,
typically in younger children under the age of five and typically in girls. So Eddie's
sudden onset of selective mutism, very rare indeed.
But it doesn't really help him in any ways, right? In the trial?
It does.
It does.
Yeah, it does.
Okay, so let me tell you.
First, the trial is delayed for months because Eddie's legal team is struggling to communicate
with him on how he wants to proceed. The trial would officially begin November 27th 2023. It would
last for 18 days and for the first time in British history due to Eddie's new selective
mutism. And again, if it ever sounds like I'm skeptical about selective mutism, I'm not skeptical
about the condition or its existence or the real life effects
that it has on real people who have it.
I guess all I'm trying to say is,
I can't be 100% certain that that is what Eddie had, right?
Now, it did make the trial unnecessarily difficult.
For the first time in British history,
Eddie was allowed to give evidence
by typing it out on his computer.
That's how he gave his statements.
He would sit in a different room from the courtroom
with his little keyboard
and whenever he wanted to ask a question or say something,
words would appear on the screen
and they had to be read out for the rest of the court.
And it was a whole process because Eddie would stop to think
or he would delete everything he was typing,
fix up his grammar,
and then someone would have to read it out loud.
Do they see like real life typing?
Yeah. And it's just annoying.
Like I think it's also kind of insulting, like really now.
Yeah.
You know, and then he and Scarlett were also given
fidget toys in court, which a lot of people were upset by.
And I can kind of understand,
I was trying to wrap my head around it.
I can understand the use of fidget toys in courtrooms,
if it means if
the purpose is for a smoother trial for the victim's family.
But it is kind of annoying when they show up with like fidget toys and Sudoku books
that they're allowed to work on.
Like you're just puzzling.
Like I think that's kind of disres...
Like I mean I don't think that they're respectful people in any way shape or form to begin with but
Eddie was just playing so doku at like high key points of the trial, especially when they're describing Brianna stab wounds
He's just puzzling
And just as Eddie blames Scarlett Scarlett and her attorney were blaming Eddie
I mean the whole thing was really ridiculous at one point Eddie's attorneys even accused Scarlett and her defense team for stealing their defense.
It's giving I robbed a bank and then you robbed me how dare you. Side note at first before
the trial Scarlett did try to tell the police the whole Manchester guy story where she was
like oh Brianna left to go meet a guy from Manchester but once the police brought in
all the evidence she started answering with just no comment, no comment, Eddie did it.
She said the same thing about the text messages that they were all fantasies, that she'd just
like to fantasize about this.
The prosecutors asked her, why even fantasize about killing your friends?
Like that's not a normal thing.
And Scarlett would respond, I just found it all quite interesting.
Why did you tell Eddie that you already killed two people?
I just wanted him
to think that I was a serial killer to add to the fantasy. You told him that you wanted to
eat human flesh. Did you intend to eat human flesh? No. Then why did you tell Eddie that you wanted
to? I just, I just know that some serial killers would, like they'd be cannibals for example.
I thought I would introduce the fantasy with Eddie. It was just weird.
During the trial, Brianna's mom was devastated when she found out that her daughter was killed
by someone she knew as a friend.
She never met Scarlett, but Brianna used to talk about her
all the time about how they would hang out
at McDonald's afterwards.
And she would later say,
it was the worst possible person
that could have done this to her
because it was someone that we trusted,
someone that Brianna trusted.
As a parent, you would never imagine that another child, that your child is met from
school would be capable of such a thing.
It was also revealed that just four months before Brianna's murder, Scarlett did in fact
poison a 13 year old at her previous school.
That's why she transferred.
She brought a bag of gummies to school.
They were cannabis edibles and she kept trying to get everyone to try it.
She's like, try it, try it.
I mean, by this point, she already had a reputation
of being a creepy, untrustworthy person,
so everybody rejected.
Skylet was so peeved off by this
that she went up to a 13-year-old at her old school
and basically just forced them to take the gummy.
Within 15 minutes, the unnamed 13-year-old
started feeling an odd sensation tingly sensations like their
heart was racing their mind-body connection was not not intact they were hospitalized because
again we don't know how much like 13 year olds I don't think that they can metabolize much cannabis
and they were spiked they were poisoned they were drug. Yeah, which, I mean, it was a huge deal
but the school did not treat it like a big deal.
Essentially Scarlett poisoned a 13 year old
and this is crazy, but Scarlett was not expelled
from her school, she was just suspended for five days.
And in that time she was arranged to transfer
to a new school and her old school said
it was to give her a second chance.
She got transferred to Birchwood Community High where she would meet Brianna.
This was her second chance.
The new high school, they didn't even know the extent of the poisoning.
They just thought that she brought weed to school.
That's why she was being transferred.
During the trial, it's revealed that Scarlett and Eddie had tried to kill Brianna twice
before, so the Ibuprofen was one attempt.
And the second attempt was
they wanted to lure her out to the park like two weeks before the actual murder but it was Brianna
stepdad's birthday so she did not go. Now a lot of netizens initially thought that Scarlett was the
most vile of the two like she was more evil than eddie because there was a lot of notes and journals
that were released by the public her obsession with these really creepy movies and the serial killers. People thought that
because she's the one that befriended Brianna, she's the one sending all these text messages to
Eddie, he's just engaging, right? But she seems more excited about killing someone. That's what
netizens thought. But then after the trial, a lot of netizens think that Eddie is actually the more
evil one. I mean, don't get me wrong, Scarlett is twisted. Netizens think that Eddie is actually the more evil one I mean don't get me wrong Scarlett is twisted netizens think that she's vile evil gross and she's
Fascinated and excited about the idea of killing someone and she needs to help she needs to be kept away from society
She's a danger and she's an evil person, but Eddie Eddie seems to have killed on pure hatred alone
Like he hated Brianna for who she was.
The attorneys, the defense attorneys would argue that
because there were other people on the kill list
that were not transgender,
that meant that this was not a hate crime.
This was just two people who wanted to kill someone
and chose Brianna not because of her identity,
but because she was vulnerable.
Meanwhile, during the trial, Eddie's dad could not show up to court because this is so foul,
but just a few days before Eddie went on trial for murdering a 16-year-old girl, Eddie's
dad drove up to a bus stop in his Maserati.
He saw two 16-year-old girls standing there waiting for the bus, and he pulled down his
pants, exposed his privates, and started touching himself while making eye contact
with the two 16 year olds.
This is-
A couple days before that killing Eddie's dad.
Not the killing, the murder trial.
So he's already gonna be on-
Oh, this is in the middle of the trial.
Yeah, before the murder trial starts,
like while they're prepping.
The dad is driving around in a Maserati.
Yeah.
And they just pull up to two young girls
and doing that in public.
Yeah, girls that are the same age as Brianna.
And then he was caught?
Yeah.
He did it twice actually.
So that day he would drive
and he exposed himself and touched himself.
And then he was driving around town the rest of the day
and then found those two girls again on the street
and did it again.
When he was brought in by the police, he argued that he needed to have his pants down even
while driving due to his medical issues.
What are his medical issues?
He said that he would need to urgently pee the guirinade at any time.
So he always drove with his wee wee out is basically what he's saying.
Eddie's dad Kyle Ratcliffe also had indecent photos and secret recording videos of 12 to
15 year old girls in the changing rooms of a water park on his phone.
He tried to argue that someone sent them to him on Snapchat, but that was easily proven
as a lie.
He also searched up on the internet, explicit acts involving school children, while his son
was preparing for a murder trial.
He would be tried in the very same court as his son, and he was sentenced to 15 months in prison,
so he couldn't show up to Eddie's,
like the second half of his trial.
Wow, this is crazy.
Yeah, I don't even know what to say about that.
But in the end, prosecutors argued
that both Eddie and Scarlett were equally guilty.
They both planned and acted on the murder together.
It didn't matter who stabbed,
or if they both or who started at first, they played a role in her death. December 20th, 2023,
Scarlett and Eddie were both found guilty of murder. The judge stated transphobia was an
aggravating factor, but they did not get charged with a hate crime. They were both given life
sentences. Scarlett was sentenced to a minimum of 22 years before she's eligible for parole.
Eddie, a minimum of 20.
Brianna's mom, Esther, gave her impact statement
where she told the court,
due to Brianna's autism, ADHD, and anxiety,
she wasn't really good at spotting danger,
but nobody could have predicted
this situation was gonna be like this.
She said she was devastated
that it was someone that Brianna considered a friend.
She said someone we believed to be her friend, someone that
we trusted, someone that I was so happy that she had, fearing that my child had
been lonely. I have moments where I feel sorry for them because they have also
ruined their own lives. But I have to remember that they felt no empathy for
Brianna when they left her bleeding to death after their premeditated and
vicious attack, which was carried out not because Brianna had done anything wrong, but just because one hated trans people and the other thought
it would be fun.
I wish we knew more about Brianna's life before she passed, but I think just seeing the way
that Brianna's mom Esther has been carrying herself with so much grace and compassion,
which she absolutely does not need to have in this situation.
I think it's very easy to tell
what kind of person Brianna was too,
because this is her mom.
When the verdict was read for Scarlett and Eddie,
Esther said, when the verdict came through,
I saw how devastated one of the moms was.
Scarlett's parents have been really,
like they have fully disowned Scarlett.
They're apologizing nonstop.
They want nothing to do with Scarlet.
But Brianna's mom said,
it kind of made me feel that's how I felt
when I found out about what happened to Brianna.
I don't feel that either Scarlet or Eddie
are the type of people that would get on very well
in prison and I suppose that is now a worry
for their parents.
For me, I feel that Brianna is in a better place
but they've got to continue knowing what their children have done. And it's true that we've
all lost our children. At one vigil held for Brianna, everyone turned on their phone flashlights
and lifted them in the air for two minutes of silence. And Brianna's mom said, if she could
see from wherever she is now, I think she would have been very happy.
Brianna's mother Esther now has started Peace in Mind, UK,
a nonprofit dedicated to teaching mindfulness techniques
in schools with the aim of teaching children
to cope with negative emotions in a very healthy way.
There is a GoFundMe that I've linked below
where all the profits will go to training teachers.
But there's a book called Beyond the Gender Binary and it reads,
how are you supposed to be believed about the harm that you experience when people
don't even believe that you exist?
And that's how the trans community felt when the authorities and the press
refused to classify this as a hate crime.
There are some vile comments on Twitter of people dead-naming Brianna,
of people misgendering Brianna, and somehow trying to excuse her killers because Brianna
was transgender. The vigils held for Brianna were a mixture of vigils and protest. I mean,
it was a mixture of grief and anger. Many of Brianna's friends who have spoken out
since her murder, many of them are from the trans community
and they said the minute that they spoke out,
people, strangers started flooding their comment sections
with just deplorable things.
One friend told Vice News,
they can't let go of their horrible politics
for just one minute.
They're constantly trying to debate
or trying to say that she was a man.
It's vile.
One of Brianna's friends stated,
I cried myself to sleep the last few nights.
I don't feel safe to leave my own house anymore.
And I remember hearing about Bree's death
and I instantly ranted to my mom and I just said,
I don't know what to do anymore.
I feel like nowhere is safe for us.
According to a spokesperson for the Mermaids UK,
a charity for transgender youth, they
saw a 31% spike that week in calls to their helpline.
Another friend of Brianna's just said, I pray that her death isn't meaningless, and
for the UK government and society to see the issue and change, because we can't let this
happen again.
Brianna's biological dad stated,
"'No amount of time spent in prison
will be enough for these monsters.
They are pure evil,
but Eddie is trying to appeal right now."
And I'm not sure what we can do as netizens,
but I hope this video is a reminder
of the person that he is
and how he does not deserve an appeal
and he does not get to make up all these bizarre excuses
of how he just talks like that
because he heard other people talk like that,
and how he knows gay people.
He played Sudoku while the prosecutors recounted
how Brianna was stabbed.
He texted that he wanted to know if it would scream
like a boy or girl.
Brianna's funeral was held March 15th, 2023.
She was pulled by white horses in a white carriage with pink feathers.
All mourners were asked to wear pink.
And Amelia Brianna's best friend was in attendance and this was the first time they were meeting in person
at her funeral.
I think being a doctor for inmates would be a very emotionally exhausting job,
especially if that includes juvenile offenders.
Doctor Church was sitting in front of Scarlett
and she said that she had something she wanted to say.
She was incredibly calm and she said,
I indeed did kill Brianna, I stabbed her.
Why?
I found it exciting.
She said that she was the one that made the final injuries
and if she wasn't interrupted,
she would have dragged Brianna's body
to the secluded woods to hide her.
Why?
I never wanted her to leave.
I didn't want her to stop being my friend,
so I killed her so that she could always be with me.
She admitted to the doctor that she wanted to take parts
of Brianna's bodies as a token.
She wanted to keep Brianna's pretty eyes.
Scarlet would later immediately take it all back
and blame Eddie for the attack.
She was also asked if she had any regret
for Brianna's murder, and she said,
I did for two hours, now I don't give a fuck
and I do it again.
Whoa.
Which side note, it's also messy, but Scarlett created another kill list
while she was in prison and it's just names of like several staff members,
doctors and guards that were taking care of her.
Meanwhile, Eddie is allegedly in speech therapy on taxpayer money and
complains about how fruit is not fresh enough at his facility.
And here's what's interesting. Apparently doodles mean something. Like what someone chooses to doodle and at what point they doodle that could have a lot of meaning.
During the trial, Scarlett sat there folding a piece of paper, refolding it, opening it, folding it, and drawing a very detailed eye. She would color the pupils and sketch the eyebrows, and
it's stated that people who draw eyes want to be seen.
Or they feel like they're being watched and they don't like it.
It's likely that Scarlett wanted to be seen.
But she won't be, because she will be in prison and
she will be watched 24 seven by guards
Thousands of people will remember Brianna forever
Thousands of people have showed up to her vigils to hold signs that read rest in pride rest in power
Pride and power again
Something scarlet and eddie will never have ever
And
That is the case of Brianna Jai.
Is a really heavy one.
What are your thoughts?
I'm gonna leave a link to Brianna's mother's charity
in the description.
If you have even like a dollar,
if you resonate with their mission,
I would check it out.
And with that being said, please stay safe.
And I will see you guys on Wednesday.