Drug addict linked to murder of Jodi

Published on Sunday 10 December 2006 00:55

LAWYERS for Luke Mitchell are set to apply for his temporary freedom after the emergence of dramatic new evidence suggesting a drug addict who fantasised about killing women may have murdered Jodi Jones.

The evidence, combined with the fact that the case against Mitchell was circumstantial and there was no forensic evidence linking him to the crime, could provide the opportunity for the 18-year-old to clear his name for the brutal killing of his girlfriend.

The possibility of a new suspect emerged when a former student with links to Dalkeith - the scene of the murder in June 2003 - made a statement to police in August in which he revealed that he believed a friend and fellow student had killed Jodi.

Three weeks before the murder, he said, the student had produced an essay for his female tutor called Killing a Female in the Woods. On the day after the murder, he had scratches on his face and arms and claimed he did not remember how he got them. He later gave friends at least three different explanations.

Both men were recovering from addiction problems and aiming to get into further or higher education. The man who made the statement to detectives is now a student at Stirling University.

In a series of dramatic revelations about his friend, he said that although a course they were attending was supposed to be "substance free", his friend drank heavily, smoked cannabis, took valium and temazepam and was on the heroin substitute, methadone.

He also often took alcohol and cannabis into the woods, close to the site where Jodi was murdered, to avoid detection by course supervisors.

Like Mitchell, he was a devotee of rock bank Nirvana and singer Marilyn Manson, whose paintings of the infamous Black Dahlia murder victim, Elizabeth Short, appeared to have influenced the killer in mutilating Jodi's body.

The student also had a fascination with websites that displayed graphic images of violence. And

he was suspected by those running the course of carving the words 'kill' and 'die' and the Nazi swastika on doors.

The man who made the statement was sufficiently concerned to call police at their incident room in the days immediately after the murder to alert detectives to his fears. He urged his friend to go forward, as all people in the vicinity had been asked to do, for elimination from police inquiries.

Eventually, he gave his friend a lift to the police station, but was asked to drop him at the end of the road. He was never convinced he had gone in.

Mitchell was later jailed for at least 20 years after being found guilty by a jury - and the man who has made the statement temporarily put aside his concerns. However, news that Mitchell had been granted leave to appeal persuaded him to approach police again.

He made a police statement which was passed to both the Crown Office and Mitchell's lawyers. Gillian Law, a solicitor representing Mitchell, said the statement "raises very serious issues in respect of both its factual content and the Crown's duty of disclosure of all the evidence to the defence."

It is known that tiny traces from an unidentified person were found on Jodi's body. Mitchell's lawyers now want that sample to be compared with a swab from the potential suspect.