Urine under bed paints picture of oddball killer

IT was the strong smell of ammonia which first struck detectives when they walked into Luke Mitchell's bedroom.

If that initially puzzled them, then their next discovery would startle even the most hardened investigators.

There lying under the teenager's bed were bottle after bottle of a cloudy liquid, looking suspiciously like urine.

More bottles were hidden away in drawers, some wrapped up in socks. Soon there were 20 bottles lying in front of the bewildered detectives. Lab tests would later show they were the 15-year-old's own urine.

As the evidence was bagged and labelled by forensic officers, along with items including a CD of shock rocker Marilyn Manson and a knife pouch inscribed with the demonic number 666, detectives can have had little idea how controversial their finds would become.

They would prove to be crucial in convincing first the procurator fiscal, and then a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh, that the police had indeed caught the killer of Jodi Jones.

The Crown used these finds, and further police discoveries about Mitchell's often bizarre behaviour, to paint a picture of a dysfunctional boy, obsessed with knives and the macabre, and capable of duplicity.

Their reliance on this circumstantial evidence would, perhaps inevitably, lead to the whole case against him being challenged.

Mitchell's legal team focused on the use of colourful details about his often bizarre habits, and the behaviour of the police, as they built their case for appeal.

In February, at the Appeal Court in Edinburgh, Donald Findlay QC would argue that prosecutor Alan Turnbull and his team effectively smeared the teenager's character during the original trial.

The suggestion was that all the talk of oddball behaviour was little more than smokescreen. They argued that it was designed to distract the jury's attention away from a lack of any hard evidence, such as DNA or a murder weapon.

Mitchell's mother Corinne – who has devotedly stood by him, regularly visiting him at Polmont Young Offenders Institute – watched on impassively throughout the 10-day appeal.

The 47-year-old, usually smartly dressed in sombre trouser suits, only occasionally broke her concentration on the evidence to whisper at crucial moments to her female companion.

She had waited more than three years to hear someone stick up so publicly for her son.

She heard Findlay tell the Appeal Court the discovery of the urine bottles should never have been mentioned to the jury during his trial.

"What this evidence was intended to do was to create some prejudice in the minds of the jury to the effect that Mitchell was an oddity with a habit which some people would regard as unsavoury, at least, and bizarre, at the other end of the scale," he said.

He added: "The leading of this evidence, which had nothing whatever to do with the death of Jodi, was manifestly unfair and unnecessary."

He particularly questioned the way the prosecution introduced as evidence a Marilyn Manson CD which Mitchell bought two days after the murder. It was apparently the only Manson CD the schoolboy owned.

The jury were shown excerpts from the bonus DVD included with the album – The Golden Age Of Grotesque – featuring scenes of two girls tied together near a country track and struggling as hoods are placed over their heads. Jodi's body had been discovered by a woodland track.

The prosecution also produced some of the singer's original paintings, depicting the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short, the infamous 1940s Hollywood murder victim known as the Black Dahlia.

The respected pathologist Professor Anthony Busuttil, who carried out the post mortem on the murder victim, testified to similarities between Jodi's catalogue of savage wounds and those found on Short's corpse.

Findlay, himself one of Scotland's most persuasive courtroom operators, would suggest the Crown had "skilfully" exaggerated evidence "to obtain from it some kind of sinister inference".

Mitchell's appeal team would also question the behaviour of detectives during the investigation, suggesting they bullied the 15-year-old, behaving like "interrogators" trying to "break his resistance".

The interviewing officers, he pointed out, accused the schoolboy of selling cannabis, called him a "hash-head" and accused him of carrying a Bowie knife and being obsessed with knives.

Findlay said at one point Mitchell, now 19, responded: "I don't know what a Bowie f****** knife looks like."

At this point the appeal judge Lord Osborne interrupted, saying: "He is not exactly a wilting violet in giving a reply like that."

Findlay contended: "The police were provoking this 15-year-old and they were trying to get at him and it was working."

Mitchell's defence team argued that overall there was an "enduring sense of unease" surrounding the evidence used to convict their client.

Findlay argued there was simply not enough evidence to find Mitchell guilty beyond reasonable doubt and that police made errors as they investigated the case.

He also claimed Mitchell did not get a fair trial because his case was heard too close to where the crime took place.

Mr Findlay argued the "unreasonable" decision not to move the high-profile trial away from Edinburgh was enough to result in a miscarriage of justice.

It was claimed that "emotional" media coverage in the wake of the killing – and coverage "hostile" to Mitchell – would have had the greatest impact in the minds of people living in and around Edinburgh. Findlay dismissed the total evidence presented by the Crown as being "exaggerated out of all proportion".

It was evidence, though, which moved the original trial judge Lord Nimmo Smith to tell Mitchell he had committed "a truly evil murder".

Today, the appeal court effectively upheld that view.

Luke Mitchell loses murder appeal

Urine under bed paints picture of oddball killer

How the case against Luke Mitchell unfolded

Read summary of the appeal court decision