I WATCHED MITCHELL TORMENT JODI WITH HIS BLADE.
Byline: By Amy DevineSADIST Luke Mitchell used a knife on Jodi weeks before he murdered and mutilated her.
Jodi, 14, writhed in pain as her twisted boyfriend repeatedly jabbed the blade into her leg.
She cried out at each blow but Mitchell seemed to be enjoying himself.
Mitchell tormented Jodi with the knife at a party, in full view of their friends.
One witness said yesterday: 'It was very disturbing. Luke could see that it hurt and he seemed to be getting a kick out of it.'
Mitchell had used blades to terrorise girls before.
When he was 12, he threatened his then girlfriend with a knife because she refused to have sex with him.
And in the months before Jodi's murder, he grabbed a female friend from behind, pressed a knife to her throat and said: 'Don't move - or I'll gut you.'
Mitchell and Jodi went to the party at a friend's house six weeks before the murder. He used the knife to cut up cannabis, then turned on his smitten young girlfriend.
One friend who witnessed the abuse said: 'Luke and Jodi were sitting together and he was poking her in the leg with a knife.
'He was jabbing her with it quite hard and she was jumping up and down because of the pain. It seemed a really cruel thing to do.
'One girl was particularly disgusted. She shouted at Luke to put the knife away and told him she would stick it up his a*** if he didn't. He stopped.'
The witness added: 'We never dreamed Jodi would be dead weeks later.
'Looking back, it makes my skin crawl to think it was a warning that no one heeded.But we were just kids.'
After Jodi's murder, one of her friends told police what had happened at the party.
The girl was put on the witness list for Mitchell's trial. But it's understood prosecutors decided not to call her because of concerns that the defence would attack her credibility.
It was feared that because drugs were freely available at the party, the jury would be distracted from the real issue - Jodi's murder.
Mitchell showed his cruelty again in May 2003, just a few weeks before he killed Jodi.
At a youth club near his home, he grabbed a girl he knew from behind, dragged her into a side room, and held a knife to her throat.
The girl recalled: 'He said, 'Don't move or I'll gut you.' 'At first I thought he was just mucking about, but then I started to feel threatened. He was saying he was going to cut me and stuff like that.
'I was nipping his arm to get him off me and after a couple of minutes he let me go.
'I was sore round my neck.It was bright red afterwards.
'I went outside and just tried to ignore him but then he came out as if it was all a laugh and said sorry.
'There was no reason for him to do it - he just pulled a Swiss Army knife and grabbed me. I thought that it was really strange.'
The girl met Mitchell at the youth club and said he seemed like 'a nice bloke' at first.
But later, he turned violent and moody. The girl said: 'He was quite aggressive to me and to other people. He was really bad-tempered and totally unpredictable - he didn't want to be told what to do.
'I knew he carried weapons and he had a Swiss Army knife. I wondered why he had it but I never questioned him at all.' The girl said she struggled to believe at first that Mitchell was capable of murdering Jodi.
But she added: 'As all the stuff started to come together, I began to think it was possible, because of the way he acted and what he did to me.'
Two years earlier,Mitchell had threatened a 12-year-old girlfriend who resisted his sexual advances. She was terrified, and still refuses to talk about the incident.
Mitchell had a sick passion for knives. His mum even bought him a new blade for Christmas after Jodi's murder.
Forensic psychologist Professor Vincent Egan, of Glasgow Caledonian University, said: 'In the case of Luke Mitchell you have someone with underlying mental health problems. Adolescence is the peak time for people to develop such problems.
'The vast majority of teenagers go through their rebellious phase, listen to music their parents don't approve of, smoke some cannabis then grow out of it.
'Luke Mitchell is different.'
CAPTION(S):
VICTIM: Jodi. Above right, a knife bought for Mitchell by his mum
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| Publication: | Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland) |
|---|---|
| Date: | Jan 22, 2005 |
| Words: | 771 |
| Previous Article: | Months of anguish that led to court; TIMELINE. |
| Next Article: | THE POEM THAT MITCHELL WROTE FOR JODI. |