"A perfectly normal girl."

Almost inevitably, the naming of Brianna Ghey's murderers was a ghoulishly gleeful event for parts of the British press.

Content warning: This edition discusses the coverage of the trial and conviction of Brianna Ghey’s killers. It does not name them or contain references to the details of that killing but be aware that some readers may still find it distressing.

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The tightly cropped picture shows a teenage girl, her eyes dark with mascara, her lips shiny with gloss, smiling at the camera. It’s an image that is almost crushingly prosaic; there are hundreds of millions of similar photos on Instagram, tacked to pin boards, and nestled in family photo albums. The headline beside it gives the context to turn such an ‘ordinary’ snap into something utterly grotesque:

Teenager’s lust for fame led to murder of Brianna

I doubt that the editors at The Daily Telegraph who nodded through that splash spent more than a moment contemplating the grim irony of opting for a smiling, polished shot of the 16-year-old killer rather than the girl whose life she took — Brianna Ghey. The judge’s decision to name the girl and boy who planned and committed Ghey’s murder — chivvied along and cheered by press — has also enabled that ‘fame’, but the Telegraph could have chosen the stark images of the killers in police custody and not how the girl chose to present herself.

Peter Spooner, Brianna’s father, told Sky News that he has changed his mind about naming the killers:

At first, I thought they should be named. Why should they be protected? People should know who they are. 

Now, I think their names are always going to be tied to Brianna's all the time. I think they should just be forgotten about, locked up and not be spoken about again. They're nothing.

While the news media is well aware of how killers seek and thrive on notoriety, it plays the same game every time: Indulging its grimmest instincts and most prurient desires. Grizzled hacks — and those who like to cosplay as ‘grizzled hacks’ — would no doubt sneer that it is simply how things work and that it’s what the public wants. Certainly, since the very first newspapers hit the streets, stories of murder have sold copies but the ink-stained habitués of Grub Street spent far less time congratulating themselves on their honourable social purpose.

Even as reports detail the killers’ fantasies, they reinforce them. The Sun’s story on the convictions breathlessly explains:

[She] had started fantasising about death and murder since she was 14 — downloading a browser allowing her to search the dark web for ‘red rooms’, which show real-life torture and killing videos. 

While the dark web exists, so-called ‘red rooms’ are a long-standing urban myth. The killer may have believed in them but a national newspaper reporting a murder case should restrict itself to the realms of reality. But horrifying facts are never enough for The Sun; it garnishes even the truly gruesome events with horror movie language. So a subhead reads Chilling messages revealed bloodlust and copy talks of Brianna being “slaughtered” while going into explicit detail about her injuries. A picture gallery — all the better for upping click rates — includes an image of the murder weapon.

In a search engine-traffic chasing story on the killers, the paper falls back on its usual argot: Brianna becomes “tragic Brianna” — her life reduced to her violent death — and her murderers are “the sadistic pair”, “the vile pair”, and “the twisted teens”. Since the murderers were named, The Sun has published six stories on the case, only one of which focuses more on Brianna Ghey’s family than the people who killed her.

Like The Sun, The Daily Telegraph rehashed the talk of ‘red rooms’ with no caveats for its readers:

[The girl] had also downloaded a “dark web” internet browser app to watch videos of the torture and murder of real people in “red rooms”.

Meanwhile, the Mail finds an expert willing to suggest the ‘red rooms’ exist:

Professor Alan Woodward, a computer science and cyber security specialist from Surrey University, said so-called red rooms – underground internet sites where people are physically abused to draw blood and even killed – were difficult to find and, consequently, hard for the police and law enforcement agencies to shut down.

The jury was told that Girl X downloaded an 'onion browser' six months before Brianna's murder which allowed her to access and watch videos of people being murdered and tortured, sometimes via live streams, on the dark web without being traced.

They’re “difficult to find” because they don’t exist in the form that the killer claimed to have seen in her messages nor in the form that Woodward and the Mail’s reporters suggest. While there are extremely violent videos on the dark web, the nature of the Tor network (the “onion browser”) makes live streaming unworkable. While there are plenty of adverts for red rooms, they’re usually scams to get crypto-currency.

The Telegraph’s story contains the line:

[The killer] was, in fact, in the words of the judge who sentenced her to life in prison on Friday, the driving force behind the “sadistic and transphobic” killing of Brianna, 16.

In the month leading up to the naming of the murderers, the Telegraph published 31 news stories and columns about trans people, every one negative. In common with most other newspapers, the Telegraph printed the victim impact statement from Brianna’s mother, in which she wrote:

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.

The same newspapers that write with justified horror about the violent videos that the killers sought out are hungrily and hurriedly pointing their readers to clips from the day that Brianna died and the moment her killers were arrested. See the killers! See the weapon! See the victim in her last moments! See the police interviews! This is ‘content’ — cold and calculated.

The Daily Mail, which has created a ruthless content production line, turning ongoing trials — including that of Ghey’s killers — into podcasts, has rushed out a YouTube ‘documentary’ on the case, promoting it on every story it publishes.

Presented by Mail journalist Tom Rawstorne, who narrates in portentous tones over dramatic music, ‘Killer kids’ intent on murder - Brianna Ghey: Teen Murderers Unmasked, is trash. For all the hushed voices, grim faces, and claims to be trying to ‘understand’ the case, it’s filth for Mail readers to roll around in and another desperate attempt to increase the publisher’s lacklustre YouTube following.

The most recent episode of The Trial, the Mail’s murder case podcast, begins with an voiceover that brightly says, “Seriously popular” then an ad for the latest series of True Detective. That’s appropriate because the podcast’s producers and presenters are turning real suffering into entertainment, bringing the ‘true crime’ trend to its most exploitative conclusion with no delay between events in court and their repacking as something to listen to while walking the dog or doing the washing up.

Along with the sheer callousness of its content production pipeline, the Mail indulges in its usual hunt for reasons someone relatively well off and, crucially, white would commit a horrendous crime. In its profile of the girl killer, badged “exclusive” and placed behind the new Mail+ paywall, Rawstorne writes:

… what makes [her] story so hard to fathom is that, unlike so many other child murderers brought up in broken, dysfunctional families, she had a start in life that many would envy.

The ‘investigation’ boils down to asking around about the family and picking through the girl’s social media posts. Unremarkable details are turned into portents:

Another TikTok collection has the title #gothic and features Gothic architecture with a soundtrack entitled Tear You Apart by American band She Wants Revenge. Lyrics to the grungy, guitar-heavy song include the verse: ‘I want to hold you close, soft breasts, beating heart, as I whisper in your ear, I want to f***ing tear you apart.’

Decades after the first moral panics over heavy metal and horror movies, papers like the Mail still delight in the notion that a taste for the macabre is a useful indicator of future murderous intent.

There’s a common desire in the press — in Britain and beyond — to be able to give even horrifying and complicated stories a neat kicker. That’s perfectly illustrated in the conclusion to the Mail’s profile:

With her hair scraped back and favouring dark-coloured pinafore dresses, a white collar showing beneath, some court observers noted a passing resemblance to Wednesday Addams, the little girl from the Addams Family films who was fascinated by the macabre. She, of course, was a work of fiction. Jenkinson, and her senseless crime, all too real.

While taking special care to mention property prices in horrific stories is usually the Mail’s modus operandi, in this case it was beaten to it by The Times:

[She] lived with her mother in a £250,000 semi-detached house in Culcheth, a village with a population of 7,000, on a quiet estate that was built shortly after the war.

Rightmove and Zoopla put the average house price in Culcheth at roughly £370,000 so the “£250,000 semi-detached” detail tells us very little, especially as other reports suggest the home is rented anyway. The reporting clichés keep on coming:

As a child, she was like any other girl her age. She spent her time making TikTok videos of her and her friends dancing and singing. She looked after her cat and her brother’s boxer, Mac, and played online games on the computer in her bedroom. “She looked a perfectly normal girl,” one neighbour said.

Vox pops are one of the most pointless, space-filling, assumption-strengthening tools in journalism. In the aftermath of a traumatic event, you’re guaranteed to get quotes from the nosier neighbours with variations on the themes of “things like that don’t happen around here” / “they kept themselves to themselves” / “they seemed very normal” because people generally don’t know much more than that. Proximity to an event does not translate to insight about the perpetrators or victims.

Absence of insight is, of course, no impediment to Sarah Vine offering her take. Her Mail on Sunday column inevitably manages to make her feelings and imaginings central to a story about the murder of a teenager by two other teenagers:

… here was this perfectly normal-looking child, pictured with her parents, riding a pony, smiling and posing on social media like any teenager. In some photos, she even reminded me of my own daughter at that age, a terrifying notion that I immediately pushed to the back of my mind.

But it made me think: what if that were my child? What if I'd been responsible for bringing this killer into the world? What if that evil had been germinating in my house, without me even knowing?

… The world is full of badly-behaved teenagers who push boundaries and indulge in destructive behaviour, but what makes two people cross the line from delinquency to murder? What renders them so desensitised to other people's suffering that they can contemplate the kind of crimes these two committed?

In many cases, there's a history of parental abuse, addiction or neglect, or some kind of deep trauma that, while never a justification, can at least offer an element of explanation.

But with Brianna's killers, there's none of that. Both came from respectable, stable families. [The female killer's] mum is a teacher, her dad a tradesman. 

What’s explicit in Vine’s column is implicit in much of the press coverage of the killers: “They came from ‘nice’ families, not the sort we usually demonise so casually, and they’re white so we don’t have recourse to our usual explanations for this kind of violence.” It’s also notable that Vine makes sure to quickly dismiss the transphobic motives for Brianna’s murder (“That she was trans was also a factor, but it does not seem to have been the prime motivator.”) The Mail titles publish reams of negative stories about trans people daily.

Even as the news pages of the Mail and Mail on Sunday luxuriate in the most graphic details of the killing, Vine writes with her usual false piety:

Just because your child is in their bedroom, never assume they're safe. Don't assume that because you have eyes on them in the real world, they are not lost in some dark place far beyond your reach… 

… If Brianna's killers had not been encouraged by extreme violence witnessed online, had violence and murder not been legitimised and normalised by the films they watched and the games they played, perhaps murder would not have become their sick game in real life.

Perhaps, too, the boundaries between boastful fantasy and cold, hard reality would not have been blurred to the point where two immature and troubled minds could not tell the difference. And perhaps sweet, gentle Brianna would be alive today.

The papers default to these familiar warnings about films and games because it’s an easy answer to a terrifying question: Why did these ‘normal’ teenagers commit such a horrific crime? Questions about wider society, the education system, social services, and the influence of the media itself in how minorities are perceived and treated don’t make for an easily emotive column or strident editorial.

I’ve consciously avoided using the names of Brianna’s killers in this edition. There’s no need to contribute to fame or infamy for them. There may be interest from parts of the public about the most gruesome details of a killing and the minute details of killers lives — it’s long been clear that ‘true crime’ is a money-spinner — but these things are not public interest stories. It’s a familiar argument but it’s worth repeating again and again because reporters and their editors don’t listen.

While decrying violent horror films, the media spends a lot of its time turning real life events into its own strikingly similar product. The difference is that the story goes on after the credits roll and the wounds can’t be wiped away.

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