Who was Christine Jessop?
Obviously, there is no substitute for actually knowing a person. Since that is impossible in the case of Christine Jessop, we must try to create a picture or portrait of a young girl from the facts provided in Kirk Makins Redrum: The Innocent and the Kaufman Report. I have made an attempt to assemble the relevant details from both sources and arrange them in a way that might give us a sense of who she was.
First, Janet Jessop describes her. (This is verbatim from the Kaufman Report)
Q. Now Janet, at this Inquiry we've heard many details of Christine's death and the subsequent murder investigation, but we haven't heard anything about Christine's life. And I know that this is something that you've been wanting to tell at the Inquiry, and hopefully this will be your last time here. And I thought that this is your opportunity to tell the Inquiry at little bit about Christine herself.
J.J. Okay. She was a normal nine-year-old little girl. She was all of forty pounds soaking wet excuse me. She really loved life. She loved her family, her uncles, her aunts and her cousins. She was a happy, sensitive, lively, caring and a little clean-freak girl. She had a terrific sense of humour. She was fun, she was feisty, and she loved to help in whatever you were doing, she just wanted to be with you. And she was a little going concern and a very loving child. She loved school and she loved sports, particularly baseball. And she adored animals and particularly her own dog, Freckles. And she was the little type, she could go from a real lady to a little tomboy. She'd put the worms on the hook for her brother because he couldn't put them on. And she even slept with the baby chicks so that they wouldn't be alone at night. And she was a very responsible little girl, she never wandered off from me for a minute. If she went to someone's home to play, or went to her grandparents for the weekend, she'd be phoning every five minutes just to say, hi. So that's the type of little girl that I lost due to some very, very foolish person, and very demented.
Q. And as Christine's mother, what kind of things did you and Christine do together?
J.J. Oh, we did a lot, we did everything together. We'd go to showers, shop, she and I were very, very close, and I guess maybe being the mother and daughter, you're closer to the daughter, the mother. We went to birthday parties, we went to parks, really the only time Christine was alone was when she was at school.
Q. And what were your expectations and dreams for Christine?
J.J. Well I think the first and most important thing was to remain the best of friends, which we were. And to see her graduate from school, to see her get married and have children and to remain a loving family and to let her pursue, rather, and achieve any goal in which she wanted to do, and this has all been taken away.
In Makins book, the author presents information that, at times, contrasts sharply with the picture Janet Jessop created at the inquiry. I have collected and assembled it here (and re-written it to some degree).
Christine Jessop was the biological offspring of Robert (Bob) Jessop and Janet Jessop. Her older, brother, Ken was adopted. She was a sickly child in the first years of her life and nearly died a few times due to gastroenteritis a medical condition characterized by inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract involving both the stomach and the small intestines. This resulted in Christine suffering from vomiting, abdominal pain and severe cramps through her formative years. However, by the time she was seven or eight, the condition was easing. This medical issue may have resulted in her being a somewhat small and skinny child.
In October of 1984, Christine Jessop was nine years old, freckled and weighed only forty pounds. She had crooked teeth and a prize-winning smile. She may have had some trouble fitting in at school at times, and may have been occasionally picked on by other children due to her size. She was not excluded though. Christine had friends (Leslie Chipman, Amanda Halloran and Jennifer Coffey to name a few). She was described as being wilful and possessing a mind of her own, but she wasnt the kind of child a parent needed to spank. Christine understood that no meant no. Still, she was no shrinking violet. Her mother described her as being a motor-mouth and talked with sass. At school, she was considered a chatty girl in the classroom.
Christine loved animals. She had a dog named Freckles, a pet frog named Harold in her basement, and fifty little chickens out in the back yard. When the chickens began to die of the cold, she and Ken slept outside with them to help keep them warm. When it got too cold, her brother retreated to the house, but Christine stayed all night. She was also friendly with her neighbours (the Morins) dogs, Jesse and James.
Christine was something of a tomboy. She wasnt afraid to get her hands dirty and she was industrious. Christine caught and sold dew worms to cottagers passing by on Leslie Street during the summer. She was a Brownie, and played on the softball team that her father coached. Apparently, she could throw a ball like a man and could use dirty words when talking about something she hated. She enjoyed time with her father and went with him to the community fire hall on occasion.
Christine had a rough and tumble side, but she also had a girlish side as well. She liked to read, knit, play with her dolls and listen to Boy George songs on her phonograph. Her favourite song at the time of her disappearance was Im Going to Live Forever the theme song from the television show, FAME. Apparently, Christine would sing and dance to this music all the time. She was afraid of thunderstorms and would follow her mother around whenever they occurred.
At the time of her disappearance, Christine had reached a point in her life when she was becoming self-conscious about her looks - her boniness - her smallness - and thats perhaps why she sometimes wore multiple layers of clothing to bulk herself up. Christine was blossoming ahead of her time into adolescence already wearing lipstick and makeup and spoke of her ambitions to wear a brassier. In the park and in the schoolyard, she spoke about boys with an odd maturity.
Prior to the Jessop familys arrival in Queensville, Christine, her brother, Ken, and two other boys (brothers one Kens age, and one three years older) had been engaging in regular sexual activity for years. Christine became involved in their activities starting when she was four. The three boys had engaged in everything up to and including sexual intercourse with her. Eventually Ken realized that they had been exploited by the eldest brother and that what they had been doing was wrong and warned Christine never to speak of it to anyone and to never let anyone do that to her again. Apparently she had kept the secret and had not told anyone. This information came to light only when Ken Jessop, crushed by tremendous guilt, confessed it to police in 1990.
Contrary to Janet Jessops description of her daughters habits, Christine apparently did travel alone around Queensville. She played in the park frequently during the summer months and sometimes stayed there quite late walking home alone around nine or ten p.m. She was observed interacting with groups of boys in the park, and sometimes these boys were significantly older than her.
Christine also frequented the cemetery and played there often. She was drawn to one particular grave: that of a little boy. She often placed flowers there below the headstone.
Like all the other children at her school, Christine had been taught street-proofing skills, but her teachers, babysitter and even her father thought that she might be inclined to go with a stranger under the right circumstances.
. I have a ton of links and info, I'm still reading through the whole thread though -- Talk to ya soon. 
