Billie-Jo Jenkins would be 38 years old if she were alive today. Who knows what she might have made of her life, whom she might have married, how many children she might have had?
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A quarter of a century on and whoever was responsible for bludgeoning her to death with an 18in iron tent peg as she painted the patio doors at her foster family’s home in Hastings, East Sussex, is still at large; the keeper of one of the most despicable secrets imaginable.
For her best friend, Holly Liles, the 25th anniversary of Billie-Jo’s death this week is a painful one. She is still haunted by memories of the terrible day she was told her friend was dead.
‘I was in total shock. I was in counselling for ages,’ says Holly, now 39 with five children. ‘It was such a dreadful thing to happen. She was my best friend. We did everything together — we were inseparable.’
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A framed photo of Billie-Jo takes pride of place in Holly’s home in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex.
Taken just a few months before she was murdered and given to Holly by Billie-Jo’s foster mother after her death, along with some of her jewellery, it shows her with much-loved Staffordshire terrier Buster. She has taken off her glasses and playfully put them on her pet’s face.
On the day she died, she had walked Buster in the park opposite the Jenkins’s family home. Talking about that fateful Saturday for the first time, Holly says she had offered to help Billie-Jo with her painting.
‘I told her foster father that I would help Billie-Jo paint the patio doors at the weekend but he said: “No, Billie-Jo sees her [biological] father at the weekend so you can’t come round.” That was the last I ever saw of her. It still upsets me to this day thinking about it. I’d give anything to see her killer brought to justice.’
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We can reveal that Sion Jenkins, now 63, goes by the name of Charles Jenkins and is believed to live in York with his second wife, Tina, 71, a millionaire divorcee and former Miss Southsea beauty queen.
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When she was found, she was still clutching a paintbrush. A post-mortem later revealed that her skull had been split.
The police surgeon who visited the scene said it was ‘the most brutal murder’ he’d attended during his 26-year career.
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Any future breakthrough in the case will come too late for Billie-Jo’s biological parents.
Her father Bill died of cancer in 2006 while her mother Deborah passed away in 2018.
Next month marks what should have been their daughter’s 39th birthday. Instead she is in a grave in the children’s corner of the City of London cemetery, where she will forever remain a child.
Billie-Jo: The troubling clues in new Channel 5 documentary 25 years later | Daily Mail Online