We haven’t spoken much about the death of Jayden Parkinson, but it really is worthy of our attention. The 17-year-old, who was pregnant with her boyfriend Ben Blakely’s child, was strangled to death in the countryside before being buried in a shallow grave last December.
Blakely, 22, denies murdering her, but is admitting manslaughter at Oxford County Court, where he is currently on trial.
‘I deserve a death sentence for what I done,’ he told the court yesterday, before also saying he relives the memory of the night her killed her on loop. ‘I think about that night every day. I think about it in my dreams. I hear them noises. It’s like a video in my dreams.’
The jury has heard that Blakely was obsessive and controlling over Jayden after they broke up, and he even threatened to put naked photos and videos of her onto Facebook – which would have been classed as child pornography, as she was under 18.
They met up in Didcot, Oxfordshire, on 3 December 2013 to discuss the fact she was pregnant, at which point Blakely denied he was the father. It was this time, prosecutors say, Blakely strangled Jayden.
And it gets even darker. The prosecution is now trying to find whether a boy, aged 17, whom Blakely enlisted to help dig Jayden’s shallow grave, knew what he was doing.
Blakely is alleged to have offered the boy an XBox and £100 for the favour, which, if he knew about, would count as a criminal act of preventing a lawful burial.
Under cross-examination from Richard Latham QC, Blakely insisted: ‘I said to him it was either for weapons or an animal. You are trying to get at that [the boy] knew. He and Jayden were friends. I didn’t tell anybody. He didn’t know nothing.’
When asked if the hole dug was the length of a body, Blakely replied: ‘I can’t tell you the fucking size.’
Blakely later moved the body to the grave of his uncle, where she was later discovered, The Mirror reports. Using a suitcase to transport her body, he took a cab to get there. Blakely denies that she was pregnant, and though a postmortem cannot prove it, staff at the hostel where Jayden was staying say that she had tested positive using a pregnancy testing kit they supplied to her.
If you’re thinking this case is too grim to read about, remember this – Jayden’s death isn’t a freak incident. Domestic violence happens to 1 in 4 women, and the prevalence is much higher in women under 24 asthe recent BBC3 drama Murdered By My Boyfriend showed. Every week in the UK, two women are killed by a partner or ex-partner. That makes it more than worthy of our attention.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.