Part 6: The amazing disappearing knife trick
- genthewren
- Apr 26
- 14 min read
Updated: May 5
It is rare that you hear support for the now over two-decade sentence handed down to Luke Mitchell. But when you do, you may hear of his magical missing knife which must surely be the weapon he used to murder his girlfriend.
I can’t find a missing knife. But that is the point. You can’t find a knife that doesn’t exist.
No one is suggesting that Luke Mitchell did not carry knives. But the knives he carried are accounted for.
I now present the amazing disappearing knife trick.
Knife No 1.
The knife taken from Luke on the night of the murder.
A multitool with a leather pouch.
Not missing. Not the murder weapon.
Knife No 2
A fishing knife taken from the home of Corinne Mitchell.
Not missing. Not the murder weapon.
At trial Sergeant Thomson confirmed that he presented Luke with a picture of knife no 2, taken from the family home, during the 14 August 2003 interview. He asked him, “Do you recognise that knife?” and Luke replied, “Yes, that’s my fishing knife…yes, I bought that for cadets.” He confirms he bought it from the Army Navy stores.
It is therefore likely the knife the cadet leader held up as an example of the kind of knife he didn’t want cadets to carry. He did not have the chance to confirm this at trial, as the knife was not presented in court.
The knife could well have been hidden with all the other drug paraphernalia or moved between Luke’s parent’s houses. He may have been inclined to hide these things as around New Year 2002/3, when Corinne discovered him smoking cannabis, she spoke to his dad and then informed his school. “It was a very hard thing to do but I thought they (the school) should be aware.”
Though her attitude to cannabis did change after Jodi’s murder, she also told Donald Findlay QC that when she first caught her son smoking, she gave him “a good old-fashioned slap round the ears.”
When I compare her action to that of my parents and my friends’ parents at the same age, this puts Corinne Mitchell in the category of strict parent. There is some evidence that this was also Jodi’s thinking. Jodi and Luke had a sleepover that involved deceiving their mothers as to their whereabouts. When Jodi’s mum found out that they had not been sleeping at Jodi's gran's as claimed, a statement reads that Jodi was begging Judith not to tell Luke’s mum because, she said, Luke’s mum was “quite strict towards Luke.” Corinne had called to confirm arrangements and Jodi’s gran, Alice Walker, had lied to her. Sandra Lean states that the “quite strict” comment was crossed out and replaced with “not as understanding as you.”
Knife No 3.
Knife number three was bought after the murder and so it’s relevance should have been minimal. It is also a fishing or skunting knife.
Not missing. Not the murder weapon.
The Police seized the pouch of this knife after arrests were made. That same day, when Corinne returned home after her arrest, she retrieved the corresponding knife from a bag by her dog’s feeding table and gave it to her lawyer, Nigel Beaumont. There was no reason to hide it. Aside from Luke’s age, there was nothing incriminating about that knife and even if there was, she volunteered it to her lawyer.
How then, did something relatively simple, become twisted into knots and confusion – even years later?
As I said, it requires no sleight of hand but it does require the exploitation of trauma. If you have scruples, you will be unable to perform this trick.
The Exploitation of Trauma
If Corinne Mitchell ever thought her son would be treated with care at the hands of Lothian and Borders Police, by the time he was arrested she had no such illusions.
If you recall the strip search scene in Adolescence, you’ll remember the boy was intimately examined in the presence of a parent and lawyer. When Luke Mitchell was stripped, police knew his mum was close by and kept her away and that was BEFORE he was charged, when he was told that he was just a witness. Corinne couldn’t understand why he was in a white forensic suit.
The arrest was far worse. Also like Adolescence, doors came crashing down and Luke, standing behind, was injured in the process. This was an operation involving huge numbers of armed police and a roadblock and yet there was no doctor to examine him. If the police thought there was no need to have a doctor waiting, how can they justify the force they used?
Here DI Martin explains what happened next to Donald Findlay;
DI Martin: Once he was processed and his rights were given to him, he was thereafter taken into the medical room and he was strip searched.
Donald Findlay QC: Normal?
DI Martin: In certain circumstances, yes.
Donald Findlay QC: Yes. And what if he doesn’t want to be strip searched?
DI Martin: Well, that can be done forcibly if required.
Donald Findlay QC: So his is going to be strip searched one way or another?
DI Martin: He is, yes
Donald Findlay QC: So that’s quite an intimate search?
DI Martin: It is, yes.
(For the full transcript of this conversation, see DI Martins transcript day 3. From Page 64 – 67)
Donald Findlay QC: He has no member of his family present.
DI Martin: No.
Donald Findlay QC: No lawyer present.
DI Martin: No.
Donald Findlay QC: He’s strip searched.
DI Martin: He is.
Donald Findlay QC: by a bunch of strangers.
DI Martin: That’s correct
Donald Findlay QC: Was there a doctor present?
DI Martin: There wasn’t no.
Donald Findlay QC: Why not?
DI Martin: There was not a requirement for a doctor to be present.
Donald Findlay QC: So it’s done by the police?
DI Martin: In the presence of the responsible adult at the same time.
Donald Findlay QC: But he’s also a stranger.
DI Martin: Indeed, he is, yeah.
Donald Findlay QC: So the young man, …a 15-year-old on his own, taken from home by the police, having been charged with the most serious of offences, processed by strangers, alone in the police station, strip searched by strangers, alone, then put in a cell which contains nothing but an old mattress and a blanket. That’s the way it works?
DI Martin: That’s correct.
Donald Findlay QC: And in Dalkeith he doesn’t even get to have a smoke?
DI Martin: As I understand it.
Donald Findlay QC: For anybody, not a pleasant experience.
DI Martin: Absolutely.
Donald Findlay QC: Not meant to be pleasant experience.
DI Martin: Absolutely.
Donald Findlay QC: But at 15 quite a horrendous experience.
DI Martin: Potentially, yes.
Luke’s lawyer, Nigel Beaumont did not appear at the station until much later in the day, seven hours after the police left a message on his answer machine. Meanwhile, Luke was alone in a cell under the constant eye of the two police standing at his open door where they remained, even when he used the toilet.
Remember Corinne knows this, having been subjected to the same treatment. An intimate examination may feel like a violation, even when it is conducted by medical staff motivated by a desire to help you. A strip search by those who mean to harm you is more akin to a rape.
She then returns to a ransacked home without her son. News of the arrests have broken. It is then that the knife is remembered and handed to Nigel Beaumont.
On the stand, Turnbull expresses incredulity that she didn’t hand the knife directly to the police and doubt at her claim that it was in a bag by the dog’s feeding table. He stresses how excellent and thorough the search team are, these professionals would not have missed a knife, they were highly trained and meticulous. He asks her if she understands the importance of telling the truth.
Later that year (2005), Strathclyde police would launch a murder charge against some Turkish men based on evidence translated from a bugged conversation. The Turkish men heard the recording and explained that it did not reveal what the police thought it did. The interrogating officers were told again and again by their superiors that the highly incriminating translation was perfect.
The interrogating officers were to discover that the ‘experts’ their superiors referred to, amounted to one individual who had done a bit of Turkish at High School. The recording was not incriminating in the slightest.
With this in mind, I believe they could miss a knife. I also believe an empty knife pouch was a useful image to give the tabloids and later the jury, particularly when Jodi’s date of birth and death have been scored into the leather pouch in Luke’s sharp angular handwriting. This was the pouch for the knife given to Beaumont, the knife later logged by him and referenced as a production in court. It was not missing and it is not the murder weapon.
The optics of an empty pouch were worth more than hard evidence.
The jury trust the police and what sympathy they might have had for Corinne is eroded by the press who have long presented her as odd, inappropriate and untrustworthy. She knows she can’t directly criticize the police and Turnbull knows it, he knows of the media bias and he knows of the trauma better than anyone and he exploits it. He did this with Corinne’s eldest son using highly distressing images. It’s done with Luke – he’s filmed hours after his traumatic arrest and that tape, of an angry and agitated Luke, is played to the jury. It works with Corinne too, who doesn’t know about the cadet knife, she gets confused between the old multitool and the knife taken after the murder because both have a similar pouch.
Luke would know about his knives but he cannot speak. His dad might know but he is not called. The defence have not prepared Corinne for this, until she takes the stand, she didn’t know they would even suggest a missing knife. She’s been kept from court until the very end so there is no opportunity to provide clarity. She is entirely unprepared for the mess her own lawyer has created. If the knife should have been passed directly to the police, Beaumont, as lawyer, should have instructed her to do so. He is funded by the taxpayer to advise her; she is at her most distressed and vulnerable. It is Beaumont’s judgement that Turnbull is questioning, not Corinne’s.
The legal team will not admit their mistakes, their reputations and rates are too precious. However, in his closing address, Donald Findlay stated the following;
“He (Lord Turnbull) spoke about the knife as being a replacement knife and I am sure that you waited and were wondering, because it was an interesting concept, plainly, as to how this was going to turn out to be a replacement knife. Well, the question one would ask is, a replacement for what? Because there are two things one can say, firstly there is no evidence in this case, there is not again, a scrap of evidence and to keep matter moving on, when I say no evidence, you can assume I mean the stressed form, not a scrap of evidence as to what was used to kill Jodi. Not a scrap. It has been presented to you on the basis that it was a knife, the sample of it is in court and it has almost crept in, it seems to have become infused into the Crown case, that this is a murder weapon….There is a danger that if things are said often enough and skilfully enough that they become fact, what they are not fact at all.”
Does he reference the knife handed to Beaumont? No. Had this been cleared up by appeal? By which time Luke has passed most of his teens in the most traumatic captivity? No. The same team are not going to proceed on the basis that their defence was defective – though they likely knew it was the strongest avenue of appeal.
The appeal fails and years after that, the SCCRC reject him. Both refer to the missing knife.
The knife that never existed can never be found. It is the best kind of missing. Presenting the absence of evidence as evidence reminds me of the trial in Wonderland.
“Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?” asked another of the jurymen.
‘No, they’re not,’ said the white rabbit, ‘and that’s the queerest thing about it.’ (the jury all looked puzzled.)
‘He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,’ said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)
‘Please your majesty,’ said the Knave, ‘I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.’
‘If you didn’t sign it,’ said the King, ‘that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.’
There was a general clapping for hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.
‘That proves his guilt,’ said the Queen.
‘It proves nothing of the sort!’ said Alice.
From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
Bound and gagged by his own defence
If Luke had no defence at all he would not have been worse off.
From Luke’s point of view, there is no benefit to even being in court. He has to stand there knowing that every twitch is being scrutinized by a media who await ammunition as vultures await carrion. Keeping as still and expressionless as possible hour after hour, day after day. Pointed at for dock identification and unable to speak.
He’s too young and inexperienced to challenge the defence whose position is that the Jones family can err, but they cannot lie. For Luke and his family, the opposite holds, they can’t make a mistake – they can only lie.
He said later, “Inside I was breaking down a lot. I couldn’t do anything right.”
We have no explanation as to why Judith Jones concern for Luke switched so suddenly to public condemnation, putting an unbearable strain on Luke and his family. The Jones family have lost loved ones to suicide, they knew the risks of this better than anyone. How suspicion became absolute certainly has never been explained.
Years later, when Judith Jones spoke of visiting Luke the day after the murder she said;
“Luke Mitchell is a person without feeling or emotion. I witnessed this on the day I went to his house. He stood there like a stick of rock, did not show any emotion at all whilst I tried to cuddle him and give him comfort.”
Could this be all?
On the 16th July 2003, the BBC published an article about a stocky man following Jodi, followed by another on the 19th July. One man came forward to confirm that, though he was identified in the reconstruction, he couldn't have been the man following Jodi because he was in England. Which left the obvious question; if he wasn't following her, who was? The family and police make no further appeals for information on the stocky man but within a fortnight revision statements are made. The stories that broadly match Luke's are all changed at the same time and in the same way.
Luke cannot defend himself against the new claims that he went straight to the body and his dog was useless. His defense won’t allow it.
Recent murders involving teen killers in both Southport and Warrington have been subject to laws designed to ensure their trials are not compromised by the media. In Scotland no one stepped in to make such provision. The Lord Advocate had the power to do something but, like the procurator fiscal, chose to do nothing until it was much too late and the directives, eventually made, were pointless. Donald Findlay makes this point but does not adapt his defence to deal with these serious failures, which he places at the door of the police. He does not blame those with real power.
The defence wouldn’t call people who could vouch for Luke such as staff or customers at his family's business, the stables or even the expert dog trainer who would have been unlikely to have shared his skills with a belligerent and unreliable fourteen-year-old. The prosecution call a number of frightened teenagers to confirm in court that they had seen Luke with a fishing knife he freely admitted to owning.
Who Luke was before the murder should have mattered but no distinction was made between the before or after. If the symptoms and effects of trauma can be presented as evidence of an irredeemably flawed character, so much the better. Where once Corinne called the school with concerns, in this new reality she “let things go”. She suspected he was smoking cannabis but her attitude had softened. Her strictness gave way as all other aspects of her sons life became brutal.
But Lord Turnbull could not be expected to wield kid gloves. His job is to attack lines of weakness. Much as I dislike his methods, he is doing something that the defence is not – his job.
The failure to defend Luke’s character reverberates to this day. Once proof was needed but the mob can say what they like of a convicted murderer and write themselves into a sensational story if they choose.
He killed his first Alsatian…he mutilated a horse…he held me at knife-point...
During the trial, the town whispers -the wee bastard may get away with it. No one would sit on incriminating information were it true – anyone who breathed a word of these stories in the early days would be pushed towards the police. Had the defence defended, these accusations wouldn’t still be used to such damning effect decades later.
Luke could not be defended as a wee boy but he couldn’t be defended as a young man either because that part of his life was only just starting. Teachers aren’t yet working with him in earnest because he still had a year before standard grades exams (GCSEs).
One arm is bound - he cannot robustly challenge the bereaved family.
Another arm is bound representing the role Mia played in finding Jodi. It is a strong line of defence but it seriously challenges the new accounts of the family and the defence won’t do that.
A leg is bound when the defence fail to properly process the knife from Corinne.
The other leg is bound when they barely remind the jury that Luke’s life might be worth something. They do not defend him.
And he cannot defend himself because his defence will not let him speak.
Bound and gagged by his own defence. The question is why?
When Corinne was ambushed with last minute evidence from the tattoo parlour, Donald Findlay said in court;
“I do not think I ever have found myself more saddened than I do at the present moment in time.”
Initially I thought he was genuinely saddened. Then I read his closing address, noting the lavish praise he heaped on Alan Turnbull QC, the man who brought that “rabbit out of a hat”. That anguished cry now reads more like a man who has been cheated at cards.
Some believe the defence thought him guilty. Others that bribery was involved. My own explanation is that the lives of the people of Scotland are secondary when they are weighed against the reputation of the Scottish legal machine. Donald Findlay QC would not challenge his own profession, not even to save a boy’s life.
When Lucy Letby’s new lawyer brought together an expert panel who questioned the evidence used to convict Letby, he demonstrated that he was prepared to, in the words of Dr Phil Hammond, “poke the snake of his own profession.” Donald Findlay would not do this.
John Halley, Advocate and part time Sheriff writes extensively about the rule of lawyers and opposed to the rule of law in his book, A Judicial Monstering: Child Sex Abuse Cover Up and Corruption in Scotland.
Rather than provide justice, the child sex abuse enquiry has led one young man to take his own life and many other victims of the scandal have been denied justice as the scope of the enquiry is reined in to exclude victims while also benefitting well-connected individuals who know the rule of lawyers all too well. The enquiry began over seven years ago and has still to publish a single recommendation for improving the lives of children in care.
John Halley’s book explains the lack of challenge from within the Scottish legal establishment, most within do not dare.
If ever a house of cards needed to come down it was this one. Keep asking questions.
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