Teenage couple convicted of stabbing mother & daughter in grisly double murder

A 15-year-old girl convicted of double murder has been found to be the “driving force” behind the killing of a dinner lady and her schoolgirl daughter as they slept in their Spalding home last year.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, gave Lincolnshire Police detectives the gruesome details of how she incited her boyfriend to stab dinner lady Elizabeth Edwards and 13-year-old Katie Edwards on April 13 last year.

The attackers, who were both aged 14 at the time, are thought to be Britain’s youngest-ever couple to be convicted of murder. They will be sentenced at a later date.

After the attack the couple decided not to kill themselves as they had originally planned. Instead they washed the blood off in a bath, had sex and watched four vampire-themed films – a fact which led them to be dubbed the ‘Twilight killers.’

During the five-day trial at Nottingham Crown Court, the jury heard grisly details of the crime and how the schoolgirl and her former boyfriend planned the killings “to the letter.”

With a kitchen knife in hand, the boy pinned Elizabeth down on her bed and stabbed her eight times, including twice in the neck, with the deliberate purpose of damaging her voice box so she couldn’t scream and wake her daughter.

The teenager girl waited outside while her boyfriend carried out the murder.

“I thought I heard her [Elizabeth] say ‘get off me’ but I am not entirely sure. Then after about 10 minutes of him putting his weight on her, she died.

“I remember the two large knives being just average kitchen knives. He slowly walked through the bedroom onto the landing and slowly opened the door.”

After hearing Elizabeth struggle, she entered the room and saw four drops of blood on a wall and heard the victim still making gurgling noises.

The boy then entered Katie’s room, where he used the same knife to stab the 13-year-old in the neck, before smothering her with a pillow while his girlfriend waited in the bathroom.

Katie’s body was covered with a sheet because the girl said she “didn’t like the smell of blood.”

The couple’s relationship was compared to that of the Great Depression-era robbers Bonnie and Clyde, where a toxic “us against the world” mentality pushed the teenagers towards murder.

“If they hadn’t got together and had the intense, toxic relationship, [the killings] would never have happened,” consultant forensic psychiatrist Philip Joseph told Nottingham Crown Court.

“She was not suffering from an adjustment disorder or a depressive illness at the time of the killings. This is clearly a planned, controlled killing – there is control all the way through it.”

The doctor, who interviewed the young murderer, added the “group dynamic” could be to blame for the girl committing crimes she would possibly “never have contemplated” on her own.

“Bonnie and Clyde ... that sort of intense attraction, emotional closeness – them against the world. It’s that sort of thing that led on to this.”

The police found the victims two days after the murder, and received full admissions from the killers the following day. Both face indefinite detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure, which equates to the juvenile version of an adult’s life term.