
Southport copycat stabbed girl, 9, in the neck
Jordan Wilkes, 29, had an 'unhealthy fascination' with child murders and previously left an eight-year-old boy unconscious in a violent assault.
On Wednesday, at Bournemouth Crown Court, he was jailed for 30 years for attempted murder.
The court heard that in August – three weeks after the killings of the three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport – he had tried to fulfil his 'fantasy'.
Before carrying out the attack, he searched online for children's dance classes in his area with the intention of carrying out a Southport-style attack.
He watched YouTube clips about Southport as well as videos and podcasts relating to the murder of toddler James Bulger. He also viewed videos of American school massacres.
Last year, on Aug 20, his victim was playing with a friend on the stairwell of the block of flats where Wilkes lived in Christchurch, Dorset.
He came out of his home with a penknife and stabbed the girl three times in the neck, shoulder and knee.
Both girls were able to get away and fled to the safety of another flat.
Police found the knife Wilkes used in his bedside table and a clump of the girl's hair in a piece of folded paper in the kitchen bin which he had taken as a 'trophy'.
The wounds to the girl's shoulder and knee were so deep the bone could be seen. The shoulder wound narrowly missed her major blood vessels, which, if cut, would have resulted in death.
A forensic pathologist said the chest wound would have likely resulted in serious injury or death had it damaged any of the underlying area.
'Scarred for life'
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was able to recover but is scarred for life. Her mother said she has been left traumatised.
She described how her daughter used to be a 'bubbly, happy carefree child' who loved her independence but now struggled to leave the house without her parents.
She suffers from 'relentless nightmares of somebody breaking into her home and murdering her and her family' and has recurring thoughts about the attack.
Her mother said that last Hallowe'en, which was once a favourite time of year for her daughter, brought back painful memories owing to the fake blood on other children.
She said: 'That free-spirited girl is no more, she has not been the same child since the stabbing.'
In a statement read out after the sentencing, the girl's parents praised their daughter for her 'resilience and bravery'.
They said: 'We did not choose to experience this trauma and did not choose what we will endure for the rest of our lives.
'We must, because of the choice of a heinous and disturbing fanatic of monstrous proportion, who chose an innocent and vulnerable little girl as his victim, subsequently plunging our family into a living nightmare.'
Wilkes denied attempted murder but a jury found him guilty last month.
Berenice Mulvanny, prosecuting, said there had been a worrying escalation in Wilkes's behaviour towards children in the years before the attack.
She said in 2016 he was convicted of actual bodily harm against an eight-year-old boy whom he subjected to an 'entirely unprovoked and brutal attack'.
Just like the girl, the boy and friends had been playing on a bin outside his block of flats.
She said: 'He punched the victim, grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him off the bin to the ground before punching and kicking him.'
At one point the boy lost consciousness and Wilkes was seen stamping on his face while he was on the ground before he was pulled off him by the father of one of the boy's friends.
She also told the court there had been two other incidents involving Wilkes which did not lead to criminal convictions.
In 2020, he set a pram outside the block of flats alight and in 2022, police were called when he was shouting and swearing at another resident's child.
The court also heard police recovered at least six other knives from the property.
'Sick fantasy'
Ms Mulvanny said Wilkes had an 'unhealthy fascination with the murder of children and saw his opportunity to fulfil some sort of sick fantasy.'
On the day Wilkes attacked the girl, he watched a video about the case of Aiden Fucci, who murdered a 13-year-old schoolgirl by stabbing her 114 times in America.
Giving evidence during the trial, the girl said of the attack: 'I saw him reach into his pocket, I didn't know that it was a knife, he hid it with his arm behind him then he came at us.
'He came running at me with a straight face.
'He grabbed hold of my arm, really tight, so I couldn't escape and he was aiming for this area [pointing to her neck].'
Her friend described Wilkes as 'mad-looking'.
'Bullied and isolated'
Nick Robinson, defending, said Wilkes had a low IQ of 72 and features of autism spectrum disorder and had experienced 'constant bullying' as a child that continued into adult life.
He said his difficulties meant it was hard for him to maintain a job and led to him being isolated.
He said: 'In reality he spent his days by himself, withdrawn from mainstream society, taking refuge in the internet. He is a vulnerable young man, 29, but mentally and emotionally he is someone who presents much younger.'
Judge William Mousley jailed Wilkes for 30 years with five years on licence when released.
Judge Mousley said: 'You had an interest in child killing and decided to try to carry it out yourself.
'The injuries were not as serious as they could have been and you did not persist by going after either child once they had got away.
'The conduct of two brave little girls and their families has been quite remarkable in the light of the ordeal that they have been through.'
Det Ch Insp Aimee Schock, of Dorset Police, said: 'This was a horrific knife attack on a defenceless young girl that could easily have had fatal consequences.
'I want to thank the young victim in this case and her friend for the courage they have shown in giving evidence and helping to build a case against Jordan Wilkes, which ultimately led to his conviction for attempted murder.'
Kelly Newman, the senior prosecutor with CPS Wessex, said: 'This attack represents every parent's worst nightmare – believing their child is innocently and safely playing, only to be targeted in such a horrific manner.'

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Why are the Macrons suing Candace Owens?
As bizarre conspiracy theories go, the rumours about France's First Lady Brigitte Macron take some beating. The stories that have been circulating about her in the murkier corners of the internet generally suggest that she was born a man under the name of Jean-Michel Trogneux, that she and the French President Emmanuel Macron are related in some way, that Brigitte's first marriage (to André-Louis Auzière) was non-existent and, for good measure, that Macron is a CIA plant who was installed into the Élysée Palace through nefarious means. Up until now, the rumours have largely remained both shadowy and obscure, with few other than the most credulous basement-dwellers attaching either veracity or importance to them. However, the Macrons have now decided to sue the popular and influential podcaster and influencer Candace Owens for defamation in an American court, calling her repetition of the claims 'outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched', and saying that 'Ms Owens' campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety.' For good measure, it says that Owens 'disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim in favour of platforming known conspiracy theorists and proven defamers'. Unsurprisingly, Owens is – no pun intended – cock-a-hoop at the idea of an embarrassing public trial involving her new nemeses. Owens is yet to file a formal defence to the claim but she commented on her Candace podcast last night that 'I find this to be irresistible and delicious' and then began to hint at some of the names of people who might be involved, including none other than the Prince and Princess of Wales and Donald Trump. Owens made yet another potentially defamatory remark about France's first lady – 'You are officially a very goofy man, Brigitte…You definitely have balls' – and then defiantly said: 'On behalf of the entire world, I will see you in court.' As Owens knows – and as the Macrons should have been made aware – suing for defamation in the United States is fraught with difficulty. The verdict of proof is on the plaintiff, not the defendant, meaning that Brigitte Macron will be faced with the embarrassing and unprecedented situation of having to prove her femininity. Even then, the case could still collapse unless it can be proved beyond a measure of doubt that Owens knew her claims to be false and therefore hurtful. A similar libel case has been overturned in France, with the Paris appeals court dismissing convictions against two women for making similar statements, which has emboldened those who believe (or claim to believe) that they are speaking truth, rather than a conspiracy theory. It is likely, given the consistency of her arguments, that the podcaster will suggest that she believed Brigitte's allegedly masculine birth to be true, and it will be phenomenally hard for any lawyer to disprove this. No wonder that Owens described this as a 'catastrophic PR strategy', and suggested: 'fire everyone around you who said this was a very good idea for you to be the first sitting first lady of a country to file a lawsuit against a journalist in another country'. She is not wrong. As Macron, knowing that his reputation in France lies somewhere in le caniveau, attempts to spend the final years of his presidency styling himself as an international statesman – hence his high-profile address to [arliament during his recent state visit to Britain, and his bromance with the king – and therefore would like to be seen as an impressive, noteworthy figure. This story, in all its tawdry and embarrassing details, represents the very opposite of what Macron is trying to achieve. He and his wife are right to be offended by it, and a degree of understandable anger at the outrageous claims is a very human response. However, when the president had his audience with the king, he might have been advised to take on the royal adage of 'never complain, never explain'. Unfortunately, what is now going to take place in a Delaware courtroom is an awful lot of complaining and explaining. Even if the Macrons do emerge triumphant, the reputational damage and resulting humiliation is likely to be so horrendous that it will be hard to see what led them to bother. Whatever happens, Owens has already won.


The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Sentence before verdict: Trump's attack on Obama is straight out of Alice in Wonderland
Almost every American knows that in our legal system, people accused of crimes are presumed innocent. The burden is on the government to overcome that presumption and prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Those simple but powerful maxims were once a source of national pride. They distinguished the United States from countries where government officials and political leaders branded the opponents guilty before they were charged with a crime or brought to trial. In Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, the Alice-in-Wonderland world of 'sentence first-verdict afterwards' came to life in infamous show trials. Those trials lacked all the requisites of fairness. Evidence was manufactured to demonstrate the guilt of the regime's enemies. Show trials told the story the government wanted told and were designed to signal that anyone, innocent or not, could be convicted of a crime against the state. So far, at least, this country has avoided Stalinesque show trials. But the logic of the show trial was very much on display this week in the Oval Office. In a now-familiar scene, during a meeting with the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Donald Trump went off script. He turned a reporter's question about the unfolding Jeffrey Epstein scandal into an occasion to say that former president Barack Obama had committed 'treason' by interfering in the 2016 presidential election. 'He's guilty,' Trump asserted, 'This was treason. This was every word you can think of.' Speaking after the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, released a report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president said: 'Obama was trying to lead a coup. And it was with Hillary Clinton.' Republican congressmen and senators, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who investigated allegations of Obama's involvement five years ago, found nothing to support them. But none of that mattered to the president on Tuesday. As Trump put it: 'Whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama's been caught directly.' Not hiding his motives, Trump said: 'It's time to start after what they did to me.' Guilt first. Charges, trials and other legal niceties come later. This is American justice, Donald Trump-style. He wants no part of the long and storied tradition in which presidents kept an arms-length relationship with the justice department and did not interfere with its decisions about whether and whom to prosecute for crimes. What Trump said about Obama is, the New York Times notes, 'a stark example of his campaign of retribution against an ever-growing list of enemies that has little analogue in American history'. Putting one of his predecessors on trial also would take some of the sting out of Trump's own dubious distinction of being the only former president to have been convicted of a felony. Some may be tempted to write off the president's latest Oval Office pronouncements as an unhinged rant or only an effort to distract attention from Trump's Epstein troubles. But that would be a mistake. A recent article by the neuroscientist Tali Sharot and the law professor Cass Sunstein helps explain why. That article is titled: 'Will We Habituate to the Decline of Democracy?' Sharot and Sunstein argue that America is on the cusp of a dangerous moment in its political history. They say that we can understand why by turning to neuroscience, not to political science. Neuroscience teaches us that 'people are less likely to respond to or even notice gradual changes. That is largely due to habituation, which is the brain's tendency to react less and less to things that are constant or that change slowly.' In politics, 'when democratic norms are violated repeatedly, people begin to adjust. The first time a president refuses to concede an election, it's a crisis. The second time, it's a controversy. By the third time, it may be just another headline. Each new breach of democratic principles … politicizing the justice system … feels less outrageous than the last.' Americans must resist that tendency. To do so, Sharot and Sunstein argue, we need 'to see things not in light of the deterioration of recent years but in light of our best historical practices, our highest ideals, and our highest aspirations'. In the realm of respect for the rule of law and the presumption of innocence, we can trace those practices, ideals and aspirations back to 1770, when John Adams, a patriot, practicing lawyer and later the second president of the United States, agreed to defend British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. Adams did so because he believed that everyone, no matter how reprehensible their act, was entitled to a defense. That principle meant that people needed to learn to withhold judgment, to respect evidence and to hear both sides of a story before making up their minds. That was a valuable lesson for those who would later want to lead our constitutional republic, as well as for its citizens. The trial of the British soldiers turned out, as the author Christopher Klein writes, to be 'the first time reasonable doubt had ever been used as a standard'. Fast forward to 1940, and the memorable speech of the attorney general, Robert Jackson, to a gathering of United States attorneys. What he said about their role might also be said about the president's assertions about Obama. Jackson observed that US attorneys had 'more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America'. A prosecutor, he explained, 'can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations … The prosecutor can order arrests … and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial.' Sound familiar? The president is not a prosecutor, but since he has returned to power, President Trump has behaved and encouraged those in the justice department to ignore Jackson's warnings that a prosecutor should focus on 'cases that need to be prosecuted' rather than 'people that he thinks he should get'. Targeting people, not crimes, means that the people prosecuted will be those who are 'unpopular with the predominant or governing group' or are 'attached to the wrong political views, or [are] personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself'. Jackson restated a long-cherished American ideal, namely that those with the power to ruin lives and reputations should seek 'truth and not victims' and serve 'the law and not factional purposes'. Since then, presidents of both parties, in even the most controversial cases and those involving allies or opponents, have heeded Jackson's warnings. They have said nothing about pending cases, let alone announcing that it's time 'to go after' people. But no more. The justice department seems ready and willing to do the president's bidding, even though there is no evidence that President Obama did anything wrong in regard to the 2016 election. In addition, he may have immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he did in his official capacity. Trump's attack on the 'traitorous' Obama may be predictable. But it should not be acceptable to any of us. Sharot and Sunstein get it right when they say, 'To avoid habituating ourselves to the torrent of President Trump's assaults on democracy and the rule of law, we need to keep our best practices, ideals, and aspirations firmly in view what we've done.' We need 'to compare what is happening today not to what happened yesterday or the day before, but to what we hope will happen tomorrow'. To get to that world, it is important to recall the words of John Adams and Robert Jackson and work to give them life again. Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty


New Statesman
4 hours ago
- New Statesman
The abomination of Obama's nation
Photo by Paul Morigi/WireImage So incoherent is Donald Trump's reign, so criminal, stupid and impulsive that, incredibly, it seems that even the vaguest possibility the president could be a paedophile is the only thing which can unify the nation. To distract from the rising water, Trump has resorted to a time-honoured American tactic: turning attention towards the trusty bogeyman of the black male. Earlier this week, his administration released thousands of irrelevant documents on Martin Luther King Jr, none of them salacious or damning in any way, or even historically significant. Just days before, Trump had reposted an AI video of Barack Obama being pushed to the floor and arrested in the Oval Office, and then pacing and sitting in a prison cell wearing an orange jumpsuit. This was apparently part of a strategy: the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, alleges a 'treasonous conspiracy in 2016' in which Obama supposedly tried to sabotage Trump's election campaign, and that Obama's administration attempted a 'coup' by manufacturing intelligence showing Russian election interference. The man who loves to scream about 'fakes' and 'hoaxes' is now, not surprisingly, orchestrating phoney accusations into his own outlandish fraud. Trump has been waiting all the time he has been president to lunge at Obama. Even before landing in the White House, Trump falsely accused Obama for years of not being born in the US, and thus ineligible to be president, all the while sneeringly implying Obama's disloyalty to country by referring to him as Barack Hussein Obama. In some eerie way, Trump smells a fearful symmetry between him and his obsession. Obama remains the one political opponent Trump truly fears, an alpha political animal burning bright in the forests of the American night every bit as much as the self-anointed king from Queens. The gamble of Obama's original campaign was to make what could have been his greatest liability – his race – into a political asset. In a country anguished by war, and frightened by George W Bush's absent response to Hurricane Katrina, people were surprised to hear that the US's profoundest problem was not war or the moral efficacy of its leaders, but America's racial divisions. Americans listened to Obama thunder about the 'creed… whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: yes, we can'. Obama made sure to insert references to 'immigrants' and 'pioneers' in his stirring addresses to the nation, but the theme he constantly returned to was the country's primal wound of race and the urgent necessity of healing it. Having made race a national emergency, Obama, a black male, was positioning himself as the only figure who could come to the country's rescue. Obama dared America to perceive his very self as the representation of the violence that haunted white America's imagination. But as Obama materialised the threat, as it were, he conjured it away. The fact was, as his team made sure every American knew, he was only half-black. He was distant from his Kenyan father; he had been raised by his white mother. He had been safely processed through Columbia and Harvard. He was gracious, civil and polite to a fault. White liberals announced they were shedding tears of happiness at Obama's election. But black people – while they too celebrated – held their breath for him to come through on the promises he had made. He never did. Swept into power during the Great Recession with a mandate Trump has never had, Obama found himself in a space no American president had inhabited since FDR. Black leaders implored him to implement a programme that would create jobs on a huge scale; he also could have poured money into housing and education for black people. Go big, they beseeched him, you will never have another opportunity like this one. Instead the Harvard-conditioned Obama turned to his director of the National Economic Council, the Harvard icon Larry Summers, and went small. He broke his promises to black people, and to the disenfranchised. He bent his knee to the white status quo he had promised to restructure radically. And yet Obama remains the 12th-most popular president in American history. The political effects of his presidency might have been disappointing, but the experience of having a man so warm with humanity, so cultivated, intelligent and playfully ironic was transporting. If anyone knew the US's curse, and its blessing, it was a black man who, despite his biracial nature, had come through the American reality. A majority of Americans during Obama's eight years in office felt they were in the hands of someone to whom they could, in that fantastical mental place every politician yearns to create, pour their hearts out to. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But this must be placed alongside the toxic racism Obama's self-promoting tactic of racialism provoked, and which led directly to Maga. The two strains have coupled and produced the rough beast of an entirely new American reality. The feeling, cultivated by Obama himself, that American salvation was embodied in the experience of black Americans has now been fulfilled, darkly and ironically, by Trump, who is rapidly making more and more Americans feel like disempowered, insignificant outsiders. The conflict between the two epochs each man represents is a battle for which group has suffered the truest affliction. In the eyes of Maga, they are the real wretched of this Earth. The demonisation of American immigrants is, for them, the restoration of a new underclass that will repair their self-esteem. The threat to annul America's only black president – Trump's AI video of Obama is no less than that – is the coup de grace. So where is Obama now, in the midst of America's greatest crisis since the Civil War? He alone, of any American public figure, has the power to reduce Trump publicly to the fraud his preposterous bluster proves he is. Look at the photographs of Trump sitting alongside Obama in the White House just after Trump's election in 2016; it is no coincidence that the AI arrest video was generated from that moment. While Obama, with masterful charm, holds the room in his hand, Trump stares at the floor, insecure, embarrassed, enraged at his inferiority. Obama might reply that it would be unprecedented for a previous president to denounce a sitting one. But Trump is unprecedented. His public humiliation of and shocking threat to Obama in that video is unprecedented. What is bad form compared to a nightmare of chaos and autocracy? Obama himself, always alive to appearances, has merely 'addressed' the general liberal spinelessness. At an exclusive gathering of liberal luminaries last week, he chastised them for being 'cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from asserting what they believe, or least what they said they believe'. 'What's needed now is courage,' he declared. Yet as he did during his presidency, he is contented with golden phrases ringing with courage while displaying no courage at all. Instead, Obama and his successor have switched roles once again. Obama and his wife, Michelle, are set to executive-produce – it is almost too surreal to write – a comedy series about America history written by and starring that flame-throwing radical, 78-year-old Larry David, yet another of America's comedic tribunes who lucratively specialise in trivialising even America's most dangerous moment. Obama won't stand up to America's tyrant. And the answer to the question of why he won't – or cannot – could well be the answer to the question of how America came to its bizarre reckoning in the first place. [Further reading: The plot against Zohran Mamdani] Related