NARRATOR: A 17-year-old girl has been killed in a park.
just panic, chaos, fear, terror.
It's just a scene of mayhem.
You just didn't expect that to happen to any of them.
The community demands answers.
justice for Jodie!
With their prime respect on the run...
We need to find these people. They're dangerous.
Oh, he's through the conservatory.
Police officers!
...police need to act fast.
We will never give up because we need to find
a trace of the killer at the crime scene.
A Friday night in East London. Police are called
to a stabbing in a children's play park.
Scenes of just panic, chaos, fear, terror.
You don't know what to do.
I mean, no-one would know what to do, I think, in that situation.
People have just witnessed their friend being brutally attacked,
in an area where this kind of thing just doesn't happen.
If you get it wrong,
if you don't do your job properly there,
someone could quite easily walk away from committing a serious crime.
Friends tell police the teenager was sitting on a bench
when she was attacked from behind.
They identify her as 17-year-oldjodie Chesney.
As much as it's a crime scene,
the first priority is we need to save jodie's life.
Jodie is blue-lighted to hospital.
Those first office on the scene are as important as the detectives,
so the questions they will be asking - who saw what happened,
why has Jodie been stabbed?
Jodie isn't the sort of person that I would be expecting
as a police officer to come along and try and save their life.
That is that when the forensic teams are called in.
Crime scene manager Sarah Thirkell has investigated over 500 deaths.
As a mother, I find it quite disturbing sometimes,
going to scenes where young children are involved,
especially if they're the same age as my children.
From a forensic point of view,
this is one of the worst scenes that you could attend.
It's just a scene of mayhem.
When you turn up at a scene and it's night time,
there's a definite different feel to it.
The simple fact you can't see everything,
you could be walking in blood,
there could be a knife just six yards away that you can't see.
This is a violent situation, are the offenders still around?
Quickly, it will be, secure that crime scene.
It's very difficult to ascertain the actual size of the scene.
In a park that's basically open all the way round,
it can be really difficult to try and work out
where the offenders have come in and exited,
so it's really important that all entrance ancl exits are closed off
so we can do a full, extensive search of the whole area.
Because it's not just the area where the attack's happened,
there might be some footprints further away from the scene
that we will need to recover.
ls there anything at that scene
that would be able to indicate who it was that attacked her?
The crime scene investigators will spend time
looking for the minutest piece of evidence
to place whoever it was at the crime scene.
Finding the weapon is crucial to the investigation.
The knife could have been discarded anywhere in the park,
it might not even have been discarded in the park.
Police search teams will do a fingertip search.
Searching a big park area is quite a daunting task.
There's so much other evidence there
that's not related to the incident at all.
Lots of innocent people that have travelled through there,
their footprints might be there,
their fingerprints and DNA on discarded items,
dropped cigarettes or food items or a drink can,
something in a bin, something like that,
so the chances of recovering trace evidence
from the scene is quite slim.
It puts pressure on the investigation.
The detectives can't rely fully on forensic evidence.
Officers at the scene speak tojodie's friends.
Police officers are gonna be dealing with people
that have witnessed something traumatic to a friend.
They're gonna be people in tears,
they're gonna be people upset, distraught
and that adds an added layer of difficulty.
I need to know from you what you've seen,
but you've just seen your friend seriously injured.
In an ideal world, what you want from them
is to sit them down and spend the next three or four hours
with them going into detail about Jodie and her life.
The police will be balancing the needs of the witness
with the needs of the investigation.
Witnesses state that two figures appeared behind Jodie,
and one was wearing a fur-lined hooded coat.
One of them stabbed Jodie in the back
before disappearing into the darkness.
So part of my role as a crime scene manager
is also to try and ascertain why has this happened,
what was the motive behind the attack,
is it a random completely unprovoked attack, or...
Is there some issues around friendship groups
or boyfriend, girlfriend?
There's lots of potential issues that someone may have
with different areas of their life.
The forensics team start at the attack site.
Jodie was sat on the table with her feet on the actual bench
and witnesses have said that she's been attacked from behind,
so that area becomes really important.
I would expect to find very little blood.
A single stab wound will create a lot of internal bleeding,
but not necessarily much external bleeding.
So that park bench would be taken away for further forensic testing.
That might have valuable DNA and fingerprint evidence on it.
En route to hospital, the ambulance pulls over to work on Jodie
in an attempt to save her life.
Ancl I'll never forget the phone call...
...when he just said the words,
"jodie's been stabbed...
"and she's dead."
None of us really knew what had happened.
The Metropolitan Police are now dealing with a murder investigation.
They must rely on forensics to help them catch the killer.
The police don't have a lot of information to go on.
No descriptions of anybody,
what are we gonna do, how are we gonna solve this crime?
There was no motive,
no evidence, no reason.
They had nothing to go on, basically.
Cos there was no reason that we knew for it to happen.
We were just in the dark.
As the sun rises, CSls search for the knife
that killed 17-year-old Jodie Chesney in her local park.
Jodie was a child.
Somebody's taken a child's life.
Ancl on the face of it,
there was absolutely no reason for this to have happened tojodie.
There's a saying in murder investigations -
to understand how somebody died, you have to understand how they lived.
Ancl that's because in most murders,
there's a link between the suspect and the victim.
Detectives must build a picture of whojodie was
and she associated with
in a bid to determine any possible motive for her murder.
jodie's social group was so sweet and innocent
that you just didn't expect that to happen to any of them.
They were a lovely bunch of kids, really, really nice,
and really good for her as well.
They used to call themselves proud geeks,
cos they all were a little bit different
from your normal crowd of kids, but they were so lovely.
And she adored them.
She would do anything for anyone.
Very proud of her.
She really kind of blossomed as soon she started Scouts.
She loved being outdoors, she was doing her Duke of Edinburgh Award,
she was actually clue to finish the last one
a couple of months after she cited.
She was always into music as well, and she loved playing music,
she learnt how to play the piano.
She learnt it by ear and it was just amazing to watch her play it.
The news ofjodie's murder spreads across the community.
First to the scene is local journalist Liam Coleman.
About half past seven in the morning
and there was a police cordon all around the park,
there was a tent over the bench where Jodie had been stabbed.
Everyone down here was shook, the community was grieving.
People were angry that this had happened,
but I think the community felt determined
to catch whoever had done this.
The shock ofjodie's death has a deep impact.
It wasn't just a case of
a few bunches of flowers had been laid down here,
you know, there was hundreds of bunches of flowers down here.
And very quickly, everywhere started to turn purple,
so purple was jodie's favourite colour,
it was the colour she dyed her hair,
and the whole of Romford, in particular as well,
had turned purple in mourning.
And we changed the masthead to purple.
I just think it was a very strong emotive thing to do
and I think that that outpouring initially
was reflective of the fact that she was obviously very popular
and very much-loved,
and also someone that just made it even more shocking
that this would have happened to her.
justice for Jodie!
CHEERING
There was nothing in her life
that would indicate why someone would kill her,
why someone would inflict so much violence upon her.
It's that emotive part of the case that captured the attention
and the interest of the press.
Jodie is the first teenage girl to be killed in the capital this year,
but the 18th person to die in a homicide in London in 2019.
The media circus comes, you know,
the world's media, essentially, to be honest,
it got broadcast, you've got everyone there.
It was hard to have the press attention, I mean,
early, well, probably eight o'clock in the morning on the Saturday,
there was already press knocking at our door
when we didn't even know what was really going on ourselves,
and they were relentless.
I can see why they were interested because it was so random,
and it-it was so out of the blue.
But we just at that point wanted to be left alone
to try and kind of deal with what was going on.
Police are hopeful the pathologist
can build a profile of the murder weapon
by analysing the wounds during post-mortem.
A single stab wound through the back,
that is clearly a very determined attack.
The pathologist was able to say it was a single-edged blade
with a non-serrated edge that penetrated the wound,
and was 18 cm in length.
That may not sound a lot, but what that actually meant was
the would inflicted on Jodie almost penetrated the whole of her body.
I've seen a lot of stab wounds in my career -
very few I've seen as horrendous as this.
After extensive fingertip searches,
CSls have not located the murder weapon,
and believe the killer took it with them when they fled the scene.
It can be quite disheartening if there's not much forensic evidence.
It puts a lot of pressure on the digital forensics side
to try and locate either mobile phones pinging off certain masts
or CCTV either from people's houses
or on the street, or maybe from a passing bus
to be able to link a potential route that offenders might have taken.
There's a team of investigators that are allocated
to basically trawl through all CTV.
The CCTV team have located Jodie and her friends
heading to the park just hours before her murder.
But they have yet to find any suspects fleeing the scene,
and are still no closer to identifying the attackers.
We haven't got a lot to go on. The police need information.
Police don't solve murders on their own.
They need the help of the public.
All police know about the attackers
is that one was wearing a fur-lined hooded coat.
Feeling the pressure, police turn to the press for help.
That was something that they do when they are struggling, you know,
that's something that they put out
when they don't necessarily have huge amounts of evidence to go off.
The media and police sometimes will work hand in glove.
The media can be an incredibly important mouthpiece.
On the night of the murder, between the hours of 7 and 11pm,
there are many people who had the dashcam and potentially CCTV.
WOMAN: We're appealing for any witnesses
who have yet to speak with the police to call me.
There will be witnesses
and people with information that will prove crucial.
Although the description of the suspect is limited,
I am certain that people will have noticed something suspicious.
I need those people to call me.
That media frenzy circus, if you like, did help the investigation.
A witness came forward and said that he was in that area
around that time driving his car, and he got stuck behind a car,
and it didn't move until two men came running quickly,
got in, and it drove off at speed.
This is now crucial.
This is probably the first sighting
away from the witnesses of our suspects.
The witness is sure the car is an older model Vauxhall Corsa.
Police scan their databases.
just five miles away from the crime scene,
one has been abandoned.
This clearly would ramp up the crime scene investigation,
and this would then be a second scene
that would need to be examined by a fresh set of CSls.
Speed is of the essence, to be able to get there and preserve the scene
and recover any evidence
and try and link this vehicle back to he scene of the attack
or back to offenders that may have escaped
using this vehicle from that crime scene.
We would also look at the tyres because if there's any tyre marks
outside the crime scene, say on the road or on the footpath,
we may be able to link that vehicle
back to those tyre marks at that scene.
We would initially photograph the car in situ,
and then get the vehicle recovered to a forensic recovery garage,
and it's at that stage that the car will be fully searched.
Digital forensics trace the vehicle's journey through AN PR
and detectives focus on who abandoned the vehicle.
Who owns this car? What do we know about them?
The officers that attended the scene
would run the registration number through the police national computer
and what that told them
was that the car had been reported stolen on the Friday,
so the clay that Jodie was murdered.
Police had to understand is that true or not?
I think personally why has this car been stolen, why, you know,
who would wanna steal that car?
It's not a Bentley, it's not a £200,000 car.
People steal cars to commit crimes because then it adds an extra layer
of essentially trying to make themselves safe,
make it harder for police to find them.
You know, you steal someone's car, go and burn it out afterwards,
you're destroying evidence.
It's not unusual for people that have used their own cars
in criminality,
especially in serious incidents, will think, "What am I gonna do?
"How am I gonna distance myself from this crime?"
So it's not unusual for people to phone up police and say,
"Do you know what, my car was stolen,
"and it was stolen before this crime was committed
"so it can't have been me."
Are they telling the truth or not?
Ancl one of the ways you would that is by looking at the person
and understanding their history, what kind of person are they?
In this instance,
there was obviously things within this person's history,
within this person's criminality, that make the officers suspicious.
Detectives discover the owner of the car has prior convictions,
including for the supply of cocaine,
which date back to when he was just 14.
Back at the forensic garage,
CSls seize all possible exhibits from the vehicle.
Full forensic examination done of that vehicle,
which would include searching for weapons,
for the knife that's outstanding,
it would be searching for blood and for fingerprints
and for potentialfibres on the car seats.
The vehicle will be fingerprinted.
We would tend to use aluminium powder
on the outside of a vehicle,
and this is almost like a silver powder
that adheres to the sweat of the fingerprints,
and we use a brush called a zephyr brush
and lightly dusting the vehicle would reveal any fingerprints
which are then lifted with fingerprinting tape.
CSI discover a palm print on the bonnet of the car.
It's sent off to experts to compare against the national database
while CSls focus on the car's interior.
There's a figurehead of a cleaning spray
in the foot well of the vehicle.
From a crime scene examinations perspective,
this means that maybe the vehicle might have been cleaned.
Maybe the vehicle is linked,
and they might have tried to get rid of fingerprint
or DNA evidence within that vehicle.
Doesn't mean we don't give up hope
and we don't still do a full examination of the vehicle,
because we will use all techniques available
to be able to catch the killer.
As the exhibits are sent to the lab,
digital forensics team look through the CCTV
for black cars near the crime scene.
A camera on Retford Road captures some movement
just minutes beforejodie's murder.
The team share the results with forensic analyst Ashley Windsor.
A car pulls up in the dark and then it stops,
and it stops for a short period of time,
and you can see some what I would describe as disturbances
which makes identification very difficult.
I've had a long look at this bit of footage,
all the images that were ever recorded in this clip.
Even though this footage is very poor resolution, it's very dark
there's very little detail in it,
it shows two figures heading towards the scene of the crime.
I want to know who leaves the car and goes into the park.
The footage is very low quality.
Ashley needs to analyse each frame
to uncover any leads as to who these figures are.
The digital forensics team look for other angles.
From trawling the CCTV in the area,
on one piece of footage, in one corner,
that you could miss if you blinked,
what the CCTV showed was two figures leaving the park,
getting into a car, and the car driving off.
So what that told the investigators
that they weren't just looking for two people,
they now had a getaway driver.
They now have at least three people who were involved in jodie's murder.
The breakthrough evidence puts the Corsa at the crime scene.
Knowing the owner's criminality,
police believe he could be the getaway driver.
He is the investigation's best lead
to who was behind the murder ofjodie Chesney.
The owner of the car is our first suspect.
This is somebody we believe was involved in the murder ofjodie,
and steps will now be taken to arrest.
Police investigating the stabbing of girl scoutjodie Chesney
are under pressure to find her killers.
justice for Jodie!
Digital forensic expert have recovered CCTV of two figures
entering the park moments beforejodie was killed,
but the images are too dark to identify them.
The team's most promising lead
is a black Vauxhall Corsa they've linked to the murder.
Now, police are planning the arrest of their first suspect,
the owner of the car, after learning he has links to criminal gangs.
The owner of the car is our first suspect
and steps will now be taken to arrest him.
Police intelligence tracks the man down in Leicester,
and officers bring him in to custody.
To hear an arrest has been made,
it's a feeling of relief, I think, to an extent,
cos you think "OK, something's gonna happen now."
But unless they have that hard evidence, then they can't charge.
When questioned, the owner of the car
gives police a written statement.
He was driving the car at the park on the night of the murder...
...but says it was two other men
that got out and walked into the park.
He thought it was for a drug deal,
and says he knew nothing about the murder
and refuses to name the people he was with.
Police need to determine if the owner of the car
is telling the truth, and identify the two men he was with.
The black car linked to the murder
provides the team with a much-needed forensic opportunity.
A trigger from a cleaning product
and a palm print harvested from the car bonnet
have been sent for further analysis.
As a promising manager,
you're always searching and searching
and trying to link offenders to a scene
because you want justice for the family.
If you're able to find some conclusive evidence,
it's a really good feeling.
Forensics recover a male DNA profile
from the nozzle of a cleaning bottle,
and find a match to a 16-year-old boy
with previous drug convictions.
The palm print is found to belong to 19-year-old Svenson Ong-A-Kwie.
He has previous convictions for dealing Class A drugs,
handling stolen goods and possessing a knife.
Investigators now have the names of three people linked to the car
seen at the crime scene, but they still need to determine
if any of them are the figures entering the park
moments before the murder.
On the face of it, that's great evidence.
We know there are at least three people.
Have we got the right three people?
But the problem is, this evidence can't be timed.
When did that bottle go in the car?
When did the person touch the bonnet?
You can't time a palm print, so as much of a breakthrough as this is,
these were just indications
as to people who may have been involved in jodie's murder.
We need to find additional evidence to this.
They need to put them together on the day Jodie was murdered.
Having admitted driving the car,
digital forensics teams use the owner of the car's cell site data
to build a picture of who he was with at the time of the murder.
They recover all possible CCTV
and get a hit from a cafe a few hours beforejodie was attacked.
In this footage we have
the owner of the car in association with other persons at the table.
There's quite a lot of this footage, and I can say that the two people
he is meeting are the other two suspects.
Later that evening, cell site evidence
shows the trio are together again,
travelling up the A12 in a car towards Romford,
just nine minutes before Jodie lost her life.
It's great evidence.
One thing we haven't got is a link between them and Jodie.
What was it that led those men to go to the park,
and did they takejodie's life on that night?
These are potentially dangerous individuals.
Did they just kill somebody for no apparent reason
in the most vicious way?
With still no possible motive as to why these men would attack Jodie,
police are feeling the pressure.
They arrest the 16-year-old.
In custody, he also admits being in the car on the night of the murder,
but insists he was not one of the men that entered the park.
He refuses to name who did.
Police rush to arrest Ong-A-Kwie,
but he is not at his registered address.
This is now a manhunt.
They need to find this person as a matter of urgency.
When people commit murders,
they don't always make it easy for police to find them.
It could something as simple as stopping using your mobile phone,
or it could be they flee the country.
Extra resources will be brought in to try and find Ong-A-Kwie.
As the pressure heightens to apprehend the prime suspect...
...jodie's friends hold a memorial.
One of the women said,
"She used to help me and my children cross the road in the mornings,
"every clay she'd see us
"and she'd see me struggle and she'd come and help."
Ancl it was just really nice to hear these people knew who she was,
and it didn't matter who you were to her,
she would help, she would go out of her way to make sure you were OK.
I reported on the tributes from the college.
Ultimately, it led to me being invited to jodie's funeral.
I think they must have been happy with the way that we'd covered it
and what photographs we'd used and all of those things.
Jodie he was given a guard of honour from her Scout group.
It was incredibly moving.
Jodie was not a person that...
would ever have been involved in anything sinister,
to be honest, a person who had no enemies,
someone that was loved by so many people.
Someone that had no affiliations to gangs.
She was a Scout, you know, she was an innocent person,
one of the last people in the world
you would think something like this would happen to.
Nine days in to the investigation,
the digital forensics team have a result from Ong-A-Kwie's phone data.
It's still being used.
He's at a new address in Dagenham.
He's on that roof. Oh, he's through the conservatory.
Through the conservatory next door.
Police officer Stay where you are!
Stay where you are!
Police officer.
Do not move! Show me your hands.
Show me your hands now!
Get over here now.
Other side, other side.
SHOUTING
INDISTINCT SPEECH
You're under arrest, mate.
Suspicion of murder.
What?
Murder? Murder.
I ain't killed no-one!
Svenson Ong-A-Kwie is taken into custody.
Also fleeing the address is a 17-year-old called Aaron Isaacs.
He's arrested for assisting an offender.
When someone's wanted for a serious offence,
if anybody helps them they can carry out that arrest.
It will be the murder investigation team to try and establish,
well, is Isaacs involved?
If this person was involved,
he's likely to have evidence on him,
and if he is, what is his involvement?
In custody, the teens offer no comment.
Police need to work quickly to build their case.
CSls rush to search the suspect's homes.
When the house searches are conducted,
there should be a list of items
that the crime scene manager has identified as still outstanding
from the scene,
and it's important that they search for blood-stained clothing
and fur-lined hoods
and a potential knife with a long blade.
Two knives were found.
These knives become important
because they may well be the murder weapon.
They're seized, examined for blood,
fingerprinted and compared against the pathologist report.
As the exhibits are sent to the lab,
detectives need to prove that
Ong-A-Kwie is one of the men who entered the park.
They call on Ashley Windsor
to identify him on all of the investigation's CCTV.
When you're trying to identify the person,
you have to look at the entire package of the person,
and when you're doing that and you study them for long enough,
you might start finding movement traits.
I now want to see what they look like
at different distances, different heights
and under different lighting conditions
because I need to be able to identify that person
under poor lighting conditions at a later stage.
Ashley starts with a clear piece of footage of Ong-A-Kwie.
In this clip, we can see the combination of clothes that he has
in daylight, we can see his size and we can see how he moves.
He's tall, slim, athletic build and he has,
because he has long legs, he has quite a wide, rolling stride.
His top garment is very dark
and it has a fur-trimmed hood.
The jacket matches the witness' description
of one ofjodie's killers.
Next, Ashley looks at darker footage,
taken an hour before jodie's murder,
that shows two men arriving at the hostel.
You see two figures and they head towards a car.
The taller of the two figures
appears to have the same wide stride.
They travel through different forms of lighting,
and I can see how their clothing changes
you can use that as your basis to work on the next clip.
Ashley compares his findings with low quality footage
from the crime scene of the two men leaving the car
and walking towards the park.
You need someone who completely understands
what they are looking at, so that's where the expertise comes in.
You look at all the attributes of one figure.
As he passes the back of the car, he's quite a tall person,
and as he moves, you can see his stride is actually quite long.
Due to the figure's size and movements,
Ashley is sure that
neither of the figures is the owner of the car or the 16-year-old.
I was confident I was dealing with the same individual,
Svenson.
Ashley's evidence confirms Ong-A-Kwie was at the park
moments beforejodie was murdered.
And police believe he is one of the figures seen running back to the car
minutes afterjodie was attacked.
The following day,
he's captured returning home, but this time, the coat is missing.
After extensive searches at his address, it's not found.
The fact that they weren't able to locate the coat
with the fur-lined hood
that a witness had seen the offender wearing
tends to suggest that the offender might have known
that they'd been seen and they've discarded the clothing somewhere.
Obviously reduces the likelihood of being able to find some evidence,
but it doesn't reduce the effort that is put in by the police
to try and recover evidence.
The police will never give up because we need to find
a trace of the killer at the crime scene.
At the lab, scientists have the results from the seized knives.
One of the knives fit the profile as described by the pathologist,
but there was no forensic evidence on that knife.
That doesn't mean to say that wasn't the murder weapon.
That might be because the offender had cleaned the knife.
It doesn't mean to say it wasn't linked to the offence,
it's just we can't forensically prove that.
But it does tell you something about the offender,
the fact that he's got two knives hidden in his bedroom
indicates that he's probably linked to
potentially some serious of fences or threats.
To prove Ong-A-Kwie is responsible for killing Jodie,
police need to show intent.
Forensic image expert Ashley makes a breakthrough.
Video footage is made up of individual still images
and they run at a sequence.
You have to ensure that you've seen every image.
I'm looking at the taller figure. Svenson.
The second person who's coming across,
and I noticed a very short duration bright return.
The glint.
This glint is appearing around about waist level on the figure,
so whatever this is is extending beyond his hand
sufficiently to capture enough light to give you that glint.
From the work I've clone over the last 30 years,
this is absolutely consistent with a bladed item.
The CCTV evidence is really good because it does place a suspect
at the crime scene,
and it also potentially shows that they are armed,
so therefore the intent was there to commit some kind of offence
or threaten someone with a bladed item.
Police now have enough evidence to charge Svenson Ong-A-Kwie
with the murder ofjodie Chesney.
The information they got form just one small piece
was just outstanding.
It was a relief when they were charged
but we still didn't have any answers as to why it had happened.
With no incriminating evidence to link Aaron Isaacs to the murder,
he's released on bail.
Police still need to identify Svenson Ong-A-Kwie's accomplice.
On the morning of the murder, CCTV shows he had a visitor to his home.
One of the clips that I was presented with
was a daytime piece of footage of a person approaching the premises,
and you can see as he approaches, he's wearing a hat under his hood,
and on the hat there are two dark items
which look like a pair of ski goggles.
Police intelligence shows Isaacs is in the same gang as Ong-A-Kwi,
recruited as the gang's drug runner
shortly after he was taken into care.
He has prior convictions for actual bodily harm,
possessing a pointed article and possession of a knife.
Ashley looks for sightings of Isaacs from the night ofjodie's murder.
You see two figures arriving from the top of the image.
The taller of the two figures is Svenson.
In the case of the shorter figure,
it's clear that he has something on his hat.
This object in fact is a pair of objects,
appear dark in some of the imagery,
and it appears light in others depending on the lighting
and how it's angled towards the camera.
This is consistent with a pair of goggles on the top of a hat.
I have no doubt I'm dealing with the same person, Aaron Isaacs.
Ashley can confirm Aaron Isaacs was wearing the distinctive headgear
an hour beforejodie was stabbed.
He looks at the poorer quality CCTV again
of Ong-A-Kwie and the second figure walking towards the park
just moments before the attack.
If I start to look at the head of the shorter figure,
I can see a very bright return.
This is something reflecting so that figure's wearing headgear
with some feature that reflects light.
This figure is showing the same features in relative size,
dark clothing ancl the headgear as Aaron Isaacs.
Police now have all they need to charge their fourth suspect,
Aaron Isaacs, with the murder ofjodie Chesney.
Police have charged four suspects with the murder ofjodie Chesney.
The driver of a Corsa seen at the crime scene and a 16-year-old
both admit being in the car, but insist they're not involved.
The other two suspects, Svenson Ong-A-Kwie and Aaron Isaacs
also plead not guilty.
They've been forensically identified on CCTV as entering the park
moments before the murder, and there's evidence they were armed.
Six months later, the country's media is outside the Old Bailey
as jodie's friends and family prepare themselves for trial.
The Old Bailey itself is a very daunting building,
and I was sat in the public gallery,
so not only was I overlooking the whole thing,
I had their friends and family sitting with me as well,
which is hard.
That is then when justice kind of starts to begin for that family.
Something's gonna happen now.
What's the chance of us getting a conviction out of this?
The investigation team will need to bring together everything they can.
Anything short of that
and they'll be not guilty, so that's a lot of pressure.
So what they'll do is they'll bring in all the different strands.
They'll bring in CCTV, forensics, witnesses, phones,
even past criminal behaviour can be brought in
if it's relevant to the charge.
All these small little strands on their own might not be much,
but when they're put together,
they can build a picture that will help the jury make their decision.
The question now is which of the teens
is responsible for stabbing Jodie?
It's hard to say what you feel when you first see them,
and they-they wouldn't make eye contact with us.
We didn't wanna make eye contact with them, but...
The youngest one spent a lot of time at the trial
not really paying attention to what was going on.
He was laughing and joking, and...
it's hard to see that you were involved in killing my child
and you think it's a joke.
Faced with the digital and CCTV evidence,
Svenson Ong-A-Kwie and Aaron Isaacs
admit that they are the men seen entering the park,
but each insist they did not deliver the fatal blow.
Having them blame each other was almost like they didn't care
what they had clone,
all they wanted to do was get away with it, basically.
They didn't care what the consequences were,
they just didn't wanna face up to the fact that they were to blame.
When the evidence is strong enough
to place more than one person at a scene, loyalty goes out the window.
People have got self-interest and people turn on each other.
We often call this a cutthroat defence...
which can be interesting dynamics for a murder trial
and quite often it brings into play evidence
that the prosecution themselves wouldn't be able to bring out,
what's known as bad character.
In an attempt to incriminate each other,
both teenagers bring up a violent event they were involved in
against a rival gang,
which left Ong-A-Kwie with a stab wound to his thigh.
The prosecution says the footage encapsulates
the suspects' casual world of violence.
It was senseless violence.
People were using knives and not thinking twice about it.
That was at the time, I think,
reflective of a lot of that crime that was going on in London.
The prosecution enter a covertly recorded prison visit into evidence.
The driver of the car tells his visitors
that he did break the law drug dealing, but did not commit murder.
He confesses that the two teenagers that enter the park
went there looking for revenge for Ong-A-Kwie's previous stab wound.
The rival gang were known to hang out in the park,
but in the darkness,
the teen stabbed innocentjodie Chesney
in a case of mistaken identity.
When you investigate murders,
one of the tricks is try and get yourself in the mind of the killer.
Why did they do what they did? Why did they do act in that way?
They walked up to her and they stabbed her in the back.
No warnings, no threats, no chance to defend herself.
They probably didn't even know it was Jodie.
They didn't even look at her face.
That shows to me a complete disregard for life.
They didn't care who it was.
They wanted to go in there and do something horrific,
they wanted an act of revenge
and Jodie ended up being an innocent victim
of something that was far more targeting and ended up
being involved in something that she should never have been involved in.
The jury retires. After just five hours they return their verdict.
The driver and 16-year-old are acquitted of murder.
Based on the CCTV analysis, distinctive clothing,
car forensics and witness statements,
the jury find Svenson Ong-A-Kwie and Aaron Isaacs guilty.
From very scant evidence at the beginning,
they were able to build enough evidence
to convince that jury
that these were the people that tookjodie's life.
To me, that shows some great detective work.
The forgotten victims in murder cases are the bereaved family,
those that have been left behind. They have to deal with so much.
We've all lost people, and that's hard enough,
but losing somebody through murder, I can't think of anything worse.
Ancl not only that, the impact on those that were with Jodie
in the park that night.
How do you live with that?
Witnessing your best friend, your girlfriend
being brutally murdered in front of you like that.
They will carry that forever.
The judge sentences Ong-A-Kwie to life with a minimum of 26 years,
and describes Isaacs as his enthusiastic supporter,
sentencing him to 18 years.
Knife crime is really prevalent now
in inner cities, and it's quite disturbing
that a young girl can be stabbed by drug gangs
feuding on a mistaken identity.
And it's also quite hard to understand kids can be that violent.
You'll never get full closure.
That hurts, because there was no reason for it.
And it never should have happened.
jodie's family now fight to raise awareness
on the impact of knife crime.
I think it's important for us,
for the world to see what a kind person she was
and what a nice person she was, and how anyone,
if this can happen to us, this can happen to any family anywhere.
It shouldn't happen to anyone, but it could.
The family wanted jodie's life to be remembered, her legacy,
the legacy that still goes now is that there is still purple ribbons
and purple bows and purple flowers
and purple plants all around that community they are still there.
I think they will probably always remain there.
People might ask, "Why is there a purple bow on that lamppost?"
or "Why is there a purple ribbon?" and everyone will know,
well, Jodie Chesney is the reason why that's there.