'A truly evil murder - you will rightly be regarded as wicked' Lucy Bannerman finds how a teenage love of music and rebellion ended with a walk to a horrific death

The video by the goth rocker Marilyn Manson was standard teenage fare:

entertainment for a rebellious generation.

However, in Luke Mitchell's case, it was more sinister. He bought the CD and DVD set just a few days after he had found the body of his girlfriend, mutilated, almost naked, dumped behind a wall near a woodland path.

The murder of 14-year-old Jodi Jones in July 2003 shocked Dalkeith, in Midlothian. Police officers admitted to being shaken by the mutilation of her body.

The one person who seemed unconcerned was Mitchell. As police undertook their massive inquiry to find the killer, their attention soon turned to her boyfriend: the calm, cannabis-smoking youth who would become their only suspect.

In the early part of 2003, the romance that developed between Luke and Jodi seemed like any other, albeit more suited to a couple older than their 14 years.

Both were known to be mature for their age, and equally strong-minded.

During the five months they saw each other, Mitchell often made the journey from the semi-detached home he shared with his mother and elder brother, on a quiet suburban street in Newbattle, to the Easthouses area of Dalkeith, where Jodi lived.

His journey took him past the historic gates of Newbattle Abbey, over the bridge and up the tree-lined road where pigeons flap above the lampposts, before reaching the turn-off for the secluded route known as Roan's Dyke Path.

It was a familiar track. The short cut through the fields separating their houses made it a quick 20-minute walk, less if Mitchell took his bike.

On the occasions he went to meet Jodi, Mitchell would follow the woodland path, the wall on his left and the fields on his right, emerging just a couple of hundred yards from her front door. It seems likely that it was on this pathway that they met for the final time at about 5pm on July 30, 2003.

The pair seemed wellmatched. Both followed the teenage trends of piercings and dark, baggy clothes.

Music and fashion became an increasingly important way of distinguishing themselves from the rest of the crowd.

However, their shared love of hardcore "nu-metal" and "heavy metal" bands unpalatable to the older generation, such as Korn, Metallica and, above all, Nirvana, became more than frequent topics of conversation. It was an identity badge. Mitchell also liked Marilyn Manson. Jodi, unlike her sister, was not a huge fan.

Mitchell - six months her senior - was Jodi's first proper boyfriend. For the schoolgirl, the relationship with the nonconformist schoolboy, with his lip-stud, long, lank hair, and grey-blue eyes, developed alongside her own newlyadopted "goth" style. It was the beginning of a teenage rebellion.

Her third year of secondary school had seen the shy teenager experiment with her appearance. Her fuzzy hair was now often tied, dyed, and braided. The bookwormish glasses were abandoned in favour of a trendier pair; and the girly dresses of her youth replaced by the wardrobe of a young Nirvana fan.

Only her childhood love of sunflowers had not yet been obscured by her love of all things black. One favourite Tshirt showed how Jodi was beginning to come out of her shell: "Feel free to point, stare, whisper, and talk among yourselves, " it said.

The message was echoed in another T-shirt belonging to her boyfriend: "You laugh at me because I'm different. I pity you because you are all the same." Mitchell was wearing it the night he murdered Jodi.

For Jodi, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana's lead singer, was a hero. Song lyrics and posters of him were plastered over her bedroom. The shadow of the grunge singer, who committed suicide when Jodi was only five, loomed large in her diary, to which she confided, in her own words, "the inner workings of a f*****-up mind."

Themes popularised by the bands they both loved resurfaced in Jodi's own writing: "Take the knife, " said one passage. "All your pain can be taken by one slit, slit to your wrists. Be free, be happy just like me."

For Mitchell, it went further.

References to "Satanic people like me" and "drink the devil's green blood" in one school essay on God concerned a teacher enough that she referred him for counselling.

He failed to attend.

Friends also remember his aggressiveness and quick temper. At the riding stables where his mother kept a horse, it was his pony, Diesel, that felt the sharp end of his temper.

One boy, who knew Mitchell well, recalls his fascination with death. The summer before Jodi's death, Mitchell came across a dead dog in the street.

"I remember the way he was talking about it, " said the friend. "It was as if he had seen a dead person. He said it made him think about the afterlife, about why the dog was dead. He was asking 'Will the dog become a person?'

'What will happen when I die?'" Images of death appealed to the philosophical side of his nature, said the friend.

Both Jodi and Mitchell had absent fathers. Both youngest children, they also appeared to provide emotional support to their mothers.

Jimmy Jones, a postal worker, took his own life in 1998, at the age of 39. He was found by his wife, Judith, and son, Joseph, hanging from a tree in the family garden. In the wake of the tragedy, Jodi grew close to her mother, who called her youngest child "my wee mentor".

Phil Mitchell separated from his wife, Corinne, in 1999, and moved to Livingston, where Mitchell visited him every other weekend. Despite his brother, Shane, being older by around eight years, it was Mitchell who became the man of the house in his father's absence.

The close bond between Corinne and her younger son was such that Shane often felt excluded, an outsider in the household.

While Mrs Mitchell kept the rest of their home almost immaculate, she allowed her sons to have completely free rein, and inevitably considerable mess, in their own rooms.

Jodi and Luke Mitchell regularly visited each other's homes. Soon, they were inseparable. During school lunchbreaks and after classes, they smoked cannabis together.

On Saturdays, they would sometimes catch the bus to Edinburgh to "hang out" in Greyfriars Kirkyard. The famously sepulchral setting was popular with like-minded music fans.

Mitchell was usually the one with the drugs. His hands blackened by cannabis resin, he would cut the hash with one of his different knives.

Although many of their friends shared a joint, few shared his interest in weapons. During one army cadet exercise, acquaintances remember the youngster approaching a girl from behind in a balaclava, and warning: "It would be so easy to kill you."

It was not just knives he carried. Cash, and often large amounts of cannabis, were produced from one baggy pocket or another.

The teenager would later boast to psychiatrists that he was smoking around 300 joints a week - an unfeasible amount, which he claimed doubled after Jodi's death.

Within days of becoming a couple, Jodi and Mitchell were having sex. He was her first.

Little did she know that another girl, Kimberley Thomson, from Kenmore, had also been calling Mitchell her boyfriend since meeting him on holiday in 2002.

But Kimberley and Jodi were not the only girls to have been attracted to the "bad boy" image. A brief romance with one girl is believed to have ended after just two days, when his behaviour scared her off.

Another fling ended on a more threatening note, with anotherWest Lothian girl, Kimberley Tait, claiming Mitchell once pulled a knife on her after she refused to sleep with him. Mitchell claimed the knife incident was only a joke.

Mitchell's enthusiasm for blades is well-remembered in Livingston. He was particularly proud of one knife he received as a present. "He said: 'Look what I got. Do you think it's cool?" recalls one female friend. "He thought it was something brilliant. We thought it was a bit weird."

While almost every day in Dalkeith was spent with Jodi, Mitchell's relationship with Kimberley Thomson continued, albeit infrequently. Over the weeks before Jodi's death, she was in regular contact with Luke. As soon as Jodi left Mitchell's house on the Saturday before she died, her boyfriend spent hours on the phone to Kimberley, with them planning to see each other the next week.

It is possible Jodi had found out about the relationship. On the afternoon of Monday, June 30, schoolfriends remember her seeming upset in her class, her head down on her desk.

That week, Jodi had been grounded for smoking cannabis at her cousin's house and playing truant.

By Monday afternoon, Judith Jones decided her daughter had been punished enough.

After arriving home from school, Jodi discovered the ban had been lifted. Delighted, she immediately texted Luke around 4.30pm. He responded a minute later and they arranged a meeting.

The exact details - when and where - may never be known. Asking her mum to save her some lasagne from the family meal she was about to miss, Jodi waved goodbye just before 5pm and started the journey from Parkhead Place to Newbattle, along the route she was forbidden to take alone.

The gangly teenager headed towards Roan's Dyke, towards the path behind the football fields, where seagulls gathered around empty goalposts.

Luke, she thought, was going to meet her.

Just hours later, Detective Superintendent Craig Dobbie was dealing with the most horrific murder he had ever seen. The 14-year-old had been stabbed, her throat slit, her breast cut, and her stomach slashed.

Her eyelids had been carefully cut.

The murder seemed almost ritualistic. Yet there was no direct evidence to link the suspect to the scene.

Despite more than 2000 interviews, a reconstruction, and help from the FBI, the biggest case facing Lothian and Borders Police for more than 30 years stretched from weeks into months. No murder weapon had been found, and DNA testing showed little that could not be innocently explained.

As the tributes mounted by the path entrance where Jodi was last seen, and the exit she never reached, so too did the suspicion surrounding the boyfriend who was meant to meet her.

His own message held an emotional resonance absent among the candles, teddy bears, and toys left by other friends. It said: "The finest day I ever had was when tomorrow never came" - an ambiguous line from the Nirvana song, On A Plain, which held special significance for the couple.

The boy soon became a social pariah, banned from both school and Jodi's funeral.

However, much to the angst of Jodi's family, one friend sided with Mitchell, forming an intimate relationship with him in the aftermath of the killing.

Despite her initial loyalty, she and Mitchell became estranged and the 15-year-old was later diagnosed with a severe depressive disorder, exacerbated by the heavy use of cannabis and the trauma of her friend's murder. Increasing doubts over Mitchell's innocence may have contributed to her condition.

With now only his mother's unfailing support, Mitchell continued to court controversy. While the congregation remembered the dead girl, Luke was looking down a Sky TV camera lens, his mother beside him on the sofa.

It was an audacious move.

The interview was regarded at best as the insensitive actions of a confused boy, at worst the miscalculated move of a dispassionate killer.

Twice he was questioned by police, and twice he was released. It was the behaviour of a particular type of guilt, according to Dr Ian Stephen, forensic psychologist.

"Many people choose to lie low, but he was sticking his nose right above the parapet, and so were his family, increasing his visibility in the hope that people would not suspect him.

"Even though he was clearly suspected, he still brazened it out."

After a police search of his home, Mitchell was finally charged with murder in April 2004. The 42-day trial revealed much about Mitchell's character. However, it revealed little about his motive. Most importantly, it failed to answer the questions:

Why? Why Jodi? And why such a brutal murder?

Professor Vincent Egan, of the forensic psychology department at Glasgow Caledonian University, said:

"Victims are often the persons closest to a troubled teenager, as the closest people evoke the strongest emotions, and the emotions can go from very positive to very negative very quickly.

"Thwarted love in an angry young man, and the shame and humiliation of this, is a common trigger to violence.

The nature of the crime - the near-decapitation - was an extreme, messy and violent act, which indicates massive anger and focused aggression in the proponent."

As Mitchell was convicted, the judge said: "You have been convicted of a truly evil murder - one of the most appalling crimes that any of us can remember - and you will rightly be regarded as wicked."

It will be a considerable time before Mitchell returns to Newbattle Abbey Crescent.

The entrance to Roan's Dyke Path, just five minutes' walk from his front door, is now marked by a permanent bouquet. Mud has made the short cut to Jodi's house almost impassable at this time of year; the two houses now linked only by grief and guilt.

At the other end, artificial sunflowers are still taped to a lamp-post - a quick, yellow reminder to passers-by, easier to spot than the withered stocks that stand in the Joneses' garden.

The murdered girl's small, two-storey home showed no sign of change yesterday after the verdict was delivered, testimony perhaps that life grinds on for the family that has suffered the suicides of a father and an uncle, and the murder of a daughter, over the past six years.

A few miles south, beyond the stubble fields and low rows of unremarkable houses, another 14 flowers brighten a pair of black headstones. They stand alone in a small, square cemetery on the outskirts of town; memorials to a father who died before his 40th birthday, and a daughter prevented from celebrating her 15th.

One says: "We can feel sad that she's gone, or open our eyes, smile, love, and go on as she'd want."