Transgender Murderer Gets Life in Prison, Sparking Controversy Over Newspaper Reports on Gender of Killer

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Thames Valley Police / Collage
Oliver JJ Lane

The Oxford ‘Cat Killer’ known as Scarlet Blake, who was born male but identifies as a woman, has been given jail sentences for murdering a man as well as a pet cat, in a case which has also gained attention for a left-wing newspaper’s uncritical reporting of Blake’s self-professed gender identity.

A UK court found 26-year-old Scarlet Blake guilty of murder on Friday and handed down a sentence of life in prison with a minimum term of 24 years for the transgender killer on Monday. The court heard how, in the disturbing case, Chinese migrant Blake had earlier killed and skinned a cat, putting it into a food blender and live-streaming footage of this.

Searching for a human victim four months later, Blake went out on the streets of the world-famous English university city of Oxford in 2021 while masked, wearing a respirator of the kind commonly seen during the coronavirus era.

Blake found 30-year-old Spanish migrant Jorge Martin Carreno, an engineer and car plant employee, who had been on a night out with friends. Carreno was offered vodka and led to a secluded location near the river where he was hit over the head, strangled, and pushed into the water. He was found in the water the following day.

Police said they were initially unable to identify the mask-wearing individual who was the last person seen with Carreno, but a tip-off from the United States identified the suspect and forensic work then established Blake had been with Carreno and at the scene of death. Blake’s also transgender ‘partner’ Ashlynn Bell, who lives in the United States, was a feature of the trial as Blake attempted to blame some of his behaviour on the influence of Bell, which the court rejected.

Further investigation revealed what Thames Valley Police said in their statement on conviction was “a dark underworld of interest in violence, death and a particular obsession with strangulation, along with a deep desire to murder someone and cause harm”. Sky News reports the court heard how Blake and a partner engaged in “consensual strangulation with ligatures” and was described as “someone who derived sexual gratification from the thought of violence and the thought of death”.

The force said the killing of a pet cat, which had been lured and trapped from Blake’s neighbouring family, was a precursor event to the murder. The judge said Blake had even pretended to be a cat: “You adopted the persona of a cat. You talked about the difficulties you had had since transitioning in childhood to live as a woman and about your troubled relationship with your parents.”

The BBC had reported the home video that Blake recorded of the pet cat being restrained, strangled, dismembered, skinned, and ‘blended’ was so extreme it couldn’t be shown in full in court, but still images of Blake smiling from the video were shown. It was stated in the video Blake had said during the live cast that: “Here we go my little friend, oh boy you smell like shit. I can’t wait to put you through the blender… Well, I wonder where I learn to do this to a person”.

The prosecution argued elements of the killing of the cat showed demonstrated that it was likely an imitation of the Netflix murder show “Don’t F**k With Cats”, in which told the story of a criminal who kills a cat before killing a person.

Meanwhile, a veteran Guardian journalist announced she would be boycotting her own newspaper in protest over how the publication had reported the case, with a report merely stating that the killer was a woman, and failing to mention they had been born a man. Writer Louise Tickle said the paper was “deceiving its readers” by calling Blake a woman without any context and neglecting to mention the transgender aspect.

The Daily Telegraph reports she said in a letter to her editor: “I’ve contributed to the Guardian for nearly two and a half decades, but as a result of an utterly dismaying news piece published on Friday, I cannot do so again until I’m confident that the Guardian is able to demonstrate that its reporters, editors and management understand what constitutes a fact, and stops deceiving its readers.”

Tickle also shared other examples of misleading media reports on the killing claiming the murderer is a “woman”, including from the BBC and local newspapers. The Guardian subsequently changed the article to mention Blake having been born male, but in a further act of apparent deception did not include an editor’s note to illustrate the change, which tends to be common practice with substantive changes.

The newspaper’s “deceiving” approach to reporting gender in the Blake case is not by far the first case where legacy media in the UK has mangled language in apparent pursuit of an agenda. As reported in 2022, the BBC altered the testimony of an alleged rape victim to erase the fact they had been attacked by a man, because that man perceived themselves to be a woman.

Replacing references to “he/him” in the piece with “they/them” the article read: “[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]. ‘I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me.”

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