Original subtitles

(Richard Shepherd) When a murder is committed,

it's always a race against time to find the truth,

to separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer,

and to make sure that justice is served.

But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?

I'm Dr Richard Shepherd, and I've spent

my entire career as a forensic pathologist,

performing nearly 23,000 autopsies.

I've learned that the dead don't hide the truth,

and they never lie.

Through me, you'll be hearing directly from the victim.

With the aid of a state-of-the-art laboratory,

using ground-breaking technology,

I'll be investigating a series of intriguing crimes

where, from the victims' bodies,

are revealed to you the truth behind these murders.

(camera shutter snapping)

In June 2021,

a family on holiday in Salcombe, Devon,

made a horrifying discovery.

While out walking, they came across a headless human body.

This gruesome discovery sparked a police investigation and a hunt

for the truth, which was 200 miles away.

Salcombe is a very quiet seaside village.

It's very picturesque.

It's very beautiful.

It's popular with holiday-makers.

I know people say this all the time, but it's really not

the kind of place you expect to find a dead body.

A family was out for a walk.

And they were walking along a footpath,

and they saw what they thought was a...

doll or a mannequin

by the side of the footpath.

And as they got a bit closer, they realised it wasn't a mannequin.

It was actually the headless corpse of a woman.

(Jane Carter Woodrow) It was a gruesome discovery for the family.

You would have a sense of unreality.

It would have been pretty hard for the family,

particularly as the head was missing.

(Richard) Devon and Cornwall Police

dashed straight to the scene.

The police attended the area, and an investigation commenced.

The police initially treated the case as an unexplained death.

Clearly, the discovery of a body in these circumstances

has particularly distressing features about it.

And I think really what would kick in is the officers' passion

to find answers, answers for the family of whoever that person

may be as to how this situation arose.

How did this person come to be here?

(Richard) Scenes of crime officers

were called to the location.

The next steps for the police are to cordon off the area,

ensure that it's secure and that no more contamination can be made

from people entering the scene.

That would allow them the time and space

to conduct a thorough investigation,

looking for any evidence that would indicate

why the body came to be where it was, who might be responsible.

The person's body had no head.

It was... clearly been sort of decapitated somehow.

So obviously, this raises suspicions.

It doesn't look like it's a sort of natural death

on the face of it.

So they began a fingertip search of the area

to try and find out, firstly, if there's any clues

and, secondly, to try to locate this person's head,

which had become detached from the body.

When looking for missing body parts,

a specific strategy would be prepared and considered,

depending on the circumstances.

In this case, the body was in a wooded area.

And there wouldn't be any assumptions made

as to whether the remaining parts would or wouldn't

be local to the initial finds.

The parts of the body that were discovered

would ultimately be removed from the scene

to allow for a full forensic examination by a pathologist.

The headless body showed extensive decomposition.

It had clearly been outside, but no-one knew for how long.

The first question that needed answering was, who is this?

There was enough soft tissue remaining to identify

that this was a female.

And what even partial remains like this can provide

is an approximate age of the individual.

A common affliction for older people

is arthritis, which is a wear and tear effect on the joints.

And the chances are, if we're looking

at fairly advanced arthritis in the body,

we're dealing with an older person.

Another tell-tale clue was osteoporosis in her ribs,

a condition that reduces the density of the bones,

making them fragile and breakable.

After the menopause, women produce less oestrogen that's needed

to generate healthy bone tissue.

So this deterioration of the bones is a sign of older age.

In this case, the postmortem revealed

that this was the body of an Asian woman

who was likely to be in her 60s at the time of her death.

So how did this woman end up in this Devon seaside town?

There was only one way for investigators to find out.

The next step in this investigation...

in fact, any investigation... is to identify the victim,

identify who the body is.

Because only by doing that, really, can there be a real focus

to the next stages of the inquiry.

(camera shutter snapping)

(Jane) From the little that they had to go on,

they knew it was a person of Asian origin.

So then they would look on missing persons lists and that kind

of thing, you know, but they would have to establish their identity,

really, to get anywhere with this.

(Matt Bonner) It's likely that the first consideration

would be that... is this the body of a local person?

It's unusual for people to travel long distances

to deposit a body somewhere

unless they have good cause to do so.

So if this was a deposition site, as it presented,

then the chances are that the initial focus would be

on local lines of inquiry.

Clearly, the body hadn't been there for very long

because it was out in the open.

You could see the body from the road.

So she would have been seen by someone

if the body had been there for a long time.

So you got a fairly narrow window of opportunity for the body dump

before it being found.

From there, the police are able to conduct house-to-house inquiries,

ask the local community if they've seen or heard anything,

but also, very importantly,

checking CCTV cameras on people's houses

and ANPR traffic cameras in the area

just to try to locate any potential suspect vehicles

that might have been used to transport this body

and dump it just on the other side

of a low wall near a footpath.

(Richard) With few clues to go on initially,

the police turned to the press.

(Emily Pennink) The local police force put out a public appeal

through the media, asking anyone who might know who this person was

or anyone who had any information at all that could shed light

on what had happened to get in touch with them and talk to them

and make a statement and help them solve this puzzle.

I think it would have been very worrying.

You know, you've got an extremely concerned local community who are,

you know, desperate for answers.

And you have the pressure of the national media

descending on this quiet community,

also looking for answers.

There would have been a degree of fear and shock

because people just really don't expect something

like that to happen in a sort of small, tight-knit community

like that.

It's like a horror story on their doorstep

in this beautiful spot down in Devon

and... where they have tourists, holiday-makers coming.

So this is the last thing that you'd want.

(Richard) With a potential killer

on the loose in the height of the holiday season,

investigators needed a breakthrough.

(Emily) For people to sort of start looking

at their neighbours and wondering,

you know, it must have been a very sort of frightening,

tense kind of time because, obviously,

until you know otherwise, the assumption is that this is

a local crime, which would indicate that

the perpetrator is also local.

Every day, you know, this person wasn't identified,

the pressure on the police is increasing,

and also the concern and worry of the local community is going up.

It was a complete mystery.

In 2021, police in Devon were searching

for the head of a decapitated body in the hope

of identifying the victim and unlocking the investigation.

At this stage, all detectives knew was

that the victim was in her 60s and she was of Asian origin.

So a huge search was underway by Devon and Cornwall Police

in the surrounding woodland.

(Jane) They need to find the head, basically.

It must have been quite a challenge for them.

Identifying her would have been critically important

in finding out what has happened

and how she ended up there.

So they've got a really big job on their hands.

They obviously searched for several days.

(Richard) The window to find new leads from the wider public

was also closing.

(Matt) As the holiday season progresses,

people go back to their normal homes,

and it could become quite a disparate investigation then.

That kind of transient population in terms of holiday-makers coming

and going would be... it'd be quite critical to start conducting

house-to-house inquiries and local inquiries

to ensure that you captured people who were there at the time.

The fact that it was holiday season would place added pressure

and priority in getting resources out in order

to conduct those inquiries whilst people were still local.

(Richard) Suddenly, police made a breakthrough.

Four days into the search, approximately 30 feet away

from the original find, police search officers

recovered the head of the body.

This is a really significant find for the investigation.

Firstly, it kind of completes the puzzle in terms of,

is this the only scene?

Attention can now be drawn to identifying who that victim was.

But unlike the body that had been discovered a few days before,

the head was very, very badly decomposed.

It was effectively a skull.

The first thing to determine is whether the head and the body

have a physical fit.

And in this case, they did, showing that they'd

come from the same person.

The head was said to be de-fleshed, a bit like this.

But when human remains are left out in the open,

insects and animals begin to destroy

the soft tissues very quickly,

making identification much more difficult.

But if animals were responsible, it's unlikely this skull would

have been so cleanly de-fleshed.

And the headband the woman wore wasn't disturbed,

suggesting the flesh had been stripped by a human.

(camera shutter snaps)

(Jane) The way in which it had been de-fleshed

up to the headband, that's a deliberate act, obviously.

(Matt) Seeing a body in this situation,

there's probably a strong motive.

Whoever did this had a strong motive to do so.

It's unlikely to be a random attack, a chance meeting,

that kind of incident or that kind of offence.

And then the police would know they

are looking for a very sadistical killer,

very dangerous person, obviously.

(Richard) Detectives knew they had a murder

investigation on their hands.

DNA samples from the now complete body

were compared to police missing persons records

to identify their victim.

DNA tests confirmed this was a 67-year-old woman,

Mee Kuen Chong,

also known as Deborah Chong.

(Emily) Deborah Chong was born in Malaysia

but had lived in the UK for many years.

She was a retired lady.

(Matt) Deborah had been reported missing

from home by a lodger from her home in Wembley in London.

(Emily) One of her lodgers had become

concerned that he hadn't seen her.

He did expect her to be at the house when he came back from work.

And the fact that she wasn't there was not just out of character.

It was extremely concerning for him.

The lodger was, of course, immediately worried

at what had happened to Deborah

and particularly when he saw her glasses

on the side, which she needed,

and her mobile phone, which she always took with her.

I know that he contacted people

that were Deborah's friends,

including someone that told that Deborah had gone to the seaside

and she was feeling quite depressed.

So hearing that Deborah, his landlady but also his friend,

had sort of taken herself off, which was extremely strange,

not only was it out of character for Deborah

to go anywhere sort of beyond a street away from her house.

It would be strange for anyone who wore glasses and had

a mobile phone to leave the house to, you know,

go down to Tesco's, let alone to go on a trip to the seaside

without those two important items with them.

(Matt) So the Metropolitan Police

would have primacy for the investigation of her

as a missing person.

Clearly, the body had been found in Devon.

And a real focus would be, how does Deborah

go from being missing in London to being recovered

in a decomposed and headless state in Devon,

an area that she seemingly would have had no need

or reason to visit?

By now, Deborah's body was beginning to help police form

a picture of what happened to her.

But the cause of death was still inconclusive.

A closer look at her torso revealed multiple broken ribs,

but there's no evidence of bruising that

would suggest these were caused by a weapon or a sustained attack.

We know Deborah lived in the southeast,

but her headless body was found in Devon.

It's possible, if she was killed in London,

that her body sustained these injuries whilst it

was being moved by the killer.

Detectives needed to know more about Deborah

and the life she lived.

(Jane) They need to find out all about her life.

That's how you find a killer.

So they've got to look where she's from,

what her circumstances are.

(Emily) Deborah Chong first came to Britain as a student.

She was on a student visa, and she went to study

at Huddersfield Technical College.

And it was while she was studying there that she met her husband,

and they settled down together and, you know, by all accounts,

had a very happy and loving marriage.

But unfortunately, he died a few years before Deborah,

and she was hit very hard by the grief of losing him.

And it affected her health.

And then, in 2021, her sister died.

This had... believed to have triggered

a decline in her mental health.

Deborah was vulnerable.

Deborah had schizophrenia, and she was on medication for that.

(Emily) Perhaps because of the problems and the suffering

that she'd gone through, she was very kind-hearted towards others

and wanted to help people, especially people

who were struggling for one reason or another.

And if she could help them either financially

or in terms of support, then she certainly did.

And there's several examples of how she took people in,

gave them a roof over their heads, didn't ask for rent,

and really made it her mission to look after others.

(Matt) Deborah was a devout Christian

and was known to be very generous, generous with her money,

supporting homeless charities, homeless people.

And that vulnerability is something that perhaps

got preyed upon at times.

(Richard) As detectives dug deeper into Deborah's past,

one name kept coming up...

36-year-old osteopath Jemma Mitchell,

who Deborah befriended at her church.

(Jane) Deborah befriends different people at the church

but particularly Jemma.

Jemma's a lot younger...

you know, she could be her daughter in age...

also really a devout Christian, and they seemed

quite close for a good while.

Jemma Mitchell came to the attention of investigators

as someone who had been in regular and recent contact with Deborah.

And they had started to spend

increasing amounts of time together.

(Emily) We know quite a bit about Mitchell.

She studied osteopathy.

And then she set up her own practise

after many years away in Australia.

She moved into the family home with her mother.

It was a huge family house, and it had been in the family

for many generations.

But over time, it had become rather dilapidated,

and it was in dire need of renovation.

It needed hundreds of thousands of pounds' spending on it

just to sort of make it habitable again.

The sorry state of affairs dated back to 2016

when Mitchell's mother instructed a firm of builders to do the work

and paid them her entire life savings.

The first builders, she paid 135,000 pounds to,

but that builder then went bust.

(Emily) So Jemma Mitchell took over managing the project,

and Mitchell found another firm of builders.

And she gave them 100,000 pounds and had promised more,

but the money never materialised.

As a result, the second builder left the site

and just left the house in a state of disrepair

with the... no roof and a tarpaulin cover.

(Emily) Having this project sort of half done

had put Mitchell in a terrible situation.

And I think she felt responsible as well,

having promised her mother that she could do this project

and could be trusted with it.

And everything was just going horribly wrong.

And by this point, I think she was getting really quite desperate.

And she knows that Deborah has money.

And so she asks her if she'll loan her some.

And Deborah, being a very kind lady, agrees to that.

(Richard) Deborah agreed to give Jemma

a massive 200,000-pound loan.

(Matt) Deborah initially offered to support her

on the condition that the house

would be used for Christian worship.

(Emily) Because Mitchell was so desperate,

you know, she accepted all the terms

and was just keen to get moving and prove to her mother

that she could actually do this.

(Richard) But Deborah Chong soon had a change of heart.

Something rang alarm bells, and she thought,

this is just going to be a bottomless pit, this house.

So Deborah perhaps thought, best to cut her losses,

tell her friend Jemma the truth, that she wouldn't

be able to give her that money.

She wasn't willing to do that.

Jemma probably felt let down, and that could

have built up a lot of resentment.

Things seemed to go from bad to worse.

She was extremely angry.

(Richard) In June 2021, police

were investigating the discovery of a decapitated corpse

with its head discarded close by.

It had been brought 200 miles from the victim's home in London

and dumped in Woodland in Salcombe in Devon.

67-year-old Deborah Chong's decapitated body

was about to reveal more secrets about her gruesome murder.

(Emily) Having the head recovered was very important

because so far, apart from the obvious decapitation,

there was no clear sign of violence that might,

might be a cause of death.

Having the complete body means that a pathologist

can do a proper postmortem and look for possible injuries.

Deborah's head was extensively de-fleshed,

but it could still reveal clues and tell us what might have happened

to her in her final moments.

The skull showed a fracture above the eye socket.

Now, the bone here is about 1 centimetre thick,

and a fracture of this part of the skull

indicates major blunt force trauma

associated with the use of a weapon,

but no weapon was ever recovered.

Would this blow have been enough to kill Deborah

before she was decapitated?

(Matt) The findings from the pathologist

lend an investigation to look

for somebody with a strong motive,

and that's more likely to be someone that's known to the victim

than somebody who's not known.

(Richard) During a search of Deborah's home

when she was reported missing,

police found Jemma Mitchell's number stored in the mobile

she left behind.

Whilst Deborah's disappearance was being investigated

by a local missing person unit, officers on that team conducted

inquiries that had led them to contact

Mitchell to ask if she knew anything

about Deborah's disappearance.

And she does, in fact, reach out to the missing persons inquiry

and say that she will come and talk to them

about what's happened.

(Matt) And on the 29th of June

and followed up with an email on the 30th of June,

Mitchell had left a message for the officers

conducting the missing person investigation

to the effect that she knew that Deborah

had intended to spend some time away,

visiting family by the coast.

(Richard) This was the last time police

ever heard from Jemma Mitchell.

But while scanning Deborah's mobile,

they uncovered a string of texts about her 200,000-pound loan.

Deborah had sent a text message to Mitchell

shortly before her death, indicating that she had

changed her mind and she was going to withdraw

her offer of financial support for the building work.

(Emily) Having promised Mitchell that she would give her

all this huge amount of money to help with the renovation project,

suddenly, out of nowhere, she's saying,

no, I'm not going to do it, or, you know,

she's starting to back out of this scheme

that Mitchell thinks is already set.

This had clearly angered Mitchell.

(Richard) While Mitchell was now on their radar

as a suspect with a motive, detectives had been investigating

Deborah's last movements.

(Matt) There would be some priority lines of inquiry

that would centre around the home address.

It was the last place she was known to be.

These lines of inquiry would include the recovery of CCTV,

whether that be from shops or restaurants

or from people's private doorbells,

as well as house-to-house inquiries,

conducting various visits to different addresses

in the locality to establish if anyone

had seen or heard anything.

(Richard) What police found was truly startling.

CCTV cameras around Deborah's home

revealed that Mitchell had visited the house

on the last day that Deborah was known to be alive.

CCTV evidence showed Mitchell arriving at Deborah's house

with a large blue suitcase.

Suitcase appeared to be quite light

and easy to manoeuvre and probably empty when she arrived.

Some four, five hours later, the same CCTV captured

Mitchell walking away from the address.

(Emily) And was seen lugging

an extremely heavy suitcase behind her.

In fact, she was carrying two suitcases,

but one was extremely heavy, and it was so heavy,

she was really struggling to pull it along the street.

(Richard) Detectives came to one conclusion:

it was Deborah Chong's body

being carried in that suitcase.

She was weaving the suitcase around town

for at least two hours, which

shows up on CCTV.

Clearly, she was panicking, trying to get

a taxi to pick up this suitcase

with poor Deborah in it.

It's quite an unusual

way to carry something out

and shows that she wasn't fazed at all,

not fazed by what she intended to do.

(Richard) Mitchell seemingly went off the radar

until two weeks later.

At 8:42 AM,

police spotted a hire car outside Mitchell's home.

Mitchell was then seen loading

the heavy suitcase into the boot.

Then ANPR traffic cameras

tracked her on the motorway heading to Devon.

(Emily) While she is driving down to Devon,

she suffers a blow out on the car.

So one of the wheels is very badly damaged.

And she's forced to pull into a petrol station to seek help.

And it's a very weird, sort of erratic kind of scene,

where she's sort of knocking over

things outside the petrol station shop

and people are sort of looking around and wondering

what on Earth is going on.

And she seems quite sort of dazed and confused.

And eventually, somebody helps her, and a repair man comes round.

And they get the spare wheel out to change the wheel.

And he said, you know, he noticed a weird, musty smell

in the back of the car.

And it was something that he'd never smelled before.

It was just a sort of slightly strange thing.

And, you know, it makes you wonder if he picked up on something,

if he picked up the smell of the body or something.

She was told by the repair man

that she really shouldn't be driving

on the spare wheel for very far.

She'd initially said that she wanted

to drive to Penzance or Land's End,

but she's told, no, that's not a very good idea.

So from there, she only drives a very short distance

because this is just outside Salcombe.

So really, whether Salcombe was her initial destination

seems quite unlikely.

More CCTV was recovered which showed that a grey Volvo hire car

that was being used by Mitchell on the 26th of June

was captured on CCTV driving along Bennett Road.

This is the area

immediately next to the deposition site,

where the body was found the following day.

(Richard) As the pieces of evidence

started falling into place,

it was time to confront Mitchell with the proof.

The police move quite quickly.

(banging on door)

(Officer) Police!

(Richard) In a late evening raid of Mitchell's home,

she was finally arrested.

Are you Jemma? Yeah, I am.

OK, Jemma, just put your arms up.

They took her into police custody.

(Officer) At this moment,

I'm arresting you on suspicion of murder, OK?

You don't have to say anything, but it may harm your defence

if you do not mention when questioned

something which you later rely on in court.

Anything you do say may be given in evidence, OK?

They raid her property and seize any items that they thought

might be key evidence in the case.

In a search of Mitchell's house, police uncovered

a whole load of financial documents belonging to Deborah.

Firstly, there was a will that had been

written out in Mitchell's favour.

Which they examined and discovered was a complete fake.

It gave all Deborah's property, pretty much in its entirety,

to Mitchell.

So that's extremely suspicious in itself.

And I think the value of Deborah's home

was around about 700,000 pounds.

So it's a not inconsiderable amount of money

that Mitchell could have claimed.

Some other items that were recovered during the search

were a phone and a passport

that had belonged to Mitchell's next-door neighbour

who had passed away in the months prior to this incident.

The phone, it was established, had been reactivated

and had been used by Mitchell to phone

and arrange and order the hire car.

And it's believed that the signature on the passport

is what had been copied and used as a witness

signature on the forged will.

(Richard) With this news, investigators

searched the neighbour's garden.

What they uncovered took them aback.

The police found this blue suitcase

on top of the neighbour's shed

and took that down, examined that.

(Emily) The large blue suitcase,

which they knew had been caught on CCTV cameras,

you would imagine,

if, indeed, it had contained the body of Deborah,

would be covered in DNA evidence and forensic evidence.

But there was very little on it, and there was no usable DNA

retrieved from it at all.

(Richard) It seemed the suitcase had been washed thoroughly,

but it still contained forensic secrets.

Inside one of the pockets on the large blue suitcase,

the police retrieved a tea towel.

And that tea towel appeared to have blood on it.

And that was examined and found to contain the DNA from Deborah.

(Richard) 67-year-old Deborah Chong

was found decapitated.

Her skull was also discovered completely de-fleshed.

Police investigating the killing of Deborah Chong

now had good reason to suspect Jemma Mitchell.

CCTV showed the devout Christian Mitchell

leaving Deborah's home with a heavy suitcase

that police suspected carried her body.

Then Mitchell was seen putting it in a hire car

and taking it to Devon.

That same suitcase was later found

containing a tea towel with Deborah's DNA on it.

(banging on door)

And in a late evening raid...

(Officer) Police! (Richard) ..Mitchell was arrested.

(Officer) All right, Jemma, at this moment,

I'm arresting you on suspicion of murder.

(Richard) Now in police custody,

Jemma Mitchell was charged with the murder of Deborah Chong.

And in a twist of fate, Deborah's decapitated head

was about to reveal another truth about her murder.

The postmortem showed that Deborah's neck was not complete.

Two upper vertebrae, the atlas and the axis, were missing,

and these are crucial for movement of the head.

These vertebrae overlap and interlock together,

and dissecting them apart is extremely difficult.

This was clearly a surgical dissection,

and it tells me that whoever did it

was skilled at cutting up bodies with a knife.

Now, Jemma Mitchell had studied anatomy and dissection

as part of her training as an osteopath.

In fact, she was so skilled,

she'd won a prize for anatomical excellence.

Mitchell had obtained a BSc in human sciences

from King's College London.

She's a very bright woman and academically quite successful.

And one of the particularly pertinent things

that was on her website was that she

had gained particular expertise

in the dissection of cadavers

as part of her training to become an osteopath.

(Jane) So when it came to dissecting Deborah,

that was quite easy for her.

To actually have de-fleshed her face right up to her hairline,

shocking.

There's no reason for her to have done that,

other than a sadistical motive, you know,

that she wanted, like, some kind of revenge,

and she was going to do what she could to extract that

from this poor woman in death.

(Richard) At London's Old Bailey,

the trial of Jemma Mitchell began.

She pleaded not guilty to Deborah's killing.

(Emily) There was a lot of media attention.

It was quite a full courtroom.

And the case had been quite intensively covered by the media

throughout.

And she gave the impression of someone who

looked quite sort of reasonable.

There was no indication from her that she

was some sort of depraved killer or anything like that.

She just appeared to be a perfectly normal woman.

Her mother, who had supported her throughout,

was in court and sat in the public gallery

and would occasionally sort of wave and blow her kisses.

And, you know, she was cheerleading

from the public gallery.

(Richard) Deborah's relatives were

also kept up to date on the trial.

Deborah's family, who lived in Malaysia,

were given permission by the judge to follow the trial from afar.

And they were given a video link so that they

could watch the court proceedings.

It was quite an unusual thing to do

but also quite a sort of sensitive decision by the judge

to allow them to be able to follow everything

and really understand what had happened to Deborah.

(Matt) Mitchell continued with her position,

really, that she had adopted throughout the whole investigation

in one of refusing to cooperate.

She'd already answered no comment to questions

that the police investigation had put to her.

And during the trial, she refused to take the stand

to give evidence in her own defence.

(Richard) The court heard about Mitchell

and Deborah's disagreement over her 200,000-pound loan.

What emerged in court is that in the weeks prior to Deborah's

disappearance and her death, she had withdrawn her offer

of financial support to Mitchell.

This had been evidenced by a text message that had been recovered

from Deborah to Mitchell, saying just that,

that she no longer wished to support

and to hand any money over.

It was clear that this had angered Mitchell

and seemingly provided a motive for her to kill, to murder.

Mitchell knew that Deborah was vulnerable.

She also thought that Mitchell was some kind of healer

and would help her.

So Mitchell took advantage of this, her delusions.

(Emily) She says, well, I'll come round.

She talks about, you know, giving her a healing session.

Mitchell had clearly made her mind up

before she even went round to Deborah's house

that she was going to kill her.

That, again, made this crime even more heinous,

that this lady trusted her, and yet she was

the last person to be trusted.

(Emily) She comes to the house

prepared with a large suitcase

with which she will be able to carry away Deborah's body.

And inside the suitcase, there is a sort of suggestion

that she would have taken with her whatever weapon

she used to attack Deborah with.

Because in all the searches of Deborah's house,

there was no sign of a murder weapon.

So the assumption was by the prosecution

that not only did she take the suitcase with her.

She also, inside the suitcase, would have taken

what's effectively a murder kit with her.

(Jane) The fact that Mitchell turned up

at Deborah's house with a suitcase

and then went inside...

her friend must have thought she was coming to see her...

and then carried out this horrendous assault on her

and then proceeded to dissect the body and decapitate her

and broke her ribs, actually, as she pushed her into this suitcase,

I mean, firstly, it shows she has clearly no empathy

and an awful lot of contempt for her friend

but also that this was a crime

that was planned, completely planned.

(Richard) But the surgical removal of Deborah's head

finalised the prosecution's case against Mitchell.

What was really important was the findings from the pathologist

that indicated that that procedure had

been conducted with a degree of expertise

by someone with some training.

Once that is overlaid with the CCTV evidence,

the only real conclusion that can be drawn

is that Deborah was murdered by Mitchell.

The jury was only out for about seven hours

before they came back with a unanimous guilty verdict.

(Richard) In the UK's first-ever televised murder sentencing,

Jemma Mitchell heard her fate.

You have shown absolutely no remorse.

And it appears that you are in complete denial

as to what you did.

The sentence of the court is one of life imprisonment.

And the minimum term of imprisonment

that you will, in any event, be required to serve

will be 34 years.

So that would mean that Mitchell would be in prison,

you know, well into her old age, and she might even die in prison.

(Matt) The judge found that it was

a particularly shocking case,

particularly considering the religious beliefs of Mitchell.

Can you please take the defendant downstairs?

(Emily) The way Deborah was killed, to have her body

desecrated in the way that it was,

it really sort of told a very clear story about what

a truly evil woman Mitchell was.

(Jane) To have done such a terrible thing

to this poor, sweet lady who people spoke so well of,

it was shocking and traumatising.

She's a cold, very calculated killer

and a very dangerous person.

Deborah Chong was a kind friend to Jemma Mitchell

who paid for that loyalty with her life.

Despite claiming to be a devout Christian,

Mitchell killed her friend in the most gruesome way.

She severed her head from her body with clinical precision

and attempted to dispose of the remains

hundreds of miles from the murder scene

and all for financial gain.

But in the end, Deborah's body revealed the truth about her murder

and put her killer in prison for a very long time.

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