The True Crime Hour

Background and Murder

Jemma Mitchell was born on July 22, 1984 in Australia. She grew up in Australia, where her mother worked for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She relocated to the UK with her mother and sister after her parents’ marriage come to an end, and learned at King Edward’s School, Witley.

Within August 2020, Jemma met Mee Kuen Chong (known as Deborah) at a church they both take part in, and the two women, portrayed as “devout Christians”, became friends.

Mee Kuen Chong is initially from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – she has resided in London for 30 years. She was a widow, who abided from paranoid schizophrenia, and was taking antipsychotic medication to control the condition.

Jemma and her mother were planning to form developments to their property, attaching another floor to the house, but were eluded out of $311,512.01 (in USD) by two builders that they had appointed for the project. Chong concurred to give Jemma $270,880.01 (USD) and the two swapped many text messages on the subject. But Deborah subsequently extracts the offer and encouraged Jemma to sell the house and “enjoy” the money alternatively.

On the morning of June 11, 2021, Jemma made a trip to Deborah’s house in Wembley, North London, bringing a large blue suitcase. It is adhered to her then murdered Deborah and put her body in the suitcase, cracking Deborah’s ribs in the process, before proceeding with the suitcase when she left the property many hours later. She also snatched documents from Deborah’s house, and together with documents swiped from a recently deceased neighbor, she later tried to utilize them to forge a will departing with the bulk of Deborah’s $948,080.02 (USD) estate to herself. Deborah, who was last known alive on June 10, was reported missing by her boarder on June 11. When Jemma was interrogated by police as to Deborah’s whereabouts, she said Deborah had departed to stay with family friends “somewhere close to the ocean”, and that she had been experiencing “depressed.”

Jemma kept the suitcase in the garden of the house she jointly shared with her mother for biweekly. After restarting her deceased neighbor’s mobile phone, then utilizing it to hire a car, on June 26, she drove 200 miles (320 km) to Salcombe in Devon to throw out the body and discarded it on a woodland path near Bennett Road. The body, with the head missing, was discovered by tourists the next day. A police officer search afterwards found the head in four days, around 10 metres (33 ft) away from the rest of the body. Deborah was 67. Deborah’s body was severely decomposed to form a case of death, but a postmortem did establish that Deborah had acquired a fracture to the skull.

Arrest and Trial

Jemma was apprehended on July 6, 2021, and eventually charged with Deborah’s murder. On September 28, Jemma stated a response to charges of not guilty. Judge Anthony Leonard QC arranged a 4-week trial for 2022, and additional hearing for December, when Jemma showed up again via videolink. At that hearing, held on December 23, Lucraft arranged a trial date for September 26, 2022. However, the trial date was eventually delayed until October 11 due to the labor strike being arranged by members of the Criminal Bar Association.

Jurors were revealed of CCTV footage of Jemma appearing at Deborah’s house with the blue suitcase shortly after 8 am on June 11, 2021, and surfacing with it looking sizeable and amassed at around 1:13pm. A additional smaller bag was said to have held documents taken from the property. She was then catching walking through London with the bags for at least a couple of hours, before being picked up by a taxi for the remainder of the ride home. The trial was told that, later that nightfall, she attended St. Thomas’ Hospital in central London with a fractured finger, which she asserted to have shut in a door.

The suitcase was located on the roof of a neighbor’s shed, but the trial find out that while no DNA from Deborah was discovered inside it, a bloodstained tea towel came upon in the pocket. The prosecutor Deanna Heer opposed that the broken finger Jemma experienced while at the property was evidence of a fight.

Conviction and Sentence

The jury was announced to think about the case on October 21, 2022. Following a period of seven hours of deliberation, on October 27, Jemma was indicted of murder. Judge Richard Marks KC convicted Jemma to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 34 years. It indicates that she shall not be eligible for parole until October 21, 2056.