The 6-year-old boy died mysteriously, the corpse clothes disappeared, and he died naked in the shape of a star in the grove.
The mother of the murdered boy then became the first suspect and was suspected of sacrificing her son to kill the killer, just to win her husband's heart.
At the same time, she used her children to buy drugs, beats and other crimes were also pulled out one by one.
The mother refused to admit to killing her son, but her heinous abuse drew much scorn, and she was recognized as her son's killer for several years, and she was sentenced to 7 years for child abuse.
However, 28 years after the crime, the case has ushered in a shocking reversal - the real culprit is a 13-year-old boy!
He killed people and picked up clothes and discarded corpses, but he confused the eyes of the police, escaped 28 years of judicial trial, and was not really convicted until 2022...
Rikki, 6, comes from a restructured family in Peterborough, England, home to her mother Ruth Neve, stepfather Dean Neve, and three sisters.
On November 28, 1994, Rikki ate as usual and prepared to go to school. He got up early and drank a bowl of oatmeal, but he didn't expect it to be the last meal in his short 6 years of life.
After he finished eating, he put on his blue jacket and went out alone, but to his surprise, he did not show up at school and did not come home in the evening.
Mother Ruth was very anxious and rushed to the police to report missing. At noon the next day, police found Rikki in a grove of trees five minutes' walk from home.
But he was dead.
Rikki was lying naked on the ground, dead, his hands and feet widely parted, and the murderer had deliberately placed himself in the shape of a star.
Further examination revealed that he had been strangled alive by his own jacket, and that someone had desperately tugged at his clothes from behind, strangling him by the throat, and that the clothes had left obvious marks on his neck.
When Rikki was found, the body had already been disposed of and many clues had been cleaned. Only the clothes that were later found in the trash can remained.
But who would have killed a child so badly that he would strangle him alive and suffocate him to death?
The police gave an answer: it was Rikki's mother, Ruth, who killed her own son!
The police's speculation was not empty, and after investigation, they found that Ruth was a very problematic person.
She was found to be an addict and was said to have taken half of the benefits she received to drug use. And often use Rikki as a "courier" to let the children buy drugs for her.
It usually happens in the middle of the night, and Rikki will go out and deliver a note to the drug dealer asking them for "frozen sherbet," a euphemism for a certain drug from her mother, Ruth.
Poor little Rikki may really think that his mother just wanted to eat "dessert" before sending him out to buy it.
Rikki is not only used by Ruth as a real drug courier, but also becomes her exclusive outlet.
If Rikki provoked her anywhere, Ruth would "hit him hard and knock him to the ground".
Not only that, she used to hold Rikki by the throat, push him against the wall and lift him up, feet faster than 1 foot tall (about 30cm) off the floor.
It was also occasional to lock him out of the house, spray him in the mouth with dish soap, lift him upside down on the bridge, and so on.
6-year-olds who should have had a happy childhood endured beatings and abuses over and over again.
What's even more shocking is that Ruth usually "punishes" Rikki in a similar way to his death - grabbing the clothes, picking him up and slowly twisting the cloth.
Isn't suffocation by choking on a clothing rikki's death?
In addition, the police also found out that Ruth had told her neighbors that she was a mysterious priestess. When I checked it, I found that there were indeed many books in her family on the subject of black magic and the occult.
One of the books talks about "sacrifice" and the need to "choose a victim like a completely innocent, highly intelligent boy."
Another book contains photographs of Leonardo da Vinci's work The Vitruvius. Hands and feet are open, taking on the shape of a five-pointed star, isn't that what Rikki looked like when he was found?
Another important point is that ten days before Rikki's death, Ruth told social services that if her son couldn't be taken care of, she would kill him.
The already bad behavior, coupled with one coincidence after another, makes it difficult not to suspect that Ruth is Rikki's killer.
Six months after the incident, in May 1995, mother Ruth was charged with murder and child abuse, which the prosecution said had beaten, abused and neglected her son.
At the same time, the prosecution also accused her of using Rikki as a "human sacrifice" and killing Rikki to please her new husband Dean, who is said to have a bad relationship with him.
The lawsuit lasted 16 days, during which Ruth admitted to child abuse but never killed her son.
A police officer also came forward to testify on her behalf, claiming that he had searched the grove after receiving the alarm, but because it was too dark to find anything, he missed the golden time to find the body early.
It was during the missed period that important evidence on the body was washed away by the killer.
Ruth had been with the police at that time, and there was no time to move the body.
Due to the lack of evidence, Ruth ended up not in jail for murder, but was sentenced to 7 years for child abuse.
But there are still many people who think she is the murderer.
After all, Ruth has a history of drug abuse, has abused her own children for a long time, and once said that she might kill Rikki, and she was able to escape the murder in the end, and everyone thought it was just a fluke.
On the other hand, after being released from prison, Ruth always insisted that she did not kill Rikki, and constantly ran outside to find the real culprit for her son.
She continued to press the police to reopen Rikki's murder and even went on television to make an appeal.
Finally, after a series of high-pressure operations, the police decided to investigate the case again in 2015.
Twenty years have passed since the case took place, and the investigation technology has become more and more sophisticated, and after a period of investigation, the evidence that was previously ignored was really found - a piece of tape on the clothes.
The tape was torn off and sent for DNA testing, a test that was difficult to achieve in those days.
The test results came out quickly, and dna was indeed detected on the tape, but surprisingly, it did not belong to the mother Ruth, whom everyone had always suspected, but to a man named James Lewis Watson.
The 41-year-old has a long criminal record: arson, sexual assault on men, carrying a firearm in public places, vandalism, possession of da linen, unauthorized occupation of a motor vehicle, and 17 thefts and 11 burglaries.
But Rikki was only 13 years old when he disappeared.
What does this person have to do with Rikki? Did he have any connection to the murder?
With such doubts, the police began to go through the previous files, and when they checked, they were shocked to find that this Watson had also been tried as a suspect in that year!
Fast back in time to the year of the crime, the police were anxiously looking for people who had been in contact with Rikki at the time to see if they could find any clues.
Coincidentally, on the day that Rikki disappeared, Watson was alone with him. Watson was asked back to the police station for cross-examination, though he denied physical contact with Rikki at the time.
The 13-year-old didn't look much like a demon killer, and perhaps because of this thought, the police did not continue to investigate Watson.
Moreover, the most important suspect at that time was her mother Ruth, so the underage teenager did not attract much attention from the police.
But with the DNA results, everything is different, if according to Watson at the time, there was no physical contact with Rikki, then how could his DNA be detected on the clothes.
Apparently, Watson had lied.
In 2016, after receiving dna test results, police began re-evaluating all the evidence in the case, and Watson was identified as a suspect.
They approached Watson again to ask about what had happened that year, and this time, Watson had changed his account more than a decade earlier.
He said he had actually made physical contact, and he once held up a diminutive Rikki to get him over the fence to see an excavator opposite.
But when the police investigated, they found that there was no fence at all, and Watson was lying again.
One lie after another has made the police more and more suspicious that Watson may be the real murderer of Rikki!
Watson had an unhappy family, no mother, and his father was often abusive, leading him to be considered a "vulnerable child" by social welfare agencies as a child.
In April 1994, Watson was attacked again by his father, so he was adopted by his adoptive mother, Molly, after entering a welfare home.
However, when the adoptive mother found out that Watson could play with shotguns, she felt that the child could not raise himself, so she sent him away again.
This time Watson is staying at a children's home called Woodgates, where Rikki lived when he disappeared.
He often skips school and is a "troublesome" boy with no adults around him, but fortunately a half-brother plays with him.
The brother also happened to be a friend of Rikki's stepfather, and he had taken Watson to Visit Rikki's house several times.
However, this brotherhood slowly became thin after Watson came out that he was gay.
I don't know if it is because of the influence of the people around him, Watson gradually developed a sick and evil personality.
At the age of 12, he was suspected of molesting a five-year-old boy, which he initially denied, but years later he admitted that "just two boys were playing each other's Tintin."
At the Children's Home, he was also found torturing pheasants in the room with his hand on the images on the children's clothing book, and when asked why he did this, he replied that although he was "against animal cruelty", the pheasant's colorful feathers "fascinated him".
Although he knew about his sexuality early on, he still had a connection with a girl.
The girl later said that Watson liked to put his hand on her neck tightly when intimate.
She also said she had seen him kill a sparrow with a stone and spread its feet.
At the age of 13, Watson suddenly indulged in the fantasy of strangling a little boy and would even tell others that he had heard reports about it on the radio.
On the third day after hearing the radio, he realized his fantasy in Rikki. I don't know how to lure the 6-year-old child into the woods and strangle him alive.
Prosecutor John Price said he stripped him naked to satisfy his sexual fantasies and that he had an abiding interest in small children.
The clothes ended up being thrown in the trash.
After the murder, the Rikki incident made headlines in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph, which featured Rikki's photographs, and Watson took several copies of the headlines as if he thought he had done a good job.
There was no high-tech technology at the time, and the police focused on her mother, Ruth, and no one suspected the head of a 13-year-old.
So at that time, except for a painless interrogation, Watson escaped under the eyes of the police.
As the investigation deepened, the truth finally came out, and the 13-year-old boy tortured the 6-year-old child to death at will due to morbid fantasies, and he actually escaped justice for 28 years because of the negligence of the police.
After issuing an arrest warrant for Watson's alleged murder, he ran directly in a car, and did not forget to take pictures to show off to friends, saying that he would continue to run in a boat next.
Eventually he fled to Portugal, sharing many vacation photos to mock the police.
Watson, however, soon ran out of money, turned to the probation officer for help, and was eventually arrested at the consulate and extradited back to Britain.
He was not finally charged with murdering Rikki until February 2020, but he did not officially begin his trial in January this year because of the epidemic and some trivialities in the legal process.
In court, Watson behaved calmly, with a gentle attitude, and appeared guilty of committing before repenting. But then he broke down and cried, "I'm a total asshole."
In the end, DNA, autopsies, soil samples, eyewitness testimony, and more tests all pointed the finger at Watson, and the evidence was conclusive.
On April 21, 2022, after a 36-hour, 31-minute deliberation, the jury found Watson guilty.
The mystery that spanned 28 years was finally solved and the dust settled.
The murderer, who had been at large for 28 years, was finally arrested and brought to justice.
Mother Ruth was thrilled: "This monster took everything from me and my daughters. I wonder what Rikki will look like today, already married and having children, right? Who knows? ”
"The only thing I have to do now is to end this chapter of my life and start a new one."
However, netizens feel extremely sad.
"Rest in paradise, Rikki, I regret that it took so many years to finally reveal the truth."
"What a terrible life this poor child is living!" In his short life, he never had the opportunity to be happy. ”
"It's miserable! The little boy was so pathetic and pitiful that he had endured so many unbearable things in such a short life. Really wish he had rested in a better place. ”
As netizens said, Rikki has only been in the world for 6 years, but what he has experienced is cruelty that others cannot imagine.
Ignored and abused by his relatives, tortured and killed by perverts, what kind of life has Rikki lived in the past 6 years?
I only hope that the arrival of the truth now can really let him rest in peace. RIP