Scarlett Blake had a fixation with death and had dissected a cat in a live-streamed video. Photo / Thames Valley Police/PA
Scarlett Blake had a fixation with death and had dissected a cat in a live-streamed video. Photo / Thames Valley Police/PA
Warning: Distressing content
A transgender cat killer who murdered a stranger will be sent to a men’s prison as a judge said the attacker used a transitioning story to “shift responsibility to others”.
Scarlet Blake, 26, was sentenced to life in prison with a 24-year minimum term at Oxford Crown Court on Monday.
Prosecutors said Blake hit Jorge Martin Carreno over the back of the head with a vodka bottle in July 2021 and choked him before pushing him into the River Cherwell, where he drowned.
Carreno, who did not know Blake, had been coming home from a night out when he encountered his killer.
The murder came just four months after Blake livestreamed the killing of a neighbour’s cat before placing it in a blender, on the instruction of a former girlfriend.
In his sentencing remarks, Judge Martin Chamberlain said Blake had derived “pleasure” from killing the 30-year-old and that a Netflix documentary, Don’t F--k With Cats, had “played a part” in cementing in the murderer’s mind the killing of a person and a cat.
Blake, who is a transgender woman, previously spoke of how coming out to relatives at 12 years old led to an “emotional rift” within the family.
Judge Chamberlain highlighted this complaint, along with unsubstantiated claims of mental illness, as an attempt by Blake to “rationalise” the crime.
Jorge Martin Carreno. Photo / Thames Valley Police/PA
Addressing Blake in his sentencing remarks, the judge outlined Blake’s claims of not wanting to “kill a living creature, let alone a person” and the blame the murderer on Ashlynn Bell, a former girlfriend based in Colorado, who is also a trans woman.
Judge Chamberlain said: “You attributed your morbid interests to a split or dissociative personality, using the language of psychiatry or psychoanalysis.
“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.
“All this was part of an elaborate attempt to rationalise what you had done and shift responsibility to others.”
Judge Chamberlain stressed that the murder was “not the fault” of Blake’s parents and whatever role Bell played in “encouraging” an “interest in killing”, it was the murderer’s ultimate decision.
“She did not control or direct you,” Judge Chamberlain said.
“Even if the decision was motivated in part by a desire to please her, the decision to kill was entirely yours.”
Blake’s mother, Fang Chen, a clinical researcher at the University of Oxford, gave no reaction when Blake nodded at her on the way out from the dock.
Judge Chamberlain previously told the jury, who sat on the two-week trial, that the fact Blake was trans “on its own has no particular relevance to the case”.
“It doesn’t make it any more or less likely that she is guilty of the offence with which she is charged,” he added, as he summed up the evidence heard during the trial.
He added that jurors were allowed to consider Blake’s “stature” and whether they believed the defendant was “physically able” to carry out the attack on Carreno.
At 69kg, the court heard Blake weighed almost 10kg more than her 57kg victim and was as tall as Carreno, at around 171cm.
Blake, who was born in China and immigrated to the UK in 2002, told jurors that never exercising was a means to avoid “masculine muscle gain”. Jurors heard Blake’s strength was the equivalent of an “unfit female”.
Scarlet Blake. Photo / Thames Valley Police/PA
‘A void impossible to fill’
Giving evidence in court, Blake claimed Bell had been a driving force behind the killing.
“She was wanting to make me do this thing and I was pretty much... well at a limit after going through with the killing of the cat,” Blake told the jury.
In a victim impact statement read in court by Gerardo Carreno, one of Carreno’s triplet brothers, the family described how the BMW plant worker “radiated kindness and humour among all those lucky enough to know him”.
In a statement that Blake listened to with a frown, Gerardo Carreno continued: “We miss Jorge every day, thinking, ‘What would life look like if he hadn’t met Scarlet that night?’
“This loss feels like a traumatic, devastating blow, leaving a void impossible to fill.”
The judge remarked that Blake’s crime was “very much more serious” than most cases of its category and that there was a “clear sexual motivation” for the murderer, with the Oxford resident telling a former girlfriend of killing “because my lover said it’d be hot”.
Judge Chamberlain gave Blake a 24-year minimum term with a life sentence for Carreno’s murder.
Two concurrent sentences of four months and two months for causing unnecessary suffering to an animal and criminal damage were also handed down in respect of the cat incident.
Blake gave no visible response as the sentence was handed down.
Speaking outside court, Detective Superintendent Jon Capps, the senior investigation officer, said: “This defendant showed calculated cruelty. The acts Blake has been convicted of are barbaric and chilling.
“The murder was premeditated with total disregard and disdain for life.”
