murder she wrote - kemi adeyoola

The first many heard of this, was from a report in The Punch newspaper about Kemi Adeyoola, an 18-year-old Nigerian girl charged with the gruesome murder of an 84-year-old woman. Anne Mendel was stabbed 14 times, in a crime commited when Kemi was only 17 and fresh out of a young offenders' institution.

Kemi had a passion for literature and had written whilst in custody an 18-page manual detailing her plans to lose 4 stones in weight and make 3 million in order to live a happy life. The neatly-written notes were entitled, Prison and After: Making life Count.

The 3m target would be made possible by the murder of a woman who had to be "rich, elderly and defenceless." The prosecution made a case that Mrs Mendel was killed in a 'dry run', as practice, ahead of another suitable would-be victim. Kemi's manual had been found in a routine search of her cell while in custody. The girl maintained that they were the notes for a book she was planning on writing, and that they should be returned to her. The notes, according to her, were a work of fiction inspired by her readings of the works of James Patterson & Martina Cole. A psychiatric report said there was nothing to suggest Kemi could commit such a crime. A few months after the teenager left the institution, Mrs Mendel, a former neighbour, was killed.

Now, life will count for Kemi Adeyoola in a way she hadn't planned. Last week at the Old Bailey in London, she was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum incarceration of 20 years. Her father, millionaire Bola Adeyoola denounced his daughter as "evil... I don't even like her." It turns out he last had any real contact with Kemi and her sisters when the girl was eleven years old. Her mother had received 3 or 4 million in a divorce settlement, which doesn't quite explain why the privately educated girls seem to have fallen on hard times, working as escorts and shoplifting - a trajectory that set Kemi in collision with the law.

Mr Adeyoola blames everyone else for Kemi's fall, failing to acknowledge any negative effect his decision to stop paying his daughters' school fees might have had on the girls. But he doesn't get away that easy. As news of Kemi's sentence broke, the London Evening Standard did an expose on Bola Adeyoola's own 'criminal' past.