Ellie and Griffiths had been at school together for years. He had celebrated Ellie’s 17th birthday with the Gould family just months earlier.
The day before he murdered Ellie, she had ended their three-month relationship.
That morning his mum dropped him at school, but once there he emailed teachers saying he was ill. He caught the bus home and hid in his wardrobe until his mum had gone out.
Despite being a learner driver, he took the keys to the family car and drove to Ellie’s house.
He strangled her before stabbing her repeatedly in the neck with a kitchen knife, leaving her hand on the knife handle.
Unbelievably, Carole told me Ellie had completed a piece of work before her death on whether child murderers should be punished.
“She got the results for that on the Monday and on the Friday she was murdered herself,” Carole said.
“To me there is some message – Mum, you had to do that to save other young girls and women – and she’d be incredibly proud we did it.”
Griffiths was jailed for 12-and-a-half years for killing Ellie.
“It just didn’t seem right that a person who bought a knife and murdered a stranger on the street faced a 25-year starting point, whereas someone who murdered a partner or ex-partner at home with a kitchen knife faces a 15-year starting point,” Carole said. “How is that justice?”
In 2019, Carole had never been interviewed by a journalist or argued her case with a politician, but that was soon to change.
On the night Griffiths started his prison sentence, BBC Points West broadcast a 30-minute programme about Ellie’s life, led by Carole.
Sat at home watching from her sofa in Frome, Somerset, was Julie.
Her 24-year-old daughter Poppy Devey Waterhouse had been murdered five months before Ellie.
