How a known predator obsessed with violent ‘snuff films’ killed 17-year-old Georgia Williams, then had sex with her body
The teen's killer was already known to police after he'd strangled another girl and they found doctored images of women he knew with nooses around their necks. So why wasn't he stopped?
GEORGIA Williams was just 17 when she was killed. She died at the hands of a violent predator who hanged her, filmed her final moments, and then had sex with her body.
But if Georgia had known about her killer's obsession with sexual violence - his strangling fetish and his doctored images of girls he knew with nooses around their necks - she wouldn't have gone to his house and she would be alive today.
This is the subject of a new Channel 5 documentary, Killed On Camera, which investigates the murder of the Telford teenager in 2013.
Her killer, 23-year-old Jamie Reynolds, was already known to the police, owing to a history of dangerous encounters with women he knew, including an incident where he was arrested aged 17 for trying to strangle a girl.
The attack was treated as an assault and he was given a warning, but if police had dug deeper they would have uncovered Reynolds' secret obsession. This was a digital stash of sick "snuff films" - videos of women being badly hurt or murdered.
He had already told therapists that he was turned on by strangulation, and his own stepfather had told the authorities that the then-teenager had been looking at images of naked women being strangled.
Long before he killed Georgia, police also knew that Reynolds had doctored a series of Facebook photos of girls he knew to show them being hanged - thanks to another tip off from Reynolds' stepfather.
But the police didn't act, and the girls he posed a threat to were never told.
As Georgia's mum, Lynette, says on the programme: "He'd been biding his time to kill someone.
"Unfortunately, it was our daughter."
Georgia was an Air Cadet who had her heart set on joining the RAF.
She was known to be extremely popular and kind, and had a diverse group of friends.
One of them was 23-year-old Reynolds, a petrol station cashier who knew Georgia's older sister, Scarlett, through school.
Reynolds wanted to be a photographer, and had already taken some portraits of girls in Georgia's friend group.
He was known to be very interested in Georgia, and had previously asked her out on multiple occasions, but Georgia had a boyfriend and she politely turned him down each time.
However, when he invited her to his house one evening, claiming he needed her help with a photography project, Georgia agreed to go and pose for a few photos.
She left her house just before 8pm on Sunday 26 May, 2013, and walked five minutes down the roads to Reynolds' house.
She never came home.
Georgia's mum, Lynette, and dad, Steve - a police officer - were worried and sent Georgia a text to ask where she was.
A reply came from her phone, saying she was staying over at a friends' and would be back tomorrow.
But she didn't come back the next day either, and Steve called the police.
Cops went straight to Reynolds' house, her last known location, and kicked the door down... but he was nowhere to be seen.
As soon as Steve heard this detail he started to panic.
As a policeman himself, he knew you don't force your way in unless there's a reason to suspect something is seriously wrong.
After finding no clues at Reynolds' house, police officers went to see Jadine Dunning, a friend of Georgia's sister, who also knew Reynolds.
They showed Jadine a doctored image of herself, hanging from a noose with her eyes bulging.
It was one of the sick pictures Reynolds had made years before, which the police had seen but not acted on.
"My first thought was where's this image come from," Jadine says in the documentary. "Why am I only hearing about this now?
"Something has gone wrong somewhere. But they shrugged it off and told me not to worry."
When police finally linked Reynolds' violent history with Georgia's disappearance, they found his digital camera.
It showed a photo of Georgia standing on a box with a rope around her neck.
Shockingly, this would be the last photo of Georgia before Reynolds kicked the box out from under her and video recorded her final moments.
He then stripped her naked and had sex with her body, before loading the corpse into his van and leaving the area.
Georgia's dad, Steve, cries as he describes his daughter's final moments.
"He had no regard for human dignity," he says. "He was only concerned with fuelling his own pleasure."
Mum Lynette adds: "To be told that your daughter has been murdered and then dealt with in terrible ways is something you can't describe.
"It's just like a living nightmare."
Reynolds was arrested three days later at a Premier Inn in Glasgow, but he denied any knowledge of what happened, claiming he wasn't well and had gone to bed early that night.
But it wasn't long before police found his notes in a book he'd used to plan the killings.
He'd written down Georgia's phone access code and noted that Georgia always signed off her texts with three capital kisses - details he used when he text Georgia's mum from her phone on the night she went missing.
Investigators also found a list with the names of 32 women he knew - all possible targets - and a series of stories he'd written about killing girls, which he planned to reenact.
One, titled Georgia's Surprise, detailed what he was going to do to the 17-year-old once he had lured her to his house.
His parents had been away on holiday that week, so Reynolds had ample time to prepare for his homemade snuff film.
As mum Lynette says: "He did it meticulously."
Georgia's naked body was later found in a wood on a hillside in Wales, partially submerged in a bog where Reynolds had dumped her.
It seemed like the family's heartbreak would never end.
To add to the nightmare, Georgia's family knew her death could have been averted.
A doctor's report had already claimed that Reynolds was a "significant risk to others" after he was first arrested as a teenager, but nothing was done.
Then, in 2011, Reynolds was again reported to the police, this time for reversing his car into a girl who spurned his advances.
Cops failed to link this to the existing information about him and, again, nothing happened.
Since his early teens, Reynolds had been obsessed with snuff films, and had a library of over 16,000 photos of women being hurt or killed.
"If they'd have followed through on one of the issues he was involved in we would have known," says Georgia's sister, Scarlett.
"If those officers had done their job properly Georgia would be alive now," adds Steve, who was still a policeman at the time.
"I lost confidence in the police. It was grinding me down."
Reynolds was given a life sentence, but it was little consolation for Georgia's family.
"A life sentence means nothing to me," Steve says.
"He can see his mother and his father. He can telephone them. I can't do that with Georgia. "
The family made it their mission to expose the police's shortcomings in the case, and a 2015 report found a series of failings and oversights had led to Reynolds slipping under the police's radar.
When the report came out, the police force admitted they let Georgia and her family down.
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However, the police involved in the case were only given misconduct meetings, and one has even been promoted since then.
Steve and Lynette weren't satisfied, and for Steve, it was too painful to continue serving as an officer.
"We likened the misconduct meeting to a group of junior school children being told off by the headmaster," they said in a statement at the time.
"That is the system and it will remain so until someone with old-fashioned values, ethics, moral standards and a backbone stands up and changes things.
“It’s a very expensive lesson when victims pay with their lives. It is about time the wrongdoers paid a higher price for their incompetence.”
Statement from West Mercia Police
Assistant Chief Constable Martin Evans said: "Our thoughts remain with Georgia's family five years on from her murder.
"Since publication of the discretionary serious case review in October 2015, the organisation has learnt many lessons and we have worked hard to implement the review's recommendations and ensure that we provide our staff with the tools and support they need to properly assess risk and ensure that everything feasible is done to protect people from harm."
Steve and Lynette have started the , a charity which provides various forms of support for young people in Telford & Wrekin.
Killed on Camera airs tonight at 9:15 on Channel 5.