In a chilling crime incident that has sent people into a tizzy, Scarlet Blake, a 26-year-old transgender has been sentenced to at least 24 years in a UK prison for murdering a random Spanish man, all because her American online girlfriend "said it'd be hot" reported the New York Post. Four months before the murder, Blake had live-streamed the horrific killing of her neighbour's cat. She was slapped with the sentence after she was found guilty last week of murdering 30-year-old Jorge Martin Carreno and pushing his body into River Cherwell in Oxford in July 2021.
Blake had previously pleaded guilty to the grotesque killing of a cat. She had live-streamed herself skinning and dissecting her neighbour's cat after which she put the dead body in a blender.
She had told the jury that the cat killing was something she "very much didn't want" and only pretended to enjoy it. Blake further said that she did it to please her girlfriend.
She used cat food and a carrier to lure the pet. After fixing up the camera and tripod to record the horrific act, she hanged the cat with a ribbon before cutting it open. After killing the animal, she dissected it, decapitated it, removed its fur and skin, and put the carcass in a blender.
Once done, she said: “Well, one day, I want to learn how to do this to a person.”
She was inspired by the Netflix documentary called Don’t F**k with Cats on a man who killed felines and murdered a human and during the act the New Order song "True Faith" played in the background.
After killing the cat, Blake stalked the Oxford streets in search of a human victim. Blake then lured Carreno to a secluded river after he got separated from his friends during a night out. She then attacked him with a vodka bottle, strangled him, and pushed his dead body into the river, the New York Post reported.
During the trial, it was revealed that Blake had carried out the crimes to impress her American girlfriend Ashlynn Bell. The judge stated: "You decided to kill someone because you believed Ashlynn Bell would find it sexually exciting, as she did. As you later said to another partner, you killed ‘because my lover said it’d be hot."
The judge told Blake she had an “obsession with harm and death” during her sentencing.
“You attributed your morbid interests to a split or dissociative personality using the language of psychiatry or psychoanalysis,” the judge said. “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," he said.
“All of this was part of an elaborate attempt to rationalise what you had done and shift responsibility to others. There is no evidence that you suffer from any relevant mental illness or other mental disorder. What you did is not the fault of a society that didn’t accept you. It is not the fault of your parents,” he said.
The video filmed by her was so grotesque that it could not be shown in the court without editing, reported BBC News.
The judge added: "There was, therefore, a clear sexual motivation for the killing. “I am sure you did derive pleasure from killing Jorge, as you had from killing the cat."
Blake tried to convince the court during her trial that she was not swayed by the Netflix documentary. However, the judge remarked: "You told the court it had nothing to do with the documentary, I am sure that this was untrue and the documentary played a part in your mind in the link between killing a cat and killing a person."
Blake has also been handed out two concurrent sentences of four months and two months for causing unnecessary suffering to an animal and criminal damage, the New York Post reported.