An “extremely troubled and damaged teenager” who smothered and stabbed to death a seven-year-girl to see whether she was a robot has been ordered to be detained in a specialist hospital under the Mental Health Act.
The 16-year-old girl, who cannot be named, broke down in tears as she appeared by video link at Leeds crown court on Thursday morning.
The judge, Mr Justice Soole, made an interim hospital order for 12 weeks for further psychiatric tests on the teenager.
In July she admitted killing Katie Rough on a playing field in the Woodthorpe area of York on 9 January.
Katie was found with severe lacerations to her neck and chest and had been smothered with a gloved hand before being slashed with a craft knife.
Members of her family wiped away tears at the end of the brief hearing, in which her attacker appeared on a television screen flanked by her solicitor.
The teenager did not speak for the duration of the 25-minute hearing, leaving her solicitor to confirm her name when addressed by the court clerk.
The girl broke down in tears and sobbed as the judge sentenced her to a 12-week hospital order.
Addressing the teenager, Soole said he was satisfied after psychiatric assessments that she posed a high risk of serious harm to others and to herself.
An interim hospital order involves a short period of specialist medical assessment pending a final decision as to how the individual should be dealt with.
Soole suggested the order would be renewed for a further 28 days when it expired. An interim hospital order cannot be in force for more than 12 months, the judge said.
“I emphasise that this is an interim order only. Accordingly all sentencing options will be open when, at its conclusion, I make my final decision.”
The court heard in July how a full psychiatric assessment had been requested for the teenager, and the possibility of psychosis was flagged a month before the killing, yet no investigation was carried out.
A friend told investigators the teenager self-harmed and liked to talk about death, and that she had said she dreamed of killing someone and heard voices in her head.
Drawings found in her home showed stickmen in poses depicting killing and death, and the words: “They are not human.” The paper was bloodstained and the court heard it had been cut with the same knife that was used to attack Katie.
The teenager’s bedroom contained books, notes and comics of a violent nature.
Police found a soft toy of Simba from The Lion King that had been mutilated.
The prosecution accepted that the teenager had a mental disorder at the time of Katie’s killing, which affected her ability to think and reason clearly and to control her emotions and actions.
The teenager had a history of depression, frequently ran away from home, including just days before the killing, and had attempted overdosing on painkillers, the court heard.
Two days before she killed Katie, the teenager had posted a picture to Instagram of self-harm wounds to her arms made with pencil sharpener blades captioned: “Mentally, seriously, not OK”. She was “clearly crying out for help and support”, the teenager’s defence barrister Nicholas Johnson QC told a court hearing in July.
He said his client had been telling people of “delusional and bizarre thoughts” for many months before the killing, including the “genuine belief in her head that her family and many others were not human and may be controlled by a higher and hostile force”.
Johnson said: “She was driven by the irrational belief that her victim may not be human and needed proof of this by using a knife.”
Alison Rough, Katie’s mother, told police that on the day of the killing her daughter and the teenager had gone to play on the field at about 3.15pm. “The girls skipped off chattering to themselves and that was the last I saw of them,” she told police.
As darkness fell, Rough became concerned about her daughter’s whereabouts. After searching and shouting for her outside, she called 999 at 4.47pm to report her missing and was told by the operator there had been a crime reported at the nearby field.
She then rushed to the scene with her husband and saw a police officer beginning chest compressions on her daughter. On seeing her injuries, Rough fell to her knees screaming and “tried to cradle Katie’s head”.
