(Jamaica Observer) Eighteen-year-old Joeith Lynch was dead by the time the letter from the Students’ Loan Bureau informing her that she had been successful in securing funds to begin her studies as a medical student at The University of the West Indies, Mona made its way into her family’s hands.
The academic prowess of the bright, former The Queens School student was brutally stunted when a group of males invaded the home she shared with her mother, Charmaine Rattray, in Lauriston, St Catherine in the dead of night on July 19, 2011 and cruelly hacked them to death before shooting and beheading them, leaving the blood-drenched house with the heads which they discarded in separate places.
In the aftermath of the bloodbath, tight-lipped residents, collared by a culture of fear, grappled with the memory of the horror of that night, with only few opting to speak with investigators outside the walls of their community.
When the story unravelled, five men between the ages of 20 and 29 years were held by the police in connection with the killings, which they said were supposedly committed on the instructions of an individual referred to as “The General” in reprisal for the death of a crony, Scott Thomas, which was supposedly engineered by relatives of the dead women.
Rattray’s missing head was seen on July 21 floating in the Rio Cobre, some 300 feet away from where she had spent her final hours.
Days later the police, acting on information from one of the men involved, found Lynch’s decomposing head in a gully just 50 feet away from the house where she and her mother were brutally murdered.
After nearly nine years behind bars, in a trial which lasted 15 working days, the riveting and at times diverse accounts of Adrian Campbell, Roshane Goldson, Kemar Riley, Fabian Smith, and former accused Sanja Ducally — the only one of the five to walk free — as to what also took place that night transfixed people listening in Courtroom 1 of the Supreme Court in downtown Kingston.
