Extract from LARA e-magazine article:
Children Who Kill. Why do they do it?
…Some killings, however, defy even the most rational of explanations. The murders that took place in the summer of 1996 have left psychologists, lawyers and police professionals scratching their heads over the killer’s motive. The details have, of course, become legendary. In a Wilmslow suburb, a group of schoolgirls were having high tea to celebrate Bryony Clive’s eleventh birthday. Even the very act of having a tea party was unusual in a decade of celebratory cinema trips and pottery painting. Bryony, however, was a precocious child who loved reading detective novels and studying the flowers in the family’s well-stocked garden. When she grew up, she wanted to be a botanist, she told her doting mother.
It was Florence Bowden’s faint that first alerted the other children that something was wrong. She slid down the chair, her legs flailing against the stripped pine table decorated with home-made bunting. She began convulsing on the floor and was dead within seconds. Ruth Watson died soon after because she’d eaten a second helping of pavlova, encouraged by Bryony who gave her a glassful of elderflower cordial to help down the slightly dry meringue. The cordial was poisoned too.
Olivia Clarke was taken to the local hospital with hopes that she’d survive. A life of dialysis before a kidney transplant was her likely fate, doctors informed her parents, but the havoc wreaked by plant-based toxins is difficult to predict. She died later that evening despite everyone’s best efforts.
Only Grace Pagonakis made a full recovery, mainly because she didn’t like elderflower cordial and had instead opted for a glass of lemonade. She’d only ingested a spoonful of pavlova when Florence passed out and required just a brief stay in hospital.
Bryony Clive, the perpetrator of the crime, survived. Her claim to also have symptoms of poisoning meant the much-needed antidote of atropine wasn’t administered to the surviving girls. Her actions came to light in hospital when a nurse became suspicious of Bryony’s manner. Under questioning, the pre-teen admitted to having deliberately added the crushed leaves of two foxglove plants she knew to have poisonous properties to the jug of cordial and to the pavlova cream after distracting her mother in the kitchen. When asked for her reasons for killing her school friends, she said that she was entitled to as ‘it was her birthday’. It is this comment that shocked the public and has added to Bryony’s infamy. It also gave her the nickname by which she has become known throughout the world – The Birthday Girl.
After a short trial, Bryony was found guilty of the murder of her three friends and of the attempted killing of Grace Pagonakis. She was jailed for a minimum of seventeen years, the sentence more lenient than you might expect on account of her being a minor, although still above the age of criminal responsibility. Although her anonymity was ensured during the court proceedings, the judge agreed that it was in the public interest for her name to be published following the guilty verdict, although strict reporting conditions meant that no photographs have ever been released. Bryony’s current location is unknown, and she will also have been given a new name on release. There have been many attempts in the popular press to discover her new identity and in 2018, in response to a particularly aggressive media campaign, a new whole life order was made protecting her anonymity and that of her family.
The whereabouts of Bryony Clive, The Birthday Girl, can never be revealed.