“Let’s kill her tomorrow at 6,” Girl X texted. “I can’t because its a school night,” Boy Y pinged back. These are far from the most graphic of the messages exchanged between the killers of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey in the months leading up to her murder. But they are shocking in their mundanity.
On 11 February 2023, two schoolchildren, Girl X and Boy Y, lured Brianna to Culcheth Linear Park in Warrington, where she lived, with the promise of drugs. Boy Y carried a hunting knife he had bought on a ski trip in Bulgaria for £13.50. “It was sharp enough to cut his skin, he assured [Girl X],” Brianna’s mother writes with clear-eyed precision, “when she asked him if it would definitely 100 per cent kill my child.” They stabbed Brianna 28 times and left her to bleed to death. The 12th chapter of Esther Ghey’s memoir is titled “I Knew This Would Happen”. It is a short chapter, just nine words: “And it is agony. The rest is a blur.”
Under a Pink Sky could justifiably have been a furious tirade of a book, but instead it is articulate, thoughtful, full of self-reflection and forgiveness – and, yes, it is brave. I have never met Ghey, but I get the impression that this is all so very like her.
The court permitted that Girl X and Boy Y be publicly identified, but Ghey does not use their names, so nor will I. Brianna, a trans girl, was born Brett; Ghey uses both names, and so will I. “I will give due diligence to the name Brianna chose for herself, but it is important to me, as her mother, that I am able to remember and mourn the child I gave birth to on 7 November 2006 just as much as the child who was murdered on 11 February 2023.”
Ghey writes that she understands how difficult it might be for some readers to comprehend her child’s transition, but “for Brianna it was perhaps one of the easiest parts of her short life”. Ghey, Brett and her elder sister Alisha listed off possible new names: Blossom? “That sounds like a stripper’s name.” Britney? “Please God, not Britney.” “It was like choosing names for a baby,” Ghey writes, “though I didn’t know or fully understand it at the time, I was giving birth to a new child and losing my old one.” Together, they settled on Brianna – “the only time in our entire lives that she willingly compromised on anything”. But Brianna’s gender identity is not the story here – or, at least, it is only a small part of a bigger, more complicated story.
It is a story that includes ADHD and autism diagnoses, school absence and exclusion, self-harm, disordered eating, isolation, anxiety, low self-esteem – and a smartphone addiction so profound, Ghey writes, that “sometimes I feel I lost two children”: the first, to a black hole of likes and notifications; the second, to two schoolkids with a hunting knife.
Esther Ghey was born to a single mother who left school at 16, but qualified as a maths teacher in her thirties. She describes herself as an insular and overweight child; she was bullied, and sometimes became the bully to protect herself. She talked back to teachers, spent a lot of time in the exclusion unit, and left school with no qualifications. Her mother fostered to augment her teacher’s salary, and one foster child introduced Ghey to drugs and alcohol – a spiral that eventually led to Ghey’s mother calling social services in fear for her grandchildren’s safety.
Ghey doesn’t name the father of her two children, nor does she label their relationship abusive, though reading between the lines, it seems it was. She escaped when Brett was three months old: “I was only twenty, had two children under two; I had been spat at, kicked at, I had lost every photo of Alisha as a baby and most of my belongings; I had lost touch with my real friends… and had very sadly come to believe that I was worthless, useless and unlovable.” With the help of her mother and some school mum friends, she eventually got clean and built a stable life for her young family.
Brett was, Ghey recalls, a “joyful, mischievous, exuberant” child who “always wanted to be outside”. He was severely short-sighted; donning his first pair of glasses, “thick as the base of a Coke bottle”, he exclaimed gleefully: “Mum! You’ve got freckles!” But as Brett entered adolescence and acquired his first smartphone, he became increasingly disruptive, withdrawing into his room and the online world. Lockdown only served to complete his isolation.
Ghey sees many similarities between these two childhoods, both spent on the periphery. “I was eleven when I was introduced to drugs and alcohol,” she writes. “Brett was eleven when he got his first phone. The deterioration in our behaviour was different, but equally as fast and deep.” But whereas Ghey could leave her bullies at school, Brianna’s “were in her pocket. They would follow her into her room and into her head.”
Brianna became increasingly obsessed with gaining followers on TikTok. But while she preened herself for “get ready with me” videos, she neglected personal hygiene and self-care in real life. She began to cut herself. She was increasingly absent from school. She fought frequently with her mother, and Brianna punched holes in the walls. In a rare moment Ghey managed to get hold of Brianna’s phone, she found she had been looking at porn and messaging men on Twitter. She was also following an anorexia influencer who was so skeletal, Ghey writes, “I truly believe these social media platforms were selling death”. Brianna grew so thin her hair began falling out, and after collapsing spent some time in hospital, where her eating could be monitored. Among it all, Ghey writes, “Brett becoming Brianna was the most positive part of that troubled time.”
Ghey found there was little support available to her. “It felt at times as if I was screaming ‘help!’ from a burning building but the powers-that-be kept telling me there was no fire.” Brianna was discharged from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) – a decision that, when her school appealed it, was upheld. The sheer number of acronyms that swirl around Ghey illustrate how toilsome and disorientating the system is: CAHMS, EHCP, CEDS, ECGs, TAF…
The month before her death, Esther’s fear for the safety of her child was so desperate that she emailed Brianna’s social worker: “I worry that I’ll come home from work one day to find both my children raped and murdered.” I knew this would happen.
Under a Pink Sky blends the personal with the political. Today, Ghey is a fervent if at times reluctant campaigner against the excesses of Big Tech: “Yes, someone had killed my child, but something else had been killing my child for a while beforehand. They say pick your battles. Well, this battle picked me.” After Brianna’s death, she raised £84,000 for the Mindfulness in Schools Project, but “soon realised that mindfulness… alone could not protect our children”. She fights for greater regulation of tech platforms. Ghey lists all the depressing stats with which we have become well-acquainted – half of parents report their child’s personality changed after being given a smartphone; a third of five to seven-year-olds use social media unsupervised – but the emotion of Brianna’s story is a far more powerful warning of the threat to our children.
At the same time Brianna was retreating into a dark world of self-harm and “thinspo” content, another local schoolchild was being radicalised online. In May 2020, Girl X, then 12, asked on Instagram for recommendations of what to watch; she had enjoyed Sweeney Todd, she wrote. She soon became obsessed by true-crime documentaries: Jeffrey Dahmer, Harold Shipman, Richard Ramirez. In search of ever-greater extremes, she accessed “red rooms” on the dark web, where she could watch live streams of people being raped, tortured, murdered. When Ghey and Girl X’s mother first met, following the sentencing, they found they had “common ground”: “Both of us had been shocked and traumatised by the material we discovered our children had been able to access yet effectively hide. Both of us had to come to terms with the fact that our lives had been irreversibly destroyed.”
Ghey frequently fought with Brianna over how she dressed – the long acrylic nails, the fake eyelashes, the long socks, particularly the length of her skirt. “But now I say, well done, Brianna,” she writes devastatingly. “Well done for being yourself and dressing the way you wanted to. You were so unforgettable that 120 witnesses recalled seeing you and phoned the police.”
Brianna’s difference was, in the end, a sort of superpower. Esther Ghey’s is surely that she is the kind of woman who looks at the mother of the girl who murdered her child and see not an enemy but a friend; an opportunity to grieve, perhaps even to heal, together.
[See also: Why we’re stuck in Ancient Rome]
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out