Siobhan Whyte’s final words to her daughter, Rhiannon, were a poignant blend of affection and resolve. “I will always love you,” she expressed, adding, “And I promise you justice.” Rhiannon, who passed away at the age of 27 and was a devoted mother to her six-year-old son, was described by Siobhan as “smart, kind, and funny, with the gentlest, purest heart.”

Tragically, Rhiannon’s life came to a brutal end while working at a hotel accommodating asylum-seekers. She was fatally attacked with a screwdriver, suffering 23 stab wounds, as she awaited her train home after a night shift on October 20, 2024—a devastating twist of fate.

The assailant, Deng Chol Majek, a Sudanese national who had entered the UK illegally just 11 weeks prior via a small boat, repeatedly misled the court. He fabricated stories about his age, his asylum claims, his proficiency in English, and most critically, his involvement in the crime.

At Coventry Crown Court, two weeks ago, Mr. Justice Soole sentenced Majek to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 29 years. The judge declared, “The evidence against you, particularly from CCTV and DNA, was overwhelming.” Majek’s refusal to admit to the crime left the court without any understanding of why he murdered Rhiannon, a hotel staff member who, along with her colleagues, had been assisting him and other residents.

At Coventry Crown Court two weeks ago, Mr Justice Soole said Majek would serve a life sentence with a minimum term of 29 years, telling him: ‘The evidence against you, in particular from CCTV and DNA, was overwhelming.

‘You continue to deny you were the assailant and the court is thus left with no explanation for what possessed you to murder a member of hotel staff whom, together with her colleagues, had been serving and helping you and your fellow residents.’

Today, speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, Siobhan’s contempt for her daughter’s killer is so deep she refuses to dignify him with an identity.

‘I never say his name. He is nothing to me. He is obliterated, not worthy of my attention.

‘I try not to let the hatred I have for him consume me. I try to be more like Rhiannon because she hated arguments, conflict. 

‘She wanted to help people. That’s why she did her job.

‘All the hatred I feel for him is overpowered by the love I have for Rhiannon. But what he did to my daughter was demonic.’

Was justice served for Rhiannon? ‘It is a relief that he is locked away for life, that he is off the streets, that no other woman will suffer at his hands as my daughter did. Do I want him to go back to Sudan? No, because he would just find a way of coming back here. And I don’t want him to die either. Dying is too easy. I want him to have a long life of suffering.

‘I relive in my head every day what he did to Rhiannon. I cannot stand the thought of her trying to defend herself and being so scared. What was going through her mind? It literally destroys me.’

‘Everyone tells me, “You have to stop thinking about it.” But tell my mind that. It traumatises me. 

‘I’d hoped to God his face wasn’t the last one she saw. But we discovered that it was. She had the most beautiful blue eyes and he blinded her.

‘Rhiannon wanted to be an organ donor but he even denied her that. He insisted he was innocent and because of that the body of the beautiful woman we loved became a piece of “evidence” that had to be sent for analysis.

‘And we had to sign to give permission for her brain to be sent away for forensic tests, too. It was all too much to bear.

‘I never cried before but now I can’t stop. I am still wrapped up in my own guilt and grief that I’m her mum and I could not help her.

‘He has no remorse, he’s given no explanation. If I could ask him one question it would be, “Why? Why her? What had she done to you to deserve this?” I watch the CCTV footage constantly searching for just one clue as to why.’

The footage shows Rhiannon leaving the Park Inn Hotel, Walsall, after finishing her late shift and calling her best friend Emma as she makes the short walk to the station. 

She chats to Emma and Majek follows her. Thirty seconds after she reaches the platform he stabs her with a screwdriver – it is a vicious and frenzied attack.

Emma hears three ‘really high-pitched, terrified, in pain’ screams before the line goes dead. Immediately she calls the police.

Recalling a night of abject fear and panic, Siobhan says: ‘I was at home and Rhiannon’s friend phoned me [at 11.15pm]. I missed the call so she phoned my daughter Cara and said, “Rhiannon is being attacked.” Meanwhile Emma’s husband was calling the police, and they phoned me.

‘My first thought was to call Rhiannon’s mobile. You see my call flashing up on her phone on the CCTV footage. [Majek] had Rhiannon’s mobile in his hands by then. And then you see him throwing it from a bridge into the river.’ Police were later to retrieve it.

‘Every part of me was shaking. There were calls back and forth to the police and the hotel, to my children. 

‘You always try to think the best and then I spoke to the police again and they said Rhiannon was on her way to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham.

‘I went with my daughter Alex and the police met us outside. We went into the family room and that’s when the consultant told us Rhiannon had been stabbed. I couldn’t comprehend it. I went into shock, just froze.

‘I remember saying, “What do you mean?” and he said she’d been stabbed in the head and that the family needed to come.’

The desolation and grief the large and close-knit family felt was unimaginable. Meanwhile, in grotesque juxtaposition, Majek was celebrating.

Immediately after stabbing Rhiannon, he swung by an off-licence, bought beer and spent the night dancing round the hotel.

During this time Rhiannon, who never regained consciousness before she died three days later, was in a coma in ICU.

‘I held her hand. I thought, “Why has she got all those marks over her?” I didn’t want to leave her side,’ Siobhan says.

‘I didn’t want to eat. I couldn’t sleep. The kids told me I had to try to rest so I went home, but I only stayed for two hours, then went straight back to her bedside.

‘I remember saying to the consultant, “Please keep her alive for my youngest daughter’s birthday.” She died the next day.’

All Siobhan’s children – Emma, 37, Daniel 35, Alex, 30, and Cara, 27 – are equally adored, but it was Rhiannon and her son who still shared a home with Siobhan in Walsall, just a two-minute train ride away from Bescot Railway Station where she was killed.

So I ask Siobhan: What does justice for Rhiannon look like now her killer is locked up for life?

She is a woman of quiet courage and tenacity. She sits in the small, neat living room of her flat in Warwickshire – she moved after Rhiannon’s death – and considers.

She did not want to be drawn into politics, into the small-boats debate, but now she says she has no option. ‘We are not a family of racists,’ she begins. ‘We’d never judge anyone by the colour of their skin.

‘Only one migrant is to blame for her death, and we all stand by our belief that he was evil.’

Since Rhiannon’s death Siobhan, plagued by grief and insomnia, has been unable to work, although she hopes to return to her job as a senior health care worker where many of her colleagues are immigrants.

‘And they’re lovely women. All of them have the proper papers to work here legally and that’s fine.’

But she reserves the full force of her anger for those who come over on small boats without documentation. ‘We don’t know who they are, what they’ve done – even if they’re using their real names.

‘They should come here with proper documentation and if they don’t have it, they need to be vetted and deemed safe, or sent back home. 

‘The Government needs to take its head out of the sand and say, “Let’s bring a change.” Keir Starmer must take some responsibility. He has blood on his hands.

‘I’d like to meet him and ask him why he is still allowing this to happen? Wouldn’t he be acting more decisively if it was his child who’d been killed?’

She points to small, ineffectual gestures by politicians such as Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley and Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls who, says Siobhan, ‘made promises in the name of Rhiannon and femicide but we’ve not heard from her since’.

Her local Labour MP suggested crowd-funding for a bench in Rhiannon’s memory – all of which, for Siobhan, is skirting round the real issue. ‘We cannot have dangerous migrants in our country killing our children.’

Two days after the verdict, Siobhan lost her mother. ‘She was heartbroken for Rhiannon’, says Siobhan. ‘So I hold him [Majek] responsible for two deaths.’

What sustains her is her family – notably Rhiannon’s little boy – and her determination to keep Rhiannon’s memory alive.

She grappled with the awful dilemma of how to tell her grandson that his mother had died.

‘If we cannot accept her death, how could a five-year-old child? How do you tell him his mummy is never coming back, that she’s been killed?

‘I couldn’t speak the words but Alex managed. She said, “Mummy had a poorly brain and she’s gone to live in heaven.”

‘His scream just broke our hearts. We lay in bed with him – his auntie Alex and me – and we told him how much he was loved and protected. He goes to bed now with his teddy which has a picture of Rhiannon on it.

‘I see his mum as a child in him. He is her double, with her kind heart. When he’s older he will know the truth, but now we have to protect him.

‘We’ve told him a little more – that a bad man hurt her brain and the doctors couldn’t make it better, and now he wants to be a “brain doctor” so he can help people like his mum.’

Rhiannon’s son now lives with his Auntie Alex, enveloped in the family’s love. It will always plague Siobhan that Majek gave absolutely no reason for her murder.

One tiny clue might reside in the malevolent glare – captured chillingly on hotel security footage – that Majek directed at her as he sat in reception on the night he killed her, watching her handing out biscuits to residents.

Siobhan was present for every day of Majek’s trial – refusing to be intimidated by him, enduring every minutia of the fatal assault.

She reserves the highest praise for British Transport Police who arrested Majek within five hours of the killing, who stood by her at every court appearance.

‘I had to look him [Majek] in the eye. I faced him in the witness box. I showed him no disrespect. I stayed quiet while he called everyone – the police, forensics, CCTV – liars.

‘He genuinely did not care. He made eye contact with me once, then he looked away. He just stood there looking dead behind the eyes.’

On only one occasion did she feel compelled to leave the court. It was when Majek’s barrister, Gurdeep Garcha KC, suggested – although Majek had been wearing identical clothes to the killer – his identity could have been mistaken.

‘He said, “Walsall is a multi-cultural city. It has a lot of people of colour. Maybe it wasn’t him.

Can you imagine how scared he must have felt being taken into the cells?”

‘I just thought, “Can you imagine how terrified Rhiannon was when he stabbed her?”

‘My daughter was 5 ft 4 in. He is 6 ft tall. Yet she had courage, compassion and a heart of gold, while he has no remorse, no conscience and has taken no responsibility for his actions.’

Today she does not cry, but sometimes the tears arrive in a flood, unbidden. She has learnt to keep her emotions in check for Rhiannon’s son’s sake.

‘We never say anything negative to him, but he knows he can ask us about his mummy whenever he likes. He is loved so much by all of us,’ she adds.

‘Not only because of who he is, but because of whose he is.’

• The Rhiannon Whyte Foundation helps support families who have lost a daughter, sister, wife and mother to murder. To donate, visit: gofund.me/b7e77e469