[2][3][4] Before her death, Capper relayed that she had been kidnapped and held captive for seven days at a house in Moston, Manchester, where she was beaten and tortured.

[6] The murder arose from the "avenging [of] trivial grievances: a sexual insult, infection with pubic lice and the loss of a pink duffel coat.

"[7] Detectives conducting the inquiry said that "for sheer mindless brutality" the crime ranked alongside the torture inflicted upon the victims of the Moors murderers.

Jean Powell's brother Clifford Pook, aged 18, was sentenced to fifteen years in a Young Offenders' Institution for false imprisonment and conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.

Powell lived at 97 Langworthy Road, Moston, a small Victorian terraced house, where she also dealt drugs and was involved with the handling of stolen motor vehicles.

She was grabbed as soon as she arrived and held down while Glyn shaved her head and eyebrows and then made her clean up the hair and place it in a bin.

[13] Capper was then kicked by Powell and McNeilly as she lay curled up on the floor, with both women took turns beating her with a three-foot-long (1 m) wooden instrument and a belt.

[8][9] Over the next five days, Capper was subjected to a series of violent acts, "increasing in severity and brutality as the time passed.

"[9][16] At some point during the week, Pook and Leigh called at the house and saw Capper, blindfolded and gagged, tied to the bed.

By this time, Capper had been lying in her own urine and feces for several days and was placed in a bath containing concentrated disinfectant and scrubbed with a stiff brush with sufficient force to remove skin.

"[18] David Hill, aged 18, was asked to "sit in" at the house, and while there heard Dudson shouting in the back room.

"[9][19] Leigh and Dudson also helped Capper's sister's fiancé, Paul Barlow, repair his car while knowing she was being held and tortured in the house.

[12] In the early hours of 14 December 1992, Capper was forced into the boot of a stolen white Fiat Panda car and driven 15 miles (25 km) to a narrow lane at Werneth Low, near Romiley, on the outskirts of Stockport.

[9][21][18] When McNeilly had difficulty getting the petrol to ignite, Glyn Powell and Dudson made multiple attempts before lighting the girl's body on fire.

[23] After her attackers left, Capper managed to scramble back up the embankment and stagger along the lane for approximately a quarter of a mile (400 metres) to Compstall Road, despite extensive burns.

Jean Powell and McNeilly were granted leave to have the lengths of their minimum sentences reviewed at the Court of Appeal in June 2012.

McNeilly, who was sharing a wing with Rosemary West and Myra Hindley, was immediately transferred to HM Prison New Hall.

Writing in The Times, Jon Ronson focused on Manchester's apparent economic imbalance, pointing out that while "superficially, it is a city of growth"—hosting international environmental conferences in 1993 and bidding to host the 2000 Olympic Games—this could not disguise the realities of the poor quality of "built-to-collapse" housing, the city council's policy on homelessness, poverty, street violence and drug culture, all of which played parts in the events leading up to Capper's murder.

The city, he said, had violent "no-go" areas, where "you can expect to be mugged," created through drug abuse and hopelessness, and populated by people who "don't work, have no money, and rarely leave the houses—that they find themselves living in—before dark.

David Ward, writing in The Guardian, similarly drew attention to the housing policies, and quoted an older Moston resident as saying: "These people are moving in and out every three months.

"[11] The Daily Mail—in what Barker and Petley called "ideological overdrive"—described Capper's killers as "the product of a society that tolerates petty crime, the break-up of families and feckless spending...

"[40] Author Carol Anne Davis agreed that, when looking for answers about how this crime came about, one need only "look at the upbringings of these women, who were single parents to three children by their mid-twenties, had teenage boyfriends who were barely legal, and who supported themselves through drug dealing and theft.

"[9] Following the convictions of Powell and McNeilly, there was wider press speculation about "girl gangs" and the rise in violent crime committed by young women; the "probation service and ex-offender organisations found themselves bombarded with requests from journalists seeking out case histories to illustrate this apparent explosion of LA-style girl-gang culture on the streets of Britain.

However, statistics and research produced by the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) did show "an increase in the number of women jailed for offences involving violence.

Manchester newspapers named all of the killers involved, but most less-localised reports simply referred to the 'violent gang' he belonged to, and it probably wouldn't have occurred to newer readers that this gang included two merciless female sadists who thought that an allegedly stolen duffel coat was an excuse to torture someone to death.

Neither Powell or McNeilly owned a video recorder, and the Child's Play-inspired music that had been used to torture Capper was a popular track at the time, taped direct from Manchester's Piccadilly Radio.

[15][43] Broadcaster David Elstein called the video connection "a false story... branded into the consciousness of the media," and questioned the news media's fascination with the film: "There is no reason to believe that Suzanne Capper would be alive today if the audiotape had instead contained the torture scene from King Lear, or a catchphrase from Bruce Forsyth ...

"[44] In April 1994, Professor Elizabeth Newson published Video Violence and the Protection of Children (the "Newson Report") which attracted huge media interest due to its claims that it had "definitively established the long sought-for link between screen violence and the real-life variety," and which cited the Capper murder as an example.

The chairman of the committee, Sir Ivan Lawrence had to point out to Newson that this was incorrect, and that both the police and the British Board of Film Classification had ruled out any connection between the movie and the murder.

[45] The link between the murders and Child's Play 3 by the news media directly led to the delay of the release certification for both Natural Born Killers and Reservoir Dogs.