Channel 4’s The Jury: 14 and On Trial for Murder puts the jury and on trial inside a real killing: Jerome and Joshua Ellis, accused of murdering Neil Tulley in 2013. The four-part series starts on 1 September and turns a courtroom record into a public decision exercise, with ordinary viewers asked to weigh a 14-year-old defendant’s responsibility.
Cedar Way in Guildford
Neil Tulley was 54 when he was killed at the family home in Cedar Way, Guildford, Surrey. Jerome and Joshua Ellis used kitchen knives, and a post-mortem found 65 separate sites of injury across Tulley’s body; court evidence said he was asleep or nearly asleep on the sofa when the attack began. The scale of the violence is why the series lands as more than period drama: it is built around a case that already reached a legal conclusion and still carries raw factual weight.
Daniel in the series
The younger defendant is called Daniel in the programme and was 14 years old at the time of the killing. The brothers do not deny being involved, but they deny murder and say they reached breaking point after years of alleged abuse. That is the fault line the series recreates: the defence says they feared what Tulley might do to them, their mother and their other siblings, while prosecutors argued the attack was not self-defence because Tulley was asleep.
Joshua Ellis on the run
After the killing, the brothers went on the run and were later found hiding in a porch by a bellringer. Joshua reportedly told the man that Tulley had been abusive and that they “could not take it any longer.” That line matters because the series is not simply replaying evidence; it is asking a real jury of ordinary members of the public to process a case in which fear, violence and intent all sit in the same record.
For viewers, the useful detail is simple: this is a four-part re-staging of a real murder trial, not a fictionalized crime story with loose edges. The programme begins on 1 September, and the central unresolved point for the televised exercise is the verdict the recreated jury reaches on Daniel, Jerome Ellis and Joshua Ellis.
