Jury Channel 4 starts tonight on 1 September, and The Jury: 14 and On Trial For Murder brings Jerome Ellis and Joshua Ellis back into prime-time scrutiny. The four-part series follows a jury of ordinary members of the public as it recreates the murder trial at the centre of the case.
Four-part is the key number here: the programme is built as a compact re-staging, not a long-run factual archive, so every episode has to carry the evidence forward. The production also changes some names, including calling the younger defendant Daniel in the programme, a sign that it is balancing courtroom reconstruction with a degree of distance from the real case.
Guildford trial details
2013 is the year that frames the story. Jerome and Joshua Ellis killed their stepfather, Neil Tulley, in Guildford, Surrey, and the court heard that Tulley was 54 when he died at the family home in Cedar Way. A post-mortem found 65 separate sites of injury across his body, and the attack was described in court as so violent that he was nearly decapitated.
Jerome and Joshua admitted stabbing Tulley while he slept, and prosecutors said that removed any self-defence argument because Tulley was asleep when the brothers attacked him. The brothers denied murder and said they had reached breaking point after years of alleged abuse, adding that they were frightened of what he might do to them, their mother and their other siblings.
Joshua Ellis after the run
After the killing, the brothers went on the run and were later found hiding in a porch by a bellringer. Joshua Ellis reportedly told the man that Tulley had been abusive and that they “could not take it any longer,” a line that captures how the case turned on competing accounts of fear, retaliation and responsibility.
54 and 65 are the numbers that keep this case from becoming a simple morality play. Tulley had previously threatened to kill Joshua and had swung at him with an axe, and he had been arrested and charged with making threats to kill before a jury later acquitted him. The same material now sits at the centre of a four-part Channel 4 series, which means viewers are being asked to weigh evidence from both sides rather than passively follow a retelling.
Jerome and Joshua Ellis
August 2013 is the final legal marker in the timeline: Jerome and Joshua Ellis were convicted over Tulley’s killing, and tonight’s series returns to that verdict through dramatized testimony and a jury drawn from ordinary members of the public. That setup matters because it turns a closed case into an active viewing exercise, with the audience positioned alongside the panel that has to judge the evidence.
The cleaner read is this: the programme will work best for viewers who want the facts laid out without courtroom gloss, because the real force of the story is in the contradiction between alleged abuse and the prosecution’s self-defence challenge. What remains on screen is whether that conflict can hold a viewer’s attention across four episodes, and whether the younger defendant’s age changes the way the case lands now.
