Six jailed for life for ‘senseless’ murder of innocent woman

Six people have been sentenced to a total of 157 years in prison for the murder of an innocent woman who was shot as part of a fight between rival drug gangs in south Wales.

Joanne Penney was staying with friends at a house in Talbot Green in March 2025 when she knocked on the door.

Drug dealer Marcus Huntley, 21, pulled the trigger on a gun delivered to him from Leicester to carry out a revenge attack.

Huntley and five others were found guilty of murder after two lengthy trials at Cardiff Crown Court.

Sentencing them, Mr Justice Fordham said Penney’s life had been “senselessly taken away” as an “innocent victim of the drug war”, adding that “all he did was open the front door of a friend’s house”.

Cardiff’s Jordan Mills-Smith, Leicester trio Joshua Gordon, Melissa Quailey-Dashper and Kristina Ginova, and drug gang boss Renaldo Baptiste, who ordered the attack from a prison cell, were found guilty of Penney’s murder as part of his war on drugs.

Both hearings heard how two rival drug gangs were involved in a turf war centered around Talbot Green and the address in Llys Illtyd where the shooting took place.

Working for Huntley and Leicester drug boss Gordon in the weeks before the murder, Mills-Smith had placed a drug dealer at 10 Llys Illtyd, who was beaten and humiliated by a member of a rival drugs gang.

Huntley and Gordon were said to have discussed a reprisal attack and a gun and ammunition were procured from the Leicester criminal underworld and sent to Cardiff.

Huntley buried the gun in a park in Cardiff before fleeing the city following the shooting.

Mills-Smith also fled to Suffolk, but police surrounded all six men. Within days they were all arrested and Huntley was stopped by police in a National Express carriage in a dramatic raid.

All six were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Huntley must serve 30 years in prison before he can apply for parole; Mills-Smith minimum 27 years; Gordon will have to serve 32 years in prison and Baptiste will have to serve another 42 years before being released. This will run concurrently with the current minimum mandate, which has 19 years remaining.

Quailey-Daspher, who knocked on the door as if he wanted to buy drugs on the night of the murder, was told he should receive a 14-year prison sentence. Gordon’s girlfriend Ginova, who destroyed vital evidence the day after the shooting, will be sentenced to at least 12 years in prison.

The judge told Gordon he was a “full and willing participant” [of the OCG]”.

He added: “Moreover, you were the dominant member. It was about gaining the upper hand.”

Fordham told Baptiste: “This was a murder committed by you, a felon previously convicted of murder.”

He told him that he would not be eligible for parole until 2068 and said, “You will be 81 years old.”

We gasped in the public gallery when the judge announced this.

Addressing Huntley, the judge said he was a “confident leader but significantly influenced by Joshua Gordon”.

‘My mother was shot for no reason’

Emotional victim impact statements were read in court during the sentencing.

Joanne Penney’s son, Cody Griffiths, said: “I can’t put into words what happened to our family.

“To have the person who brought me into this world and gave me life be taken away from me in such a terrible way is something I can never accept.

“You shot my mother in the heart, and you shot her entire family in the heart. I will never be able to see or talk to her again.

“You’ll never imagine what you took from us. She meant nothing to you, but she meant everything to us.

“My mother will never see me get married, she will never meet my children. Can you imagine living without your mother?”

Statements from Joanne Penney’s two teenage daughters were also read.

They said: “We write this to the people who killed our mother and to everyone who helped explain how you changed our lives forever.

“Being told our mother had been murdered is something we will never forget. “How could someone do something so cruel?

“We felt lost, scared and angry. We still feel that way. Now we keep asking ourselves why our mother was shot? Was she afraid? Did she know what happened? We can’t stop thinking about her last moments. It must have been so scary for her, and it’s so painful for us to imagine.”

“We were given memory boxes but we had no memories to put in them and we never will. Our father died when we were little and you took our mother, our history was taken from us.

“We remember him taking us to the beach and giving us ice cream. It was very nice. We hoped that one day we would see him again and tell him about our childhood and family, but that hope is over. This pain is much more than you can imagine.

“You not only took away our mother, but also our chance to know our past, our future, who we are, where we came from. You left us orphans.

“As grown people we will never fully know him, this future is gone forever. We will live with this pain for the rest of our lives.

“Please remember this and ask yourself how you would feel as a child if your mother had been shot for no reason.”

The court and the six defendants also heard a statement read on behalf of Joanne Penney’s mother, Sharon Penney.

“I come from a large, close and happy family, but this terrible incident affected us all, as parents, siblings, children, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

“We are terrified and we miss him so much. It is so hard to see the pain on the faces of your three children who have lost their siblings. Every time I look at them, I burst into tears.”

“I have nightmares about what happened and I wake up screaming and crying and realize it’s not a nightmare, it’s reality.

“To this day I still can’t go back home and live with my brother and his wife. I’m so afraid of being alone, I’m afraid of myself and the depths of my depression.”