HAMILTON, Bermuda -- She entered the courtroom without a hint of swagger, wearing a black robe and one of those floppy white wigs required of lawyers and judges in the British courts.

Cherie Booth Blair may have been the international star attraction at a hearing Monday before Bermuda's Supreme Court, but she was all business discussing the brutal torture and murder of Canadian teenager Rebecca Middleton.

Almost 11 years after the 17-year-old high school student from Belleville, Ont., was raped, sodomized and stabbed to death in this British colony, Booth Blair appealed for Bermuda's chief justice to order government prosecutors to re-open their investigation into a case all sides agree was horribly botched from the beginning.

Booth Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and one of Britain's top lawyers, argued Bermuda's chief prosecutor made grievous legal errors in 2006 when she ordered the case against Middleton's two alleged killers permanently closed.

"The system here in Bermuda failed both in the prosecution and investigation," Booth Blair told Chief Justice Richard Ground in the first day of an unprecedented two-day judicial review.

"The consequence of this is that we have two individuals who -- on the balance of evidence available -- are responsible for a heinous sex assault on a girl who had just turned 17, and who have never effectively been charged for their crime."

Booth Blair was hired by Middleton's family in a last-ditch effort to revive Bermuda's investigation into Kirk Mundy and Justis Smith, the two men believed responsible for the girl's death.

The vacationing Canadian teenager had been partying in Bermuda in the early hours of July 3, 1996, when she accepted a ride home on a motorbike from the two local men.

Less than an hour later, Middleton was discovered lying partially naked on a deserted road with 35 stab wounds. The investigation later determined she had been restrained and repeatedly raped during the assault.

But neither Mundy nor Smith was ever convicted of a serious crime. Mundy received a five-year sentence as an accessory to murder in a plea deal the Crown now admits was a mistake. Smith was acquitted after the judge in his murder trial made a flawed direction to the jury.

Several subsequent appeals failed when courts ruled the two men could not be retried because of the 'double jeopardy' rule, which prevents defendants from facing new charges based on the same criminal act.

Bermuda's director of public prosecutions, in a March 2006 decision, determined any new charges would constitute an "abuse of process" against the two men.

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