Mothers Who Murder (27 page)

A further damning report was published by Lord Laming on 12 March 2009. Entitled ‘The Protection of Children
in England: A Progress Report’,
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Laming claimed that too many authorities had failed to adopt reforms introduced following his previous review into welfare after the death of Victoria Climbié in 2000, when she too suffered months of abuse at the hands of her guardians. In essence, the report concluded that the child protection services in general were still failing children. As a result, ministers pledged to overhaul the relevant services. Balls said Laming’s report would be acted upon. In April, Haringey Council sacked social workers Gillie Chrustou, the team leader who made the fateful decision to return Peter to his mother’s care, and Maria Ward as well as three managers for the failings that led to Peter’s death.

It was not until October 2010 that the second serious case review was published. This follow-up review had been required as the first was deemed inadequate by Ofsted – the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills in the UK, which reports directly to Parliament and is therefore considered independent and impartial. This second review was headed by Lord Laming,
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and had been commissioned by Ed Balls on 17 November 2008, to provide an urgent report on the progress being made across the country to implement effective arrangements for safeguarding children. In total, Lord Laming made fifty-eight recommendations, all aimed at increasing the safety of children, including improvements in the quality of training for social workers, and clear targets for child protection including maximum caseloads for social workers. This second set of recommendations built on the 108 Lord Laming previously put forward after his inquiry following Victoria Climbié’s death in 2000.
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The picture is not clear-cut, though, as Lord Laming’s
recommendations have themselves been criticised, and it has been said that they have made social workers’ jobs harder. Morale among social workers on the frontline hit an all-time low. A consequence of these cases – and the inevitable criticism of child protection services that follows – is that fewer people want to enter these professions, making the working life of those in child protection even harder. This will put children who are already in danger at further risk.

Shoesmith lodged an employment tribunal claim against the council. Almost two years and five months after she was sacked, in May 2011, Sharon Shoesmith won her case for unfair dismissal in the Court of Appeal and was awarded a six-figure compensation payment. The government and Haringey Council sought to appeal the ruling, but that request was refused on 2 August 2011. Although Shoesmith was successful, Haringey Council workers Gillie Christou and Maria Ward lost their appeals for unfair dismissal.

Jason Owen was released two years after his conviction, on 5 August 2011. He was not a free man for very long, returning to prison in April 2013 for breaching the conditions of his release. On 8 October 2013 the Parole Board publicised that it had directed the release of Tracey Connelly, just four years after being convicted of causing Peter’s death. Connelly will change her name and has already changed her appearance by putting on a considerable amount of weight, but the media continue to track her and publish photographs, making it difficult for her to start a new, anonymous life. Connelly still makes headlines, as even the most innocuous activities reawaken the anger the British public feels towards her. For example, in
late 2013 a daily newspaper ran a story about Connelly on a trip to a local shopping centre, where she was described as appearing to enjoy herself. She may have left prison behind but Connelly cannot escape the rhetoric of hate. She was described in the article as ‘cruel’ and the details of Peter’s short life were again published. Connelly is clearly still considered one of Britain’s worst offenders.
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EMMA WILSON, 2011, UNITED KINGDOM

In 2011, eleven-month-old Callum was murdered by his mother, Emma Wilson. Callum’s short life had been spent in the town of Windsor, Royal Borough of Windsor, Berkshire, on the outskirts of West London. This is an affluent area, best known as the site of Windsor Castle, one of the British Royal Family’s residences. Information for this case is taken from newspaper reports and websites, as the original court file was not available at the time of writing. I have cross-referenced these reports as far as possible, to try and ensure accuracy.
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I consider this case relevant because we have reviewed the terrible circumstances that led to the deaths of Victoria Climbié and Peter Connelly, and the considerable public outrage that resulted, as well as the numerous reports aiming at preventing such a tragedy happening again. I wanted to see if these reviews have made any difference. Did Victoria and Peter’s tragic deaths leave a legacy that helped protect children?

The first sign that anything had happened to Callum was subtle. On the evening of 19 March 2011 the Wilsons’ neighbours in the flat downstairs heard five or six bangs on their ceiling, which were enough to reverberate through the ceiling and shake the light fitting above them. Wilson
later claimed that these noises were caused by her oldest son, Callum’s older sibling, jumping off the furniture. However, the Crown would contend at trial that these bangs were too close together to have given the child time to climb up and jump off the furniture, as evidence from the neighbours downstairs indicated they were only seconds apart. This was when the prosecution claimed Callum received his life-threatening injuries. However, the emergency services were not called until the next morning, when Wilson told an emergency operator that the child was lifeless. A recording of the conversation with the emergency operator reveals that Wilson claimed to have just picked Callum up from his cot and that he was making strange noises; she said that he was fine when he went to bed the previous night.

Callum was rushed by ambulance to Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, but following an initial examination he was taken for specialist care to the John Radcliffe Hospital
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in Oxfordshire on 20 March 2011, with ‘catastrophic injuries’. Wilson initially tried to blame these on Callum’s twenty-three-month-old brother, citing jealously as the older sibling’s motivation. However, medical experts for the Crown did not believe this was possible because the toddler could not have had the strength to break Callum’s ribs, the injuries being consistent with violent squeezing of his chest.

The eleven-month-old died on 21 March 2011 as a result of a fatal brain injury caused by his mother on 19 March. He had also suffered significant bruising to other parts of his body. The post-mortem found that he had nine broken ribs, as well as a broken right arm and left leg, injuries that doctors believed were sustained ten to fourteen days before
his death.
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Bone starts to remodel (or heal) itself within twenty-four hours of a trauma happening. Therefore it is possible to estimate how long ago a living person acquired an injury as a result of the amount of healing the bone exhibits. The jury were shown computer-generated images of his injuries, some of which Wilson claimed were the result of her efforts to resuscitate Callum. She said that she ‘was holding him really tight because his head was very heavy. Well, I was panicking, he wasn’t holding his head’.
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As we know, in over two-thirds of the cases where a child dies at the hands of another person, the parent becomes the principal suspect, and so it was here. Wilson fell under immediate suspicion of causing Callum’s extensive injuries because he was in her sole care at the time, and had been for the preceding thirteen hours before he suffered his fatal injuries, the effects of which would have been immediate and obvious in their severity.
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She could offer no plausible explanation for them, saying only that the ‘constant pushing and rolling’ by his sibling could be the cause.
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Emma Wilson was arrested on 31 March. She denied harming her son and still maintains her innocence, and although the evidence against her is compelling it is circumstantial. What is present in this case, which wasn’t in other comparable scenarios where women have been accused based on solely circumstantial evidence, is the fact that Callum clearly suffered severe physical trauma. Most compelling is the fact Wilson cannot say she was unaware of Callum’s injuries, yet she failed to seek immediate medical treatment. We have to remember that Wilson did not claim that anyone else had access to Callum – except her two-year-old son, who clearly did not cause these injuries.

Possibly the most shockingly aspect of this case is that after she assaulted her son so violently that he suffered a fatal brain injury, Wilson posed next to him to take a photograph of herself with her mobile phone. She smiled as she did so. This was just part of a series of photographs the jury were shown that had been taken by Wilson of Callum in the weeks leading up to his death, clearly showing bruises and scratches on the little boy’s face. It remains unclear as to her motive for taking these photographs – which later became strong circumstantial evidence against her – but the jury heard that for a number of weeks she had repeatedly beaten her son and then taken photographs of the injuries she’d caused.
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There was also another photograph showing a young boy (possibly his older sibling) wielding an open pair of secateurs, while Callum crawled away. After causing her son’s fatal injuries to which he succumbed in hospital, she buried him in an unmarked, communal grave without a headstone.
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Wilson’s case was heard at the Central Criminal Court in London, overseen by Judge Stephen Kramer. Information regarding the family’s history that emerged during the court case leads me to think Wilson may have had a psychological condition, and for this reason she failed to bond with Callum from the beginning. It would appear that Wilson had never wanted Callum, evidenced by the fact that she had abandoned him as a newborn baby at Wexham Park Hospital and told no one of his existence for seven months while he was in foster care. In November 2010, though, Wilson took Callum out of foster care and brought him home to live with her in her social services flat in Windsor. Even though she had elected to care for her youngest son, she carried on lying about his parentage,
telling people he was ‘Callum Keller’, her cousin’s son. As with her first child, Wilson had shown no physical signs of being pregnant, so she was able to keep the pregnancy a complete secret – to the extent that her parents did not even know that they had another grandson. She had also put him up for adoption, claiming the reason she did this was because her partner at the time, Neil Richardson, had insisted on the grounds that he did not think she was able to cope with two children.

Callum was seen by a number of professionals, so this raises the question as to whether something could have been done to save him. For example, the family were known to social services, who had visited the home. On one occasion when health and social workers attended at the family home, scratches were noticed on Callum’s face, which Wilson claimed were caused by his older sibling. Lies were also told to staff at his playgroup, where Wilson provided a false name and address for the toddler, and blamed facial bruising on his older, non-existent, sister. The staff from the playgroup saw changes in the boy, giving evidence that he went from being a ‘happy, smiling baby’ to an ‘emotionless and listless’ child.
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In March 2011, during the last weeks of his life, Wilson attended two playgroup sessions without Callum, taking his older sibling on his own. The Crown alleged this was to allow Callum time to recover from the injuries inflicted on him in the ten to fourteen days before his death.
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It was difficult for the medical experts to determine exactly how Callum’s fatal head injury occurred, but prosecutor Paul Dunkels said that it was either caused by him striking his head against something or alternatively he received a direct blow to his head. Either way, the damage
to his brain was catastrophic; one blow was so hard that it caused his retina to detach, leaving him blind. Clearly, his twenty-three-month-old sibling was not capable of inflicting these injuries. The Crown did not contend that Wilson deliberately set out to murder Callum but that she had carried out ‘a violent act’ against a ‘vulnerable’ child, possibly ‘in a moment of temper’. Wilson had clearly been incredibly violent towards him and had intentionally harmed him, even if her intent had not been to kill.

After a trial that lasted for five weeks, in December 2013 twenty-five-year-old Emma Louise Wilson learnt of her fate. It took a unanimous jury at the Central Criminal Court ten hours to find Wilson guilty of Callum’s murder. On 24 January 2014 she was sentenced to life imprisonment; she will serve a minimum of fourteen years and will not be eligible for parole until 21 January 2028. After the verdict was announced, Detective Chief Inspector Ian Hunter said Callum had ‘suffered an abhorrent catalogue of abuse at the hands of his mother’.
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If I were going to look for an alternative scenario there would be a limited number of options to consider. It is clear that Callum’s injuries were caused intentionally and that required the presence of an adult. At no time has Wilson made allegations that any other adult was present or harmed her son; in fact, she has given no clear indication as to how she thinks Callum’s fatal injuries were sustained. Therefore, if no one else caused the injuries and, due to their severity and nature, they could not have been self-inflicted even accidentally, then we must logically accept that Wilson caused them. So she is guilty of murder. Then we are left with the question as to why. As she maintains her innocence, she is not giving any information as
to her potential motive, so instead we must look to her actions to try and come up with some options. All that is possible is to consider other cases of this nature, when one sibling has been treated very differently to the others. Even that is difficult, as there simply isn’t enough information available yet to examine Emma Wilson’s background to see if she fits what could be considered the stereotype for perpetrators of this kind of sad crime: young, broken women from disadvantaged backgrounds, who have often been abused themselves, with little hope for a better future. The only real clue is that the judge presiding over her trial noted that prior to harming Callum, Wilson was of good character and had been a good mother to her oldest child. The question then is – what went wrong with Callum?