Mothers Who Murder

by Xanthe Mallett

  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 Hospital36 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.37 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’.38

  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.39 She could offer no plausible explanation for them, saying only that the ‘constant pushing and rolling’ by his sibling could be the cause.40

  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.41 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.42

  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.43 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.44

  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’.45

  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?

  When considering that, I thought back to Rachel Pfitzner, who murdered her two-year-old son, Dean Shillingsworth, in 2007, allegedly because she hated and feared Dean’s biological father and could not emotionally separate her feelings for Paul (Dean’s father) from those for her son. Dean was tortured, physically abused and neglected before he was finally killed by his mother in a rage. Pfitzner then put his body in a suitcase, which she dumped in a duck pond in a local public park in Mandurama Reserve at Ambarvale in Sydney’s west. Pfitzner had two other children – one older and one younger than Dean – who she did not abuse, but these children had different fathers. Pfitzner was suffering from a personality disorder; the exact diagnosis was debated between various experts at her trial for Dean’s murder. What they did agree on was that she was a very disturbed young woman.

  Without more to go on, I have to wonder whether this case is similar in some ways. As with Pfitzner’s case, there is no indication that Wilson mistreated her older son. And also just like Pfitzner’s case, Callum and his brother had different biological fathers. Initially it had been thought that Richardson was the father of both of Wilson’s children, but it later emerged that Callum was the result of an affair with a Mr Workman. Wilson’s defence barrister, Michael Turner QC, stated that this was the reason Wilson was accused of murdering Callum.46 Workman was not aware that Callum was his child until after the boy’s death. Another similarity is that both Pfitzner and Wilson appear to have murdered their sons in a fit of uncontrollable rage, after which they both seem to have panicked when they realised what they’d done.

  Reports entered into evidence suggest that Wilson was not suffering from any mental illness, but something was obviously very wrong. These are clearly not the actions of a stable and balanced psyche. Added to this is the fact that at trial Wilson claimed Callum’s facial bruises were inflicted by an older, non-existent, sister – the same lie told to staff at his playgroup. While I have not had access to any reviews of Wilson’s psychiatric history, I still think that it is relevant that some psychiatric disorders lead to the patient suffering anti-social and mood-related issues, and some show signs of impaired empathy. The judge noted that Wilson failed to show any emotion throughout the trial, saying it was ‘a troubling feature in this case’.47 This is an interesting case to watch as more information will become available in time, and I imagine more clues will come to the fore that will help to explain Emma Wilson’s extreme actions.

  Just like many of the other vulnerable children, Callum Wilson was known to social services. And just like the other children discussed in this chapter, social services failed to save his life. As a result of Callum’s death, a serious case review has been initiated. As yet unpublished, a newspaper report48 claims that the aim of this review is to examine social services’ assessment procedures when dealing with the family. The same article raises further questions about whether cost-cutting measures initiated by the Council of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead could have been a factor in the potential mismanagement of the Wilson case, leading to an environment where staff were over-stretched and under-qualified or poorly managed. The council has elected not to comment until the publication of the review. This will be just the last in a long line of these types of reviews. It remains to be seen if this one will make any difference in protecting children in the future.

  SADLY, THERE ARE ALWAYS MORE, UNITED KINGDOM

  Callum Wilson was not the only case to make the news in 2013. In August Magdelena Luczak, aged twenty-seven, and her partner, Mariusz Krezolek, were found guilty of brutally murdering her four-year-old son, Daniel Pelka, after many months of abuse and neglect. Leading up to his eventual horrific death, Daniel was starved until he looked like a bag of bones, weighing just 1 stone 9 pounds.49 He was under-weight and undersize for his age (even before the acute episode of starvation), having been systematically starved for anything up to nine months before his death. The court heard that during the time they continued to punish the little boy – getting him to perform arduous physical activity while starving him to increase weight loss – his mother took the lead in convincing teachers and doctors that his dramatic weight loss was the result of an eating disorder.

  Luczak and Krezolek were described as ‘heartless monsters’ during the nine-week trial, held at Birmingham Crown Court in England. They will now spend at least thirty years in prison for the cruelty they meted out to a defenceless little boy. The judge who presided over the case was shocked that, even though the evidence moved many of the jurors to tears, the Polish nationals accused of torturing and murdering Daniel sat emotionless throughout the entire proceeding.

  In a situation reminiscent of Peter Connelly and Victoria Climbié’s cases, the couple sought to conspire to hide Daniel’s suffering from the authorities through a series of elaborate lies, with the judge adding that the aim was to protect themselves at all costs. Bruises had been seen on the four-year-old’s neck and what staff at his school feared were two black eyes. The bruising on his neck was noted by staff at Daniel’s school, but no written record was made of the later injuries around his eyes.

  Daniel was kept in a cold room for an estimated thirty-three hours after receiving a head injury that would eventually prove fatal. During that day and a half, Luczak and Krezolek decided not to call for help as Daniel lay suffering after the couple had inflicted more than twenty separate injuries on him. Many of these had been to his head, causing his brain to swell. Evidence recovered from the computer at the house indicated that he might also have been poisoned with salt and subjected to an attempted drowning in the hours before he died.

  What struck me about the coverage in this case is that nowhere did I find a motive; in fact, the judge described it as ‘unfathomable’. What also struck me was the ‘groundhog day’ feel about it. People knew, but still Daniel wasn’t saved. After the abuse came to light, the British Association of Social Workers said this case underlines the need for all agencies to communicate and work closely together. We’ve heard that before, many times.

  FRANCE

  We know child abuse is a serious and ongoing problem for the UK, but across the Channel in France children are also suffering. On 19 November 2013, Fabienne Kabou was caught on CCTV pushing her fifteen-month-old daughter, Adelaïde, to the coast. The following day, little Adelaïde’s body was found by a fisherman, strapped into her pushchair and submerged in the English Channel. Fabienne Kabou booked into a hotel in Berck sur Mer with baby Adelaïde on 19 November, after which she took her daughter to the coast and drowned her. She then left the area. It took the police ten days and a nationwide search using DNA from the pushchair to find Kabou, tracking the philosophy student to the home she shared with a sixty-three-year-old sculptor in Paris. Kabou was arrested. She never denied murdering Adelaïde, and in fact made a full confession telling police that she made the decision after she determined that the child simply didn’t fit in with her new love life. Fabienne Kabou’s motive was pure selfishness. She told her boyfriend that she had given the child to her biological grandmother who agreed to take Adelaïde to Senegal, so he had no reason to fear for the child’s safety.

  Unsurprisingly, the case made national headlines in France, and when it did it caused public outrage, people wondering how a mother could be so utterly self-centred as to murder her own daughter because she didn’t fit with her lifestyle.50 Hundreds took to the streets in what is known as a ‘White March’, a protest in which the demonstrators are campaigning for improved child protection.51 Cases such as this rarely fail to cause social outrage. Then follows the inevitable procedural review. However, sadly, weeks or at best months later, no doubt we will read about the next child killed at the hands of a parent or guardian. This case is possibly unusual, but it’s certainly not unique. We know that love is one of the reasons mothers kill their chil
dren – love for someone else when having the child around is simply irreconcilable, or love for the child, when the mother feels compelled to commit suicide but can’t bear to leave the children behind. Love can be an incredibly powerful motivator for all kinds of extremely positive or heinous acts, some seemingly selfless, others selfish beyond anything most of us could ever imagine.

  FULL CIRCLE, AUSTRALIA

  In August 1993, six-year-old John Ashfield was murdered by his mother and her partner in Sydney. The world did not hear his name until it was first published in a newspaper article in 2007, fourteen years after the little boy was savagely beaten and murdered. The media felt it was important to print John’s name and his story, as many claimed that the New South Wales 2004 legislation that made it an offence for the media to publish the name of a dead child who had been the victim of a crime failed in its aim, and instead protected the killers from being identified. Due to pressure from the New South Wales Homicide Victims Support Group and the Victims of Crime Assistance League, as well as publishing giant News Limited, New South Wales Parliament acquiesced and in 2007 passed a bill amending the law, making a child victim’s name publishable under certain circumstances, as notably, for example, Peter Connelly, who was simply known as Baby P for a number of years.

  According to the original article52 – as the case documents were not available – John’s mother, Gunn-Britt Ashfield, then twenty-five, led the assault with the assistance of her twenty-year-old boyfriend Austin Hughes. According to evidence presented to the court in 1993, on 5 August of that year Ashfield became enraged when she was told that John had touched his three-year-old sister in an inappropriate manner. What this meant specifically was not expanded upon in the article, but we can assume that Ashfield was told John had touched his sister in a sexual way. Ashfield and Hughes agreed that the little boy should be punished. And punished he was, severely – punishment that would lead to his death in less than twenty-four hours.