Granny Date Blog

Who would harm our baby?

Nicola was sure her husband loved their children as much as she did. But when their son died of unexplained injuries, they both fell under suspicion. How could they clear their names?

It was late at night and Nicola Blantyre was asleep by her eight-week-old daughter’s side, on a hospital ward, when the call came. Rachel had been admitted in the very early hours of the same day, with a severe lung infection. Rachel’s brother, Thomas, almost one year old, hadn’t been able to stay on the ward with his mother and sister. It was dangerous for him – bronchiolitis is so contagious. The call was from reception, made by a friend of the family who worked at the hospital. Thomas had been brought to accident and emergency by Nicola’s husband, Steve. Their son was not breathing.

“I can remember looking at the nurse,” Nicola recalls, “then saying, ‘I’ve got to go downstairs. You’ve got to look after Rachel.’ ” I started running out of the children’s ward, going round in circles. I couldn’t remember where I was going. I got myself in a lift and I was shaking all over. I couldn’t see clearly. Then there was a woman in a green uniform running towards me. She took me to the intensive care room. I saw four or five doctors around Thomas. He had tubes coming out of him. As soon as I saw him, my legs went. Someone put me in a wheelchair and I just remember sitting there, frozen. I was shaking and cold; I couldn’t speak. I wanted to get near him, but they wouldn’t let me. They wheeled me into another room and Steve was there. He wasn’t saying anything much at all. I thought he was in shock.”

A doctor came in and told Nicola and Steve that Thomas was going to have to be transferred by ambulance to another hospital – one better able to cope with his head injuries – as soon as he was stable enough to be moved. After Thomas had been in the hospital for about an hour, his parents were allowed to see him. “Thomas kept crashing, his breathing kept stopping, they kept having to revive him. I collapsed on the floor, hysterical – just screaming. After a couple of hours, they managed to stabilise Thomas and then two doctors came to speak to us. It was an accusatory atmosphere: ‘Thomas is very sick. He’s one of the sickest children on the ward – he’s got a head injury, signs of trauma. Unless it’s a car crash or a clotting problem, he’s been deliberately hurt. We think he might have been shaken. Who looked after him?’”

Steve told the doctors that he’d left his son on the sofa in the living room while he went to get a drink from the kitchen. When he came back, Thomas had slumped to the side. Steve explained that he had quickly realised the baby had stopped breathing, and called for an ambulance. Nicola and Steve had been together for 10 years, married for three. They were happy. They loved their babies. There was no possibility in Nicola’s mind that Steve had hurt her baby, any more than she had.

“They were asking all these questions, then they said, ‘The police might arrest you.’ I remember thinking, ‘How dare you accuse anybody of hurting my son? You’ve got this all wrong. How dare you assume it’s that, before you’ve even sent off any blood tests, or got any results back?’”

During that night, Nicola called her parents and told them what was happening and that she thought the doctors suspected Steve had done it. (She has no memory of this: she knows she made that call, said those things, only because her father told her later.)

The next day, at the second hospital, and after a brain stem test, Thomas was diagnosed as brain-dead and his ventilator was turned off. Nicola’s shock became more intense and she kept losing the use of her legs. “I held him as the life support was switched off, kissed and cuddled him. I couldn’t stop crying. Steve held him, too.”

As Nicola and Steve were travelling back to the first hospital to see their daughter, someone from the borough’s child protection team rang. Rachel had been examined by doctors. She had unexplained injuries and was being put under a care order. If they came to the hospital, Nicola and Steve would not be allowed to see her.

A couple of days later, immediately after Thomas’s postmortem, police arrived at Nicola and Steve’s home, separated them, and arrested them both. Steve was arrested on suspicion of murder and grievous bodily harm to Thomas, and grievous bodily harm to Rachel. Nicola was arrested on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and of allowing the death of a child. Nicola has no real memories of this time. All she has is what she wrote in her diary.

“I hear those awful words,” Nicola wrote, “and I say, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’ My legs begin to wobble as I’m led to an unmarked police car. Rachel has nine rib fractures. Signs of other injuries had been found on Thomas’s body. I’m in total shock. How the hell did this happen? Did we pick our babies up too hard? Did we swaddle them too tightly? I was completely horrified that I, as a mother, didn’t spot these injuries.”

At the police station, Nicola was locked alone in a cold and dirty cell until she was photographed and swabbed for DNA. Interviewed by the police late in the evening, she was advised by her solicitor to make no comment and released on bail. Steve was held longer, so Nicola returned home with her mother. She found that the locks had been changed and the police were searching the house. With no access to her belongings, she went back to her parents’ house. Steve was released later that night and joined Nicola at her parents’.

Rachel was still in hospital and under the emergency protection order. It was arranged that Nicola and Steve would be allowed to make a 90-mile round trip, five days a week, to see her for three hours a day at a contact centre.

Nicola and Steve had had their ups and downs, like any couple. They had even separated for a while, after Steve became involved with someone else. They had worked through it all, though, got married and both were delighted to have started a family. They loved the babies. They had never been happier. It was absurd to Nicola that Steve, who was such a lovely father, so enthusiastic and hands-on, could possibly have harmed another person, let alone a baby of his own.

Nicola got in touch with the Five Percenters, a support group for parents who say they have been wrongly accused of shaking their babies. (It takes its name from the claim that one shaken baby syndrome case in 20 is misdiagnosed.) By this time, a number of extremely high-profile miscarriages of justice involving infant death were known. Chief among them were the cases of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel, who were accused of shaking or smothering their babies before being found not guilty or having their convictions quashed. Patel had been cleared of killing three babies, after her 80-year-old grandmother travelled from India to offer the evidence that five of her own babies had died for unexplained reasons.

Some friends rallied round the couple, but others fell away. Nicola relied heavily on her own parents and on Steve’s mother, who was appalled that her son could be accused of such a thing. Sudden infant death sometimes runs in families, and Nicola began frantically researching her own family background, and Steve’s, for brittle bone disease, for something that would explain it all. She quickly became consumed with campaigning zeal. It stopped her from brooding. Steve remained passive, listening to Nicola’s updates on what she was doing, but deep in depression. The couple tried to comfort each other and still, occasionally, made love. Nicola felt strongly protective of Steve, who seemed so defeated by the accusations against him and by the loss of Thomas.

“I did a crash course in pathology and neuropathology,” Nicola says. “I contacted experts around the world, tried to build relationships with other parents, campaigners, support groups. I was on the phone constantly. I’d put together a kind of fact sheet for social services and said to anyone in authority, ‘Look at these other miscarriages of justice. This could be wrong. Keep an open mind.’”

Yet, in truth, Nicola was in no condition to undertake research. She was finding it hard to piece even simple things together – not just the call she’d made to her father that first night, but other basic stuff. At one point, filling out forms, she couldn’t recall her parents’ dates of birth. At another time, as her father tried gently to persuade her that she was perhaps not being open-minded herself about Steve, he reminded her of a holiday in Spain, during which Steve, in a fit of fury, had subjected her to shocking verbal abuse. Nicola didn’t remember the outburst. She didn’t even remember the holiday.

In the end, no charges were made against Nicola. But about seven months after Thomas’s death, Steve was taken into custody and charged with murder and GBH. Nicola believed that the family was at the centre of a terrible miscarriage of justice, like so many of the people she had contacted through the Five Percenters. If only she kept going with her campaign, they would get to the truth.

After some weeks, Steve was bailed again and Nicola redoubled her campaigning efforts. She also discovered that she was pregnant. Against Steve’s wishes, she terminated the pregnancy. She knew the baby would be taken into care at birth and she couldn’t bear the thought of having a third child taken from her. In the weeks after the termination, Steve became even lower and began to talk of suicide. One afternoon, he produced a noose he had made.

Certainly, the situation did look hopeless. “By this time, nearly every medical expert witness report had come back,” Nicola says. “They all said something had happened to Thomas. There was no concrete alternative. They all said that Thomas had been abused.” Also, at the pathology level, an older skull fracture had been missed. A second opinion had been sought from another pathologist. It took about 13 months for that injury to be confirmed. As soon as it was, Steve was questioned by his solicitors. Still convinced by her brittle bones hypothesis, Nicola became increasingly desperate. She completely believed in Steve, but wasn’t able to get across to anyone the impossibility of him hurting a baby.

“He came home from the solicitors this particular day – I remember because that was the last time I spoke to him – and said, ‘Sit down, I’ve got something to tell you.’ He told me that Thomas had that skull fracture because he’d fallen off the sofa one day, while I’d been at the hairdresser’s. Steve said that he’d turned round to pick up the camera and take a photograph. Then he’d heard ‘this thump’ and Thomas was on the floor. I remembered that I’d come back that day and Thomas was pale, subdued and cold. I’d wanted to take him to the doctor but Steve had said it was fine.”

After he told Nicola about this, the first words out of her mouth were: “I’m leaving you.” In a terrible epiphany, Nicola realised that the problem wasn’t that she was right and everyone else was wrong. It was that she was wrong and everyone else was right. The switch in her mind was sudden and complete. There was no reason that her husband would not have told her about this earlier incident at the time, if he’d had nothing to hide. But he had hidden it. He had insisted that Thomas was fine and didn’t need to see a doctor.

Nicola was overwhelmed by this new shock. All that disbelief, all that contempt, was turned on herself. How could she have let her children down so massively, how could they both have suffered and one of them died, because she’d been so blindly loyal and had deferred so completely to their father?

Nicola moved in with her parents. She told her social worker immediately that – more than a year after Thomas’s death, more than a year after her separation from Rachel (whom she’d seen every day but never without chaperones) – she had stopped believing that her husband was innocent. The social worker told Nicola, not unkindly, that this was the first of many steps she needed to take to get her daughter back.

But that was still some way down the road. Finally, now that she no longer had to protect Steve, she began to address her own psychological problems. She sought professional counselling and was quickly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her urge to acquire some understanding, make some sense of what had happened, only strengthened.

Nicola wanted to tell the police why she had left Steve, why she had stopped believing him. But her solicitor warned her not to. Success in defending Steve, not truth, seemed the priority. It wasn’t the first time that the solicitor had displayed an aversion to Nicola telling the truth.

Before the revelation about Thomas’s skull fracture, Nicola had remembered Steve giving experts the wrong information about another injury Thomas had received, and had told social workers the real narrative, simply because she wanted honesty at all times.

This is what happened. Nicola had been upstairs putting Rachel to bed and came down to find Thomas ailing. The baby had slipped from his grasp, Steve said, and he had saved him from crashing to the floor by grabbing his arm. Steve had overruled Nicola this time as well, saying again and again that there was no need for a doctor. Because Steve had had medical training in the past, Nicola had deferred to him. But a day and a half later, they had taken Thomas to hospital, where he was found to have a broken arm.

Steve had lied about the delay between the accident and the trip to the hospital, saying the couple had taken Thomas in much sooner than they really had. At the time, Nicola had thought that he’d been ashamed of his earlier decision. Now it’s probably what she feels most regretful about – questioning her partner’s actions and motives too little, failing to challenge his lies to medical staff, being blind to the fact that his behaviour had been manipulative. Had that injury been investigated more closely, perhaps things would have turned out differently.

Still the solicitor, busy with another case, didn’t set a time with the police for Nicola to be interviewed. Eventually, officers arrived at her parents’ house with an arrest warrant. “I’m sitting on the sofa in pieces, paralysed, shaking with fear. My mother phones up the police and says, ‘You can’t arrest her – she’s in a right state,’ and they say, ‘All right then. We don’t actually want to arrest her; we just want to talk to her.’

“I just said, ‘This is all bollocks. I’m going to talk to the police, on my own. I’ve got nothing to hide.’ So I went down there. I was in such a state that they sent me home. That was the turning point, though. That’s when I finally started working with the police, rather than seeing them as the enemy.”

Nicola called a female officer, met with her in the car park of a B&Q, and sat there in the officer’s vehicle, telling her everything. She also agreed to be formally interviewed as soon as possible, and confirmed that she had no problem at all with becoming a prosecution witness. She had broken completely with Steve. Nicola wanted the truth, and she believed that only Steve knew it.

Her parents supported her in this new course. Nicola now agreed with the social workers that Steve should not be around Rachel. But she was unhappy with how the Crown Prosecution Service was preparing its case against him. Her earlier research had taught her that the tests used to diagnose shaken baby syndrome were not always reliable. She thought that the experts were being too prescriptive in insisting that the murder charge rest on shaken baby syndrome alone. By specifying shaking, rather than suggesting an unspecified act of violence, the prosecution was setting a higher bar for reasonable doubt than it needed to.

Nicola didn’t know what had happened that night. She understood that she might never know. She knew that unless Steve was found guilty, there would never be any incentive for him to confess to what he’d done, but what she saw was two sets of experts set to field two sets of theories, based on nothing but an interpretation of injuries, to see which theory would “win”. Yet it was out of her hands. All she could do was wait.

At last, the trial came, and Nicola was the first prosecution witness. She couldn’t look at Steve.

She wrote in her diary, “Today is the day I give evidence. I am shaking. I meet the CPS QC, who is friendly and reassuring. As I enter the court I feel sick. I see Steve behind a glass screen and cannot believe I am here. I have to relive the horror of what happened to Thomas and I break down. My evidence lasts two days.

“These weeks seem to roll into each other. It’s a real juggle between seeing Rachel and being in court. I’ve been returning home very upset, which has been stressful for the rest of the family. It’s stressful to see Steve’s family, too, and sad to think we were so close in the past.”

It was almost two months from the start of the trial to the delivery of the verdict. Nicola says, “I’m inside Barclays bank when I get a phone call. Not guilty on all counts except GBH without intent to Thomas for his broken arm. Steve is sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.” On appeal, Steve’s sentence was reduced to two years. He was out in 11 months.

Nicola felt defeated. It wasn’t because her former husband “got off lightly”. It was because no one had helped her to learn the important thing – the truth. The man she had lived with for a decade, the only person who knew what had happened to their babies: she knew that he hadn’t been telling the truth, that he never had been. Mostly, in fact, he had preferred not to speak at all.

Right from the start, when Nicola had received that life-changing phone call, even in her hysterical state, she’d known it was weird that Steve hadn’t told her himself. When she thought back, she saw that it was she who had issued the early denials to the accusatory medics, she who had told the social workers and the police that they were wrong.

Steve had said nothing during those first few days. She’d known all through the campaigning that he wasn’t contributing – wasn’t writing letters, wasn’t making calls. But at the trial she heard the 999 call her husband had made, the call in which he’d asked the operator, “Cross your fingers for me.” Not for Thomas.

And when they switched off the life support system, Nicola had chosen to believe Steve’s explanation for his strange final words to his son. He’d asked for forgiveness, and had said this was simply because he couldn’t save Thomas, because he tried to resuscitate him and failed.

All through the first 14 months, when Nicola believed her husband would never harm a baby, she had in her head the idea that most people have about child abusers. That they were “horrible monsters”. Of course, Nicola says, “hindsight is a wonderful thing. In the first months I was repeatedly told: ‘Good people do bad things.’ ”

Nicola felt defeated by herself more than anyone. But she also felt let down by a system that seemed to put guilt and punishment above truth and narrative, that never told Steve that the truth was the most important thing, because it hadn’t been about truth but about what could be proved.

This version of Nicola’s story cannot claim to be the truth either. It’s subjective, the product of Nicola’s imperfect memory. But a list of facts can be made, a list of the things that Nicola lost: Nicola lost her son. For a long time, she lost her daughter, and that lost time will never be recovered. Nicola lost her home. Nicola lost her career (because she’d worked with children). Nicola lost her husband, not just the future that she had imagined and assumed for them, but the past that they shared, too, because she looks back and thinks that she just didn’t know him, didn’t know that person at all.

Nicola isn’t bitter. She eventually got the chance to bury her son. She and Rachel live together again. They are happy and Nicola is calm enough about leaving her daughter in the care of others – which she wasn’t always – to start building a new career for herself. She doesn’t want to tell her story because she hates that her former husband is free. She wants to tell it because she learned so much from the experience. She wishes that someone had been able to get through to her earlier, that she hadn’t been forced into a corner so quickly, accused, threatened, put on the defensive.

“I now help with training the police,” she says. “We look at interviewing skills, safeguarding and best practice when investigating childhood death. The idea is to provide professionals with a parental perspective.”

Nicola wants to change the way that the medical profession, the social work profession, the legal profession and the criminal justice system deal with cases such as hers and Steve’s. It didn’t help, telling the couple so early on that they were likely to be arrested. It didn’t help, letting Nicola know how strongly she was suspected, when she knew she was innocent. It didn’t help, insisting that Thomas had to have been injured because of shaking, when that particular explanation is so notoriously unreliable. But perhaps it will help, listening to Nicola, who has learned so many harsh lessons, but is unlikely ever to learn the truth about how her baby died.

• All names have been changed and a number of identifying details have been omitted or altered.

I want my mother to say sorry for neglecting me as a child

My father suffered from depression when I was growing up and my mother never had time to listen to me. Then as a teenager I went off the rails

My father was quite severely depressed during my childhood. I feel my mother handled things very badly when he became ill. When I tried to discuss my feelings, I was told: “Just let things wash over you.” Nobody talked to me properly. I self-harmed. I skipped school. I was caught shoplifting. It was ignored.

Aged 15, I took an overdose. I overheard my mum on the phone telling a friend “We had no idea she was unhappy” and genuinely do not know if she was lying or deluded.

I am now happily married to a wonderful man and have a good relationship with my parents. I feel no animosity towards my father as he has had a very difficult life; he is much better these days. I get on well with my mum now but feel frustrated that she handled things so badly.

My mother’s way of coping is to pretend that everything is fine; she cannot cope with recognising that it is not. I tried to talk to her about things recently and she said: “Well, you know that was a very difficult time for me.”

I really wanted her to say, “I’m sorry, that was a difficult time for everyone” or something that acknowledged I am a person with feelings too. I don’t think she is capable of apologising without excuses or justification. She is one of those people who only ever says: “I’m sorry but …”

I find I am hugely affected now. If I think I have upset someone I will apologise for hours and worry if I think I have made people unhappy. I don’t handle conflict or arguments well and tend to get explosively angry and then guilt-trip about it for days.

I am newly married and should be really happy, but here I am dwelling on things from years ago, and I don’t know why it’s suddenly all upsetting me now, or what to do about it.

P, via email

You feel like this now probably because you are in a place of safety and are finally able to pull out those feelings and address them. The child you were in that situation – not listened to, not checked in with – it’s heartbreaking.

Your mother probably did the best she could. It wasn’t great from your point of view, I grant you, and it’s enormously frustrating to not be listened to, recognised or thought of. If only she could just, even once, say “Sorry, it must have been tough for you, too” it would go a long way, wouldn’t it?

But trying to keep a family together with a suicidal husband (as you say in your longer letter) must have been extraordinarily tough. I’m not excusing it but I think it’s more complex than your mother just handling things badly.

She may well not be able to “go there” now, as the guilt she probably feels is enormous. Overwhelming. But we will have to leave her to deal with her feelings. It’s you that matters here.

I consulted Andrew Reeves, who is a counsellor and psychotherapist working with young adults (bacp.co.uk). “It sounds as if your family’s function was being responsible for your father living – and that’s an enormous responsibility.” Reeves wondered if your mother “ignored everyone’s needs, including her own”. He also thought you were constantly trying to become visible because you felt invisible – the overdose, the self-harming, the shoplifting. Reeves also thought that your feelings had always been “externally defined [mostly by your father's needs]. You’ve lost your sense of self.” He pointed out that constantly apologising may be internalised anger and that you may be frustrated with your mother because you learned that it’s safer to direct your emotions towards her.

Children in a house with a mentally ill parent learn to take the temperature of a room very fast. They learn to subsume their own feelings. You sound as if you have survived to become sensitive and empathetic – great attributes. The problem is that you have gone too far over to the other extreme and your perception of other people’s feelings affects your own behaviour too much.

It’s as if you dare not make any impact for fear that people can’t handle it. You asked me how to find a good therapist. It’s largely down to personality – who you get on with. Most therapists will offer a free introductory session. Not all are equal. Reeves thought someone with a humanistic approach (you can set this in the search terms here, itsgoodtotalk.org.uk/therapists) would be helpful.

Your problems solved

Contact Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.

Follow Annalisa on Twitter @AnnalisaB