Читать книгу Parents Who Kill - Shocking True Stories of The World's Most Evil Parents - Carol Anne Davis - Страница 24

The following month, handcuffed to a police officer, she attended Alexander’s funeral and read out a poem which said that they would be reunited in an afterlife. Robert visited her, hoping for answers, but eventually caused a scene and was barred from the prison.

As her trial date neared, her legal team told her that her story didn’t add up, that there was no sign of the supposed masked men. Belatedly, she admitted that she’d started the fatal fire by herself.

At Newcastle Crown Court in August 2006, her family and friends there to support her, she pleaded guilty to infanticide. Two psychiatrists testified that she had been suffering from post-natal depression at the time that she murdered Alexander, that her mind was disturbed after the birth. Her QC echoed this, saying that she was comparatively isolated and had struggled to care for her son.

The judge noted that she had already spent over a year in jail and sentenced her to a three-year community order, which included three years’ probation and supervision at a bail hostel. After the trial, Det Supt Barbara Franklin, who led the enquiry, said ‘Danielle can only be described as an attention seeker.’

En route to the hostel by train, Danielle Wails went on a drinking binge and gave an interview to a woman’s magazine. (The previous month, the baby’s father had told his side of the story to a different woman’s weekly.) The magazine stated that she wasn’t paid for her story, but the authorities were enraged as she’d given the interviewer information which she hadn’t given to the police or the courts. A local MP demanded an enquiry as to why Danielle hadn’t been escorted all the way to the bail hostel, and she was briefly returned to jail for breaking her bail conditions by abusing alcohol.