Couple convicted after years of abuse against children
A couple were found guilty today of inflicting years of brutal cruelty and humiliation on seven children which only ended with the suspected suicide of one of their victims.
The man and woman, from Co Armagh, were responsible for one of the worst cases of violent neglect ever heard in the North.
With the woman having already confessed mid-trial to a catalogue of ill-treatment, the jury of eight women and four men at Antrim Crown Court sitting in Coleraine, Co Derry, took just one hour and 40 minutes to unanimously convict her partner of all 16 counts against him.
He had beaten the children, some on a near daily basis, throughout a terrifying regime stretching back almost 15 years.
One of the youngest victims was threatened with being shot or stabbed if he told the authorities about the abuse.
As the verdict was read out, the man stood emotionless in the dock, while the woman sat stony-faced with friends and relatives.
Across the courtroom, some of the children wept while others gasped and cheered the outcome.
Outside, as the couple, who cannot be named to protect their victims’ identities, were released on bail until they are sentenced, a spokesman for the children expressed his loathing for what the pair had done.
He said: “He is an evil, evil man. He’s nothing but a big bully and any time he was confronted, he stood behind her (co-accused).”
He added: “Justice has finally been done for these children. They have been subjected to years of violence and one of them had to die to save the rest.”
During the 27-day trial, the jury heard the man would come home from work at night, ask which children had misbehaved, and line them up in front of a fireplace in the so-called good room.
Their trousers and pants were pulled down before they were beaten on their bare backsides.
As the children wept with pain, the woman told them they deserved everything they got.
Violence flared in the home, which senior Crown counsel Charles Adair QC described as rotten to the core, with frightening regularity.
Children were punched to the ground, kicked, knocked against furniture and into cupboards, or beaten with a hard rubber pipe used to herd cattle.
One young victim was attacked for taking too much cheese in a sandwich, the court was told. The man also lashed out at one child for taking a biscuit and attacked another for selling dinner tickets.
Even on the rare occasions when fun was allowed it turned nasty, such as the time one child was battered for tackling the man too hard during a game of football.
Apart from the assaults, the children rarely received proper food either, the court heard.
Prosecutors said the eldest was forced to cook beans or spaghetti on toast for the others, while the couple regularly dined on their own.
At weekends, tinned stew was used to feed the children.
All six surviving children gave evidence against the couple, with some reliving their brutal treatment in video interviews relayed to the court.
The youngest was so traumatised by the man’s outbursts of rage that she used to vomit every time he went to strike one of the others.
All but two of the victims ran away from home at different stages of the abuse.
One of them was called a “wee bastard” and a “dickhead” on his return by the man and then sent flying with a punch to the stomach.
Giving evidence, the man claimed he never asked them why they had fled, telling the trial that it was a matter to be left with social services.
He claimed that the couple were the victims of a witch-hunt, with police, child protection agencies and a family all involved in a conspiracy.
The children had been brainwashed against him, he told the jury.
But his hopes of escaping conviction were dealt a blow when the woman dramatically reversed her plea and admitted all 16 counts of ill-treatment.
She later attempted another U-turn, applying twice to have her confession scrapped.
The woman claimed first to have been so drugged on Valium pills that she did not know what she was pleading guilty to. Then she told trial judge Mr Justice Girvan that she was put under pressure by her legal team, an allegation refuted in the witness box by her senior counsel Noelle McGrenera QC.
Nevertheless, the woman gave evidence on the man’s behalf, claiming she was responsible for any discipline in the home which amounted to just a light slap, and that he only smacked one of the children once.
She claimed one of the youngsters left home after she caught him masturbating, although this conflicted with the first explanation given to the social worker brought in to investigate the original allegations of abuse years earlier.
The official was told then that the child could study better at the place where he had gone to stay.
During intense cross examination by Mr Adair, the social worker denied incompetence in her original inquiry.
She insisted that the children’s allegations were all withdrawn at that stage, and she also revealed that referral files on the case never reached her desk.
The missing documents were discovered only when the trust in question carried out an internal inquiry after the child’s death.
But after the verdict, the victims’ representative insisted they wanted answers for how the neglect went undetected for so long.
“The social services’ original case was a shambles, there’s no other word for it,” the children’s spokesman said.
“The carpet was lifted up and everything was brushed under it. There has to be a lot of questions asked about that.”
Even though a pathologist’s report concluded that the boy had probably shot himself, the couple on trial maintained throughout that it was an accident.
Mr Adair insisted the man knew his brutality contributed to the death yet he refused to face up to it.
The man’s defence barrister, Philip Mooney QC, also stressed that the tragedy, which he described as the watershed without which the case would never have reached trial, could not definitively be put down as suicide.
He also attacked the alleged inconsistencies of the children, with some referring to beatings that others never mentioned.
But ultimately the jury concluded that the couple had lied to cover up horrendous levels of abuse.
As Mr Adair put it throughout the trial, the woman had been the trigger to the man’s gun which inflicted such terrible damage.
Releasing them on bail until they are sentenced, Mr Justice Girvan barred the couple from having any contact with their victims.
