A mother has been found guilty of the manslaughter of her nine-year-old son, who was found unresponsive in a cold bath with 50 injuries over his body, while her partner has been found guilty of his murder.
Prosecutors said that nine-year-old Alfie Steele was repeatedly assaulted, beaten and put in a cold bath as part of a cruel and “sinister” punishment regime by Carla Scott and Dirk Howell in Droitwich, Worcestershire.
Jurors at Coventry crown court took just over 10 hours of deliberation to find 35-year-old Scott guilty of Alfie’s manslaughter, returning a majority verdict of 11 to one on Tuesday. She was cleared of his murder.
Howell, 41, was found guilty of Alfie’s murder by a unanimous verdict.
The judge, Justice Wall, remanded both defendants into custody to be sentenced at 11am on Thursday.
During their trial, both defendants denied they had “dunked” Alfie in a cold bath as a punishment before his death on 18 February 2021. Scott said he had been enjoying a warm bath, but his low body temperature of 23C suggested otherwise.
The six-week trial was told Scott and Howell, a career criminal, tried to cover up the killing by delaying calling 999 after Alfie was either drowned, asphyxiated or went into cardiac arrest. The court heard Alfie may have been put back in a warm bath as the couple tried to pass off the murder as an accidental drowning.
Opening the case last month, the prosecutor, Michelle Heeley KC, said that the pair hit Alfie with “belts, or a slider, like a heavy-duty flip flop, and used other more sinister forms of punishment”, and made him stand outside at night and have cold water thrown over him.
She added that Alfie’s body was covered with 50 injuries, with only a handful likely to be caused by normal childhood bumps and scrapes.
Scott, of Vashon Drive, Droitwich, and Howell, of Princip Street, Birmingham, had denied the charges against them.
Earlier in the trial, jurors were told Howell had admitted cruelty offences against other children before the case started.
They also heard that Scott had Alfie during a previous relationship, at which time social services were involved. The couple broke up in 2017. Scott started dating Howell in July 2019 and within six months they were engaged.
Heeley said neighbours raised concerns with the authorities “within a short period of time of these two getting together”, including seeing a child standing outside the house begging to be let in, and hearing him screaming from the bath.
In a 999 call made six months before Alfie was killed, a neighbour told police: “It sounds like my neighbours are doing something bad to their kid in the bath. Like they are really hurting them. It sounds like someone thrashing around in the bathtub. It sounds like you can hear he’s being hit and held under the water or something.”
The call was played to jurors, along with further audio of an emergency call in 2020 in which a concerned resident told the operator “something strange is going on”.
Despite a social services plan to protect Alfie by barring Howell from staying overnight, Scott regularly flouted this rule, the Crown Prosecution Service told jurors.
Howell “believed in discipline” that was far more physical and psychological than conventional approaches such as set bedtimes or the naughty step, Heeley said.
Neighbours witnessed Howell aggressively shouting and swearing at Alfie in the street while Scott stood by and let it happen.
Shortly after Scott made a 999 call saying she had found Alfie submerged in the bath, Howell was arrested by police while trying to board a train at Droitwich station. “What were they both trying to hide at that point? Their guilt. They knew what they had done and Dirk Howell’s first instinct was to run,” Heeley said.
A multi-agency review is now under way into the safeguarding of Alfie.
Stephen Eccleston, independent chair of Worcestershire Safeguarding Children Partnership, said his team were “shocked and saddened by the death of Alfie”, and passed on condolences to Alfie’s family.
He added: “Following his death, we began a process of conducting a local child safeguarding practice review. With the completion of the trial, we will now be asking the independent reviewer to complete the review. The report is due to be published later this year and we will consider further comment at that time.”
An NSPCC spokesperson said it was “vital that a thorough review into the circumstances around Alfie’s death establishes whether more could have been done by professionals to protect this little boy”, to help prevent future tragedies.
