DC Beth Colbourne was walking out of Chester crown court when she got the email that brought an end to one of the longest baby death mysteries in recent times. It started: “Are you sitting down?”
As an officer in Cheshire constabulary’s major crime review team, Colbourne had been tasked with solving a puzzle that had confounded police for 25 years: who was Baby Callum?
The newborn boy had been found wrapped in two bin bags by a dog walker in woodland near a theme park in Warrington on the morning of 14 March 1998, sparking a nationwide search for his parents.
The discovery had a profound effect on the Cheshire town. Hundreds of young women were rounded up and some arrested. Schoolgirls were questioned and swabbed for DNA.
The abandoned baby was buried in a tiny white coffin after a funeral paid for by donations at an Asda supermarket. Yet still no one came forward.
But then, a quarter of a century later came the answer. A routine review identified an unusually close match between Callum and the DNA of another man whose profile had since been uploaded to the national database after an unrelated arrest.
His name was Matthew Sharkey, now 28. Further tests confirmed he was the older brother of Callum – and he had unwittingly solved one of the force’s deepest mysteries. “That’s quite a significant moment,” said Colbourne, who retires in two months.
The chance discovery led to the knock on the door that Joanne Sharkey, now 55, said she had been expecting for 25 years.
Last week, the former council officer, who a judge said had led an unblemished life before and after Callum’s death, was sentenced after admitting killing her newborn son while in the grip of severe post-natal depression.
She was handed a two-year prison term, suspended for two years, meaning she could walk out of Liverpool crown court with her family, who have supported her since her arrest in 2023.
The judge, Mrs Justice Jennifer Eady, refused to jail Sharkey on the condition that she commits no further offences and undergoes mental health treatment. Eady accepted powerful psychiatric evidence about the defendant’s mental illness at the time.
“The evidence is clear,” the judge said as Sharkey wept in the dock. “Not a day has passed when you have not dwelt on these matters, appreciating the horrendous nature of your crime … I am satisfied that this very sad case calls for compassion: no useful purpose would be achieved by immediate imprisonment.”
Three detectives involved in the investigation have spoken of their relief at finally solving the puzzle.
Former DI Jo Miller, who fronted a number of the media appeals in 1998, said: “Today brings a lot of closure for me and I’m sure it brings a lot of closure for the people of Warrington and the community that lived through the investigation at the time.”
Miller, who retired in 2013, said the case had had a “devastating” effect on the Cheshire town and that residents could now mourn Callum’s death properly. “I was relieved,” she said of the news two years ago that his mother had been arrested. “Really, he could be put to rest.”
Sharkey, who was 28 at the time, told officers it was a relief that she too could finally speak about the secret she had kept since 1998. Her mental health had spiralled after the birth of her older son, Matthew, in July 1996.
She told no one she was pregnant, including her husband, hiding her bump behind baggy clothing and saying her size was the result of overeating at Christmas. She gave birth alone at home in Croxteth, north Liverpool, before suffocating her child and wrapping him in bin bags.
The detectives would not be drawn on whether they believed it was right that Sharkey was not taken into immediate custody for her actions.
But DI Hannah Friend, the head of Cheshire’s major crime review team, stressed how the “really tragic” case highlighted the importance of comprehensive postnatal support.
She said: “It’s a difficult one because you pour your heart and soul into these investigations. We always remember the victim at the centre of it. It’s very difficult to balance all the considerations, but we’re very much thinking of that little baby.”
