Man guilty of murdering toddler – Sally Howes KC led Alex Kettle-Williams for the Crown
Isabella Rose Wheildon’s body was found with “traumatic injuries” in a locked bathroom under a pile of blankets by a police officer in June 2023. Her mother, Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell, 24, and her partner Scott Jeff, also 24, were arrested a day after the discovery of the body, having been picked up by police after a night out at the Corn Exchange pub in Bury St Edmunds.
The trial, which began on 8 October at Ipswich Crown Court heard from expert witnesses that Isabella had suffered “crash-like” injuries including broken and shattered bones. The court heard how Jeff had repeatedly beaten Isabella and gave her cold showers as punishment as he was frustrated about potty training whilst her mother ‘stood back, watched and did nothing’. Jeff and Gleason-Mitchell had moved Isabella’s body around in pushchair and Gleason-Mitchell had told a friend that her daughter was dead, and that she had been in her pushchair for three days and was “going to start to smell”. The couple kept her death a secret, and carried on pushing around her lifeless body in her chair with the hood pulled up to shield her face, even taking her corpse on a shopping trip to buy computer gaming equipment.
A post mortem showed soft tissue injuries to Isabella’s head, neck, torso, limbs and back, and a torn vagina. She also had fractures to both her wrists, and a complex pelvic fracture involving several bones, likely to have been caused by ‘kicking or stamping’. Some injuries occurring up to two weeks before her death and others as little as six hours before she died.
Jeff was convicted of murder and two counts of child cruelty.
Gleason-Mitchell was acquitted of murder but had previously pleaded guilty to causing or allowing the death of a child and two counts of child cruelty.
Sentencing is due on 13 December. The judge Mr Justice Garnham addressed Jeff and said: “I am obliged by law to impose a life sentence on you; I will have to fix a minimum term for you to serve.”
