Wicked lies of the career woman who hid her baby’s body in a drain
... and this smiling photo, posted on Facebook days after she gave birth, is just the start of her web of deceit
THE first time that Stuart Connett laid eyes on his baby grandson was in the back garden of his Grimsby home where he and a workman were trying to clear a blocked drain.
When the two men spotted an object wrapped in black bin bags on February 11, 2016, they joked that if it turned out to be full of money, they would share the proceeds.
Moments later, their laughter turned to stunned disbelief as they opened up the bin bags and saw the top of a baby’s head. Mr Connett’s wife, Anne, who was hastily summoned from the house, later recalled that what she saw was ‘like a doll’.
Not for a minute did it occur to the couple that the mummified baby boy was their grandchild, or that their own daughter could have been capable of disposing of her baby boy’s body in such a brutal, heartless fashion.
But at Grimsby Crown Court this week, 29-yearold Sinead Connett was jailed for a year after admitting concealing the birth of her son.
The once high-flying Tesco HR manager claimed he was stillborn in August 2013 before she hid him in the drain at her school teacher parents’ home.
She denied all knowledge of the infant when he was found nearly three years later, but DNA tests proved the truth.
As the net closed in on Connett, she told lie after lie in a bid to get herself off the hook, claiming to have been raped by a taxi driver and not to have known she was pregnant until it was too late to have a termination. Both claims were later proved to be false. Indeed, in many ways this week’s court case raised more questions than it answered.
Above all, what drove an intelligent young woman with a promising career, a supportive fam- ily and a long-term schoolteacher boyfriend, to commit such a desperate, wicked act?
A photograph of Connett posted on Facebook two days after she is thought to have disposed of her baby’s body certainly gives nothing away about her state of mind.
Fresh-faced and smiling, she appears not to have a care in the world. Only her apparently thickened waist, concealed beneath her red floral dress, hints at the monstrous secret she was keeping.
When she discovered she was pregnant, Connett was 24 and making her way up the career ladder. She had been with boyfriend Jonathan Layfield — who was revealed to be the baby’s father and is now her husband — since they met as students at the University of Leeds in 2008.
The pair had discussed having children in the future, even if they had no immediate plans to become parents.
After graduating, they set up home together in the village of Markyate, near St Albans, Hertfordshire.
Connett, who had previously worked for Marks & Spencer and Selfridges, was employed in HR management at Tesco, while Layfield, the son of a police officer from Christchurch, Dorset, was a history teacher at Vandyke Upper School in Leighton Buzzard.
From the outside, then, a perfectly stable set-up into which to bring a child.
And yet while being interviewed by police, Connett said she feared her boyfriend would leave her if he found out about the pregnancy.
‘I feel like I would have ruined my relationship,’ she said.
But could there have been another reason for Connett’s reluctance to become a mother — and for her delay in seeking medical help to end her pregnancy?
This week it emerged that in the months before her pregnancy and for nearly a year afterwards, Jonathan Layfield was embroiled in an illicit ‘sexualised’ relationship with a 16-year- old pupil at the school where he taught. He began sending ‘inappropriate’ emails to the girl in July 2012, in which he revealed his fantasies of having sex with her.
They were sent with what was described as ‘unusual frequency’, often late at night.
The relationship continued until March 2014 — when former grammar school boy Layfield kissed the pupil at school. Shortly after, her parents complained about his conduct and he was suspended, before resigning soon after.
A Professional Conduct Panel hearing in November 2014 heard that Layfield, now 28, deleted emails in a bid to cover up his behaviour and failed to appreciate ‘the importance of maintaining boundaries and where those boundaries lie’.
He was prohibited from teaching ‘indefinitely’ after the Panel con- cluded that he ‘still poses a risk to female students’.
At the time of her pregnancy, was Connett aware of Layfield’s disturbing obsession?
Given the length of time that he was involved with the teenage pupil and the fact that he appears to have failed even to notice that his girlfriend was pregnant, it is clear that behind the facade of this happy, successful young couple, something highly dysfunctional was at play.
For the detectives who investigated this heartbreaking case, picking apart Connett’s web of lies has not been easy.
She claimed she hadn’t realised she was pregnant until it was too late to do anything about it.
In reality, her GP recorded her early ‘unplanned’ pregnancy in January 2013 and referred her to a Marie Stopes Clinic, although the arrangements were left to Connett to finalise.
She didn’t attend the clinic until May 2013, when she lied about her dates and claimed to be 22 weeks pregnant — just inside the legal limit of 23 weeks and six days.
But a scan revealed she was much further along than this — 28 weeks pregnant — and was therefore too late to have a termination. Yet she still seems to have been in denial.
If she had put on weight then her family do not appear to have noticed. She told friends and colleagues that her bloated stomach was due to a health condition.
She bought just one Marks & Spencer babygro before the baby arrived and told police that she intended to give birth and then go to hospital and arrange for the baby to be adopted.
It is hard to believe it is true, given what happened next.
As her due date approached in August 2013, she and Layfield — who was still sending ‘sexualised’ emails to his pupil — went on holiday to Turkey for a week. While they were there, Connett appears to have gone into early labour. Layfield claims she was ‘unwell’ during the holiday and that he had tried to find a doctor, but that Connett had recovered by herself.
The day after they returned home, Connett gave birth in the bathroom at the couple’s home, cutting the cord with a pair of kitchen scissors.
The baby, she said, wasn’t breathing and she tried in vain to clear its airways and breathe into its mouth.
It is not exactly clear whether Layfield — who says he was unaware that Connett was even pregnant — was at home at the time. She insists he was not.
But he told police during his own interview that Connett had locked herself in the bathroom for a number of hours, complaining that she was suffering from a heavy period.
When she finally emerged, he could see that she had been bleeding, but that she had cleaned up the bathroom herself. Connett hid
Her teacher lover was in an illicit relationship with a 16-year-old pupil
her baby, which weighed only 3lb, in the boot of her car before driving 160 miles to her parents’ home in Grimsby two days later.
She told police that she had planned to ask them for help and then panicked when she found that they were not at home and hid the baby’s body in the drain.
It was, she claimed, a spur- ofthe-moment decision that she’d taken in ‘blind panic’.
In truth, she knew full well that Stuart and Anne Connett were away on holiday in Ireland at the time, and that she would find their house empty. She wrapped the child’s body in three plastic bin liners, tied them up and after lifting the heavy iron drain cover from a rear drain inspection pit, lowered her son into the cavity inside before replacing the cover.
‘ Your conduct can only be described as callous and calculated when you placed that child’s body in the drain,’ Judge Jeremey Richardson told Connett just before he jailed her this week.
‘You went about your life as though nothing had happened.’ He added that Connett was the ‘architect of this appalling, truly appalling scenario’.
In fact, as the Mail has discovered this week, Connett’s deception went much further than that.
A series of text messages she sent after the baby’s body was finally found by her father and the workman on February 11, 2016, show how effortlessly she was able to lie to those around her, including her own mother.
Four days after the gruesome discovery of her son’s body Connett messaged her, saying: ‘Let’s hope it gets resolved soon xx’. Shortly afterwards, she sent another text message: ‘I am sure it’s horrible waiting to hear anything. Love you xx.’
When her mother texted back the same day: ‘ As long as it has nothing to do with either Ross [her elder brother] or you I’ll be fine xxx’,
Connett replied: ‘It won’t be! They will get to the bottom of it soon enough. Just hard having to wait xx’.
Later that month, she also messaged a family friend: ‘Mum is so worried, doesn’t want people knowing it’s our house etc. Just lots of gossip and speculation isn’t it x’.
Despite her astonishing deception, the net swiftly closed in on Connett. Humberside Police officers working on Operation Bluebell — the name they had given the unidentified baby boy — took voluntary DNA samples from all family members.
The results rapidly revealed that Connett’s DNA profile matched blood found on the Marks & Spencer towel wrapped around the baby’s body and that Layfield was the baby’s father.
Connett said she had been too afraid to come forward when her baby’s body was found in case people judged her. But detectives who interviewed her noted her apparent lack of remorse or concern for the baby. Her main worry, they said, appeared to be about the damage the case would cause to her reputation.
She told Humberside Police that she was ‘very career-minded’ and afraid of losing her job.
Separately, Tesco colleagues interviewed by police confirmed that it had been a stressful time because the company had been making staff redundant on an almost daily basis.
But none of this could remotely have justified the way she behaved towards her baby.
Incredibly, while police were investigating her crime, she and Layfield ploughed on with plans for their big white wedding, which took place at the Guildhall in Poole near his family’s Dorset home in November 2016.
Photographs from that day show the beaming newlyweds — bride Connett in an elegant white strapless dress and her groom in his navy suit — as though they didn’t have a care in the world.
Like his parents-in-law, Layfield has stood by his wife throughout the case. He was overcome with emotion in court when she was sentenced this week, and blew a kiss to her as she was taken away to start her jail term.
The unpalatable truth, however, is that at the time of their lavish wedding, their baby son’s unclaimed body was still lying in cold storage in the morgue at Sheffield Children’s Hospital.
It was only after attention was drawn to this distasteful fact at a court hearing in July this year that the infant was retrieved and given a private funeral at which he was finally dignified with a name — William. It is not known whether his parents attended.
While his mother is now being punished for concealing his birth, so many questions still remain.
Crucially, due to the decomposition of the baby’s body, it was not possible to determine whether he was born alive or, as Connett claims, stillborn. His death was recorded as ‘unascertained’.
The baby’s skull was fractured, although according to the pathologist who examined him the damage could well have been caused by the workman who originally removed the body.
Connett insists she did nothing to harm her baby. Her crime, she says, was in being unable to face up to the fact that she was pregnant and then panicking as events overtook her.
‘I’ve done something terrible,’ she told police when she finally admitted what she had done.
‘How can anyone put a baby’s body into a drain and go on as if nothing has ever happened? I hate myself for doing that.’
A source at North East Lincolnshire Coroner’s office told me this week that they couldn’t rule out holding an inquest at a future date, given the question marks that are still hanging over the infant’s death.
A Safeguarding Children Procedures Manual published earlier this year for local authorities in England and Wales points out the close link between concealment and infant mortality.
‘Concealment and denial can lead to a fatal outcome, regardless of the mother’s intention,’ states the manual.
A final decision on an inquest will be taken in the near future by the Coroner under guidance from Humberside Police.
Given the lack of dignity William Layfield was shown in the aftermath of his birth and death, some might argue that a Coroner’s inquiry is the least he deserves.
The loss of a child in any circumstances is a tragedy, but what unfolded after his birth is almost beyond comprehension.
They married as their baby lay in the morgue