IF THEY LET MY SON’S KILLER OUT OF JAIL, HE WILL DO IT AGAIN
MUM’S LIFE SENTENCE OF SUFFERING
injury while playing, and he then strangled the lad out of fear of being blamed.
Finally, a month after Liz’s torment began, McKilligan led police to the desolate woodland where he’d dumped Wesley’s body.
Recalling the devastating moment a police officer told her, she said: “He got on his knees and he held both my hands. He went, ‘We’ve found Wesley’.
“I just looked at him. I went, ‘And?’. He said, ‘But I’m sorry, he’s not alive’. Well, my world just ended there.”
Police refused to allow the family to say goodbye to Wesley because of the condition his body was in. Liz said: “By this time I wanted to vomit. The whole of me body was shaking. And all I kept saying is ‘no, I need to go and see him, I need to go and give him cuddles and kisses’.
“McKilligan actually took them to my son’s body. He was wrapped up in a black bag and put inside a box and just shoved in the ditch.”
“The funeral was the hardest day of my life. Looked at me son’s coffin. That was the hardest, the hardest thing I had to ever do.
“Everybody liked Wesley because he was straightforward. He was a fun-loving child, always happy and always willing to help people. He trusted everybody and I think that’s why he lost his life, because he trusted this person.”
At a trial in 1999, a jury took less than three hours to find McKilligan guilty of raping and murdering Wesley in his garage.
He was handed a life sentence and required to serve a minimum term of 20 years.
Judge Mr Justice Bennett told him at Newcastle Crown Court: “You are a dangerous, manipulative, callous paedophile and killer.”
But in a cruel blow to Wesley’s family, in 2000 McKilligan won an appeal against his rape conviction – meaning he once again will evade the Sex Offenders Register when he is released.
Last summer, it was reported he was being considered for parole.
The Parole Board said it would “carefully look at a whole range of evidence, including details of the original evidence and any evidence of behaviour change”.
Last year, we told how McKilligan had formed a band playing Celine Dion covers behind bars.