I killed my crying baby and hid the truth for 50 years, mother f inally admits
She is spared prison, but her relatives cannot forgive her
FOR 52 years she harboured the terrible secret of how, as a 15year-old mother, she smothered her new-born baby.
All along, Melody Casson had claimed she accidentally killed son Wayne by falling asleep on him and ‘deceived’ a coroner into believing her, a court heard.
But racked with ‘self torment and selfloathing’, she finally admitted how she placed a cushion over the 18-day-old’s face to stop him crying and waking her family that night in 1963.
In a haunting confession, Casson, now 67, told a policeman who went to her home to deal with a domestic situation: ‘I want to tell you something – to tell you everything. When I was 15 I had a baby, and he cried and he cried and cried and cried incessantly.
‘I put a cushion over his face and smothered him and killed him. I said it was an accident but it wasn’t. I said I’d fallen asleep with him. I killed him.
‘This happened when I was a schoolgirl. I’ve been living with this all my life. I knew it was coming. I can’t take no more of the pain.’
She also told the officer how another son, Darren, died in 1983 in a car crash when he was 18 – two days after the 20year anniversary of baby Wayne’s death. She believed this was some form of ‘punishment’ for her treatment of Wayne.
Casson was given a two-year jail term, suspended for two years with supervi-
‘The punishment will be lifelong’
sion, after admitting manslaughter at Leicester Crown Court on Monday.
Describing it as a case that ‘may well be unique’, Judge Mrs Justice Thirwall said Casson had not intended to kill or hurt her baby.
She told Casson: ‘I accept you’ve felt guilt every day of your life for the past 52 years. You wanted to bring yourself to justice and that is what you have done.
‘Were it not for that it would never have been known and it’s right and proper you accept public responsibility for what you did. You took your baby’s life and deceived the coroner.
‘You’ve lived your youth and all your adult life in the shadow of these offences. The punishment inflicted upon you will be lifelong, until the day you die, and nothing I do will alter that.’
The tragedy happened at the home Casson shared with her parents in Braunstone, Leicester. Wayne’s father Alec Bradshaw, who worked for a tyre fitters and as a milkman, died in 2001 aged 58 from lung cancer.
Adrienne Lucking, QC, prosecuting, said Casson’s father had cancer and needed rest and her mother was away recovering from an operation. Casson struggled to control the baby’s crying and would take him out so her family could get some sleep to avoid their ‘moaning’.
On September 6, 1963, Casson’s older sister and her sister’s fiance were in the house and needed to be up for work the next morning. Wayne was propped up on the sofa when Casson placed a cushion over his face and held it there with her hand.
Recounting what Casson told the police when she finally confessed in February last year, Mrs Lucking said: ‘When he stopped crying she took it off, thinking he’d shut up for a while. She didn’t think he was dead.
‘When she saw he was white, she realised he was dead. She was in shock. She ran upstairs shouting for her father.
‘She’d never done anything like that before to quieten him, nor had she harmed him. Up until then it was “brilliant”, and she described him as “a beautiful baby”.’
At an inquest the cause of Wayne’s death was given as asphyxia and a coroner recorded a verdict of mis- adventure. Prosecutors have accepted Casson’s guilty plea to manslaughter instead of murder because there was no evidence to contradict her account.
The court heard that, aged 16, she married Wayne’s father and they had two more children. After divorcing, she had another child with another partner.
Despite the mercy shown by the judge on Monday, the tragedy has divided Casson’s family.
Yesterday her daughter Dawn Bradshaw, 52, of Leicester, claimed she overheard her mother confess to killing Wayne 40 years ago but was told to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’
She said: ‘She deprived me of a brother and let my father go to his grave not knowing the truth about how his son died. I don’t even know where my brother is buried. My mum is a vile woman and I would have loved to see her jailed for what she did.’
And Casson’s granddaughter Charlotte Bradshaw, 27, f rom Blackburn, said: ‘I can’t believe my nan was capable of this. I never ever want to see her again. It’s tortured all of us.’
Last night Casson, of Torquay, Devon, declined to comment. But her partner of 20 years, Keith Walsh, 67, said: ‘ Some f amily members are supportive, others have said they don’t want to know us any more.
‘But it’s not them that matters, at the end of the day it’s Melody.
‘What happened in court doesn’t detract from how she’s felt for the past 52 years. It’s something she will have to take to her grave with her.’