Murdered baby’s mother attacks council role
Authorities forced me to give up Leiland-james because I was a victim of domestic abuse, she says
THE mother of a baby who was murdered by a foster carer claims social services forced her to give the infant up for adoption because she was a victim of domestic abuse.
Leiland-james Corkill was taken from his mother Laura Corkill 48 hours after he was born by emergency Caesarean at West Cumberland Hospital in 2019.
Ms Corkill’s attempts to bond and build a relationship with her son while he was in foster care – in the hope of being eventually allowed to keep him – were undermined by the Covid lockdown, when the closure of a contact centre meant she could only see him via video link.
Leiland-james was subsequently placed in the care of foster mother Laura Castle, who went on to shake him to death when he was just 13 months, in January 2021.
Castle was jailed for 18 years after being found guilty of murder and child cruelty at Preston Crown Court in May this year.
‘My mind was in two places. I feared they were going to whip everything away, but I was determined to carry on’
Her husband Scott Castle was cleared of causing or allowing the boy’s death.
In a statement read to the court, Ms Corkill described Castle as a “monster”.
Leiland-james was moved in with the Castles in August 2020 when he was eight months old, after being taken into care by Cumbria county council.
Ms Corkill said Cumbria council was wrong to have taken Leiland-james from her, even though she had already had two children taken into care while she was living with an abusive partner.
She says that by the time she became pregnant with her third child she was in a “good place” and on the road to rebuilding her life with the help of social workers and the Women Out West charity helping women who have suffered domestic and sexual violence.
Ms Corkill said: “I wanted to do anything and everything possible, to make sure social services didn’t get their hands on this one. I was on cloud nine. I heard nothing from social services until 22 weeks.”
But she claims things went wrong when a second social worker replaced the one that had been looking after her during her pregnancy with Leilandjames. She says this social worker wanted to know more about her, particularly her time with an abusive partner when her first two children were taken from her. “My mind was in two places. I feared they were going to whip everything away, but I was determined to carry on. I thought ‘they are not getting him’,” she said.
The council said Ms Corkill had been informed three times of its intention to remove the baby from her care as part of a long-standing plan.
But she said she has never been shown the paperwork relating to the plan and that she only received confirmation when the social worker was taking her son from the hospital.
Aishea Drysder, from Women Out West, said: “The first we knew was when Laura phoned us from the ward. We were devastated.”
The charity says it had its own plan which would have seen Ms Corkill supported at home with the baby. After he was taken away, there were several failed attempts to negotiate with Cumbria council to bring the child home, said Ms Drysder.
For the first few months of Leilandjames’s life, Ms Corkill was able to see him at a council-run contact centre, four times a week, for an hour-and-ahalf a day.
She told the BBC: “I was still expecting him to come home. The contact meant the world to me. I even asked for them to extend it to about two hours. They wouldn’t do it. I didn’t trust them [the social workers], but I was willing to cooperate to get Leiland back.” But when Covid hit the contact centre closed and she could only see her baby via video link. Ms Corkill believes her lack of face-to-face contact with her son because of Covid and the closure of the centre was one of the factors used against her by the council.
In July 2020 the family court granted an adoption order for Leiland-james.
Ms Corkill says she was devastated, as she had not been told that Cumbria council had already identified her son for adoption and had found a family to place him with months earlier.
A council spokesman said there had been concerns that Leiland-james’s needs could not be met and that it had a duty to act. It said Ms Corkill was assessed as not being able to meet Leiland-james’s needs and during his life her circumstances did not change. An independent review into the case is expected to be published shortly.