Woman who killed three year old boy because he looked like his father is sentence to decades in prison

Australian Supreme Court on Thursday sentenced a mother, who killed her three-year-old son “because he looked like his father,” to no less than 33 years in prison.

 

The mother and her partner, the boy’s stepfather, were found guilty of murdering the toddler after almost two months of abuse in August 2014. Her partner was sentenced to 30 years in jail.

She had begged for her family to return the three-year-old to her care after losing him to them when he was just a few weeks old, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

“Don’t get me wrong, I did love the boy,” she later told police.

“But there was a part of me that hated him because he looked like his father, or maybe because he was his father’s child, I don’t know.”

 

 

 

 

In the end, the hate won out.

The then 40-year-old woman and her partner variously slammed the little boy’s head in a wardrobe door, beat him with a wooden spoon, stuffed a plastic ball into his mouth and strapped it with duct tape and stuffed him into an ice-filled Esky and sat on the lid over a three-month period in 2014.

Some time between the evening of August 2 and the morning of August 3, 2014, by means unknown, they put him out of his misery altogether.

“This was a terrible crime of child murder,’’ New South Wales Supreme Court Judge Peter Johnson said during the sentencing.

Judge Johnson said that rather than nurturing her son, the mother punished him as if he was in some way responsible for the sins of his biological father.

“This was a grotesque and cruel feature of her conduct towards her son.
“Joseph was extensively tortured in the weeks before he died.
“His mother slammed his head in a cupboard and his eyes had been covered by duct tape,’’ the judge said during the sentencing the court heard.

The judge said Joseph was “exceedingly vulnerable” and the couple had worn him down “physically and psychologically” with the assaults.

After the sentencing, Joseph’s uncle told newsmen that the judge dished out the appropriate punishment.

 

 

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