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A man who murdered his new girlfriend’s toddler and hid her body in a pushchair while out shopping and going to the pub has been jailed for life.
Scott Jeff, 24, will will serve a minimum of 26 years in prison after subjecting two-year-old Isabella Wheildon to a “regime of escalating brutality” before she was found dead in a bathroom in June 2023.
Jeff and Isabella’s mother Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell, also 24, were seen joking at the shops while pushing her body around in a buggy the day after her death, Ipswich Crown Court heard.
Gleason-Mitchell – who was cleared of murder – received 10 years in prison after admitting causing or allowing the death of a child.
Judge Mr Justice Neil Garnham described Gleason-Mitchell, who “stood back and let that abuse and violence happen to your little girl”, as a “weak and spineless person”.
The judge said Jeff took over potty training of Isabella who would sometimes wet herself and Jeff “couldn’t tolerate such accidents and began punishing her when they occurred”.
He said her injuries were concealed with a puffer jacket and sunglasses, with her arms fractured and her pelvis later “in effect shattered”.
The judge said the pelvic injury was caused when Jeff either stamped on her or “kicked her between her legs with enormous force”, resulting in her death hours later.
Crown prosecutor Sally Howes KC said a post-mortem examination identified “extensive external traumatic injuries to the soft tissues of the body including head, neck, torso, limbs” and other areas.
She added that the toddler’s cause of death was given as “bone marrow embolism caused by skeletal trauma”.
Ms Howes said Gleason-Mitchell told police “she didn’t kill her daughter and she thinks it’s the harm Scott Jeff did to her that killed her”.
Mr Howes said the “violence started when there were problems with potty training”, adding: “If Isabella said she was a mummy’s girl Scott would hit her.”
“[Gleason-Mitchell] said she had no injuries before going away with Scott Jeff,” said Ms Howes. She admitted she should have got help.”
However, the court heard after Isabella’s death, Gleason-Mitchell told a friend she could not go to police as her daughter’s body had brusies and she would “get done for it”.
Gleason-Mitchell sent a series of voice notes, with one saying: “We literally can’t go to the police because she’s covered in bruises.”
In a further message, Gleason-Mitchell told her friend Joanne Gardner: “I feel like we’re just going to bury her and hope for the best.”
Ms Howes said cocaine – and a bi-product of it – were identified in Isabella’s blood and the results “demonstrate Isabella had ingested cocaine”.
She said the “concentrations are low” and it was not possible to determine the amount ingested and when, but it was “likely to have been in the previous day or so prior to death”.
The prosecutor said it was not known how it was ingested, but suggested second-hand smoke from a person smoking crack cocaine as a possibility.
Isabella’s paternal grandmother Michelle Wheildon said it “haunts me to think what was being done to her and how terrified she must have been”.
Her maternal grandmother Ann Mitchell, mother of Gleason-Mitchell, wept and said that “a large piece of me and my family has been taken”.
She said that “just to spend time with her” she goes to the crematorium with Isabella’s favourite crisps Wotsits, and Fruit Shoots, and “sits talking to her”.
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