A woman murdered her two-year-old son, with the help of her partner, and then tried to blame his death on another child.
Rachel Fee, 31, and her civil partner, Nyomi, 29, have been convicted of assaulting and killing the toddler, Liam, at his home in Thornton, Fife, in March 2014.
After a seven-week trial at the High Court in Livingston, the jury found that the couple had subjected Liam to a prolonged period of cruelty.
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The trail exposed a short life of "unimaginable pain", says The Courier. The injuries that finally ended the two-year-old's short life were so bad they could have been seen in a road crash victim, the court heard.
Paediatric pathologist Dr Paul French described how Liam died after a severe blunt force injury to his torso ruptured his heart.
French found 30 external injuries on Liam's body, as well as fractures to his upper arm and thigh, likely to have been sustained in separate events before he died.
The full indictment of charges against the Fees ran for five pages, each "seemingly more disturbing than the last", reports the Daily Mirror's reporter Steve Robson. Two other young boys were also subjected to a "shocking scale of abuse", he says, with one forced to sleep in a makeshift cage and another forced to sleep in a room with rats and snakes.
The couple attempted to blame a seven-year-old boy for Liam's death, even forcing his fist into Liam's mouth after he died to leave DNA traces.
Detective inspector Rory Hamilton of Police Scotland said it was the courage of the two young children, who also suffered abuse and neglect, that helped detectives pin responsibility onto Rachel and Nyomi Fee. During interviews with specially trained detectives and officials from Fife Council, evidence of "horrendous abuse" emerged and the version put forward by the two women was "utterly discredited", he said.
Social services had been alerted to the Fees but as one senior Fife social worker admitted to the court, Liam "fell off their radar".
