Mother and partner guilty over death of nine-year-old Alfie Steele

Prosecutors said that Alfie Steele was repeatedly assaulted, beaten and put in a cold bath as part of a cruel and “sinister” regime of correction by Carla Scott and Dirk Howell in Droitwich, Worcestershire.

Jurors at Coventry Crown Court took 10 hours and 13 minutes of deliberation to find 35-year-old Scott guilty of Alfie’s manslaughter, returning a majority verdict of 11 to one on Tuesday.

She was cleared of his murder.

Howell, 41, was found guilty of Alfie’s murder by unanimous verdict.

The judge, Mr Justice Wall, remanded both defendants into custody to be sentenced at 11am on Thursday.

During their trial, both defendants told jurors that Alfie was not “dunked” in a bath at his home in Droitwich, Worcestershire, as a punishment prior to his death on February 18 2021.

Opening the case last month, prosecutor Michelle Heeley KC said that the pair thought it was acceptable to hit Alfie with “belts, or a slider, like a heavy-duty flip flop, and use other more sinister forms of punishment”.

She added that Alfie had 50 injuries all over his body, with only a handful likely to be due to normal childhood bumps and scrapes.

Scott, of Vashon Drive, Droitwich, and Howell, of Princip Street, Birmingham, had denied the charges against them.

The six-week trial was told Scott and career criminal Howell tried to cover up the killing by delaying calling 999 after Alfie was either drowned, asphyxiated or went into cardiac arrest.

The court heard Alfie, who was found lifeless with a body temperature of 23C, may have been put back in a warm bath as the couple tried to pass off the murder as an accidental drowning.

During the trial, it emerged that Alfie was killed six months after a 999 call from a neighbour, warning police the couple were “doing something bad to their kid in the bath”.

The caller told police it sounded like Alfie was “being hit and held under the water or something” at his home in Vashon Drive.

At the time of Alfie’s death in February 2021, Scott was the subject of a social services plan designed to protect him, with one of the rules being that Howell was not allowed to stay overnight at her house.

The jury heard Scott “continuously” flouted the rule – allowing Howell to stay over and subject Alfie to beatings using a belt and a flip-flop, as well as throwing cold water at him.

A multi-agency review is understood to be under way into the safeguarding of Alfie, whose neighbours contacted police on several occasions after filming him crying “let me in” while in a garden, and seeing him being forced to “stand like a statue” outside his home.