Man who murdered partner’s two-year-old daughter and took her body to pub and shops jailed
A man who killed his partner’s two-year-old daughter and took her body in a buggy to the pub and shops has been jailed for life.
Warning: This article contains details readers may find distressing
Scott Jeff, 24, was found guilty last month of Isabella Wheildon’s murder as well as two counts of child cruelty after an eight-week trial at Ipswich Crown Court. He will serve a minimum of 26 years in jail.
Judge Mr Justice Neil Garnham said he subjected Isabella to a “cruel campaign of violence and abuse which ended in her death on 26 June” last year.
Jeff, who was not the toddler’s father, had been in a relationship with her mother, former nursery worker Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell, also 24.
Gleason-Mitchell was cleared of murder but pleaded guilty to causing or allowing the death of a child and two counts of child cruelty. She has been jailed for 10 years.
The judge described her as a “weak and spineless person” who “stood back and let that abuse and violence happen to your little girl”.
He said she was “so concerned about her own comfort and pleasures, and about maintaining a relationship with this man, that you would tolerate anything, including these dreadful assaults on your daughter”.
Isabella was found in a buggy in a locked bathroom at a temporary housing unit in Ipswich in June last year.
The court heard Isabella had injuries to her head, neck, torso and limbs after suffering “escalating brutality” at the hands of Jeff and Gleason-Mitchell.
Prosecutors said Isabella died from “bone marrow embolism caused by skeletal trauma”, and had fractures to both wrists and a “complex pelvic fracture involving several bones”.
Traces of cocaine and cannabis were also found in the toddler’s system.
Sally Howes KC told jurors the toddler was a “healthy, contented, well-cared for little girl until Scott Jeff came into her young life” towards the end of May 2023.
Scott Jeff and Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell. Pic: Suffolk Police
From then, she suffered “escalating brutality which was callous, cruel and ultimately fatal”, at Jeff’s hands.
A post-mortem found Isabella had “extensive external traumatic injuries to the soft tissues of the body including head, neck, torso, limbs” and other areas, the barrister said, adding that her mother “did nothing and allowed this [the abuse] to happen”.
Jeff and Gleason-Mitchell, both of no fixed address but formerly from Bedfordshire, had been staying at the temporary accommodation for 11 days, when Isabella’s body was discovered on 30 June.
Prosecutors said she died on 26 June after having difficulty breathing. Jeff and Gleason-Mitchell claimed they attempted to perform CPR on her but she died at 11.37pm.
CCTV footage showed the couple went out to the shops 30 minutes later and were shown joking, apparently unaffected by Isabella’s death.
Over the next three days, they pushed the toddler’s body around in a buggy, even taking the bus into town to go shopping and going to the pub.
The pair were arrested in the early hours of 1 July in Bury St Edmunds, having fled Ipswich after police had found Isabella’s body.
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The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
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In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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