Joanna Sugden
The mother and stepfather of an eight-year-old girl found hanged in her “revolting and squalid” Nottinghamshire bedroom have both been jailed for 12 months for child neglect.
Susan and Simon Moody locked Charlotte Avenall in her excrement-covered room for 12 hours each night.
The girl, who had severe learning difficulties, was left to use a chest of drawers as a toilet. She was found on September 12 last year having accidentally hanged herself from a cord tied to a window.
Social Services knew that Charlotte was vulnerable and had visited her home in June that year, Nottingham Crown Court was told. But when they returned after the neglect had started they found no one at home. No follow up appointment was made, despite the child’s school raising concerns when she arrived with faeces on her hands and wearing unsuitable clothes for the weather.
Police officers said that they had never encountered such filth in a bedroom and compared it to the rest of the house, which they said was grubby but nowhere near as squalid.
The family’s tanks of spiders and lizards were regularly cleaned out but when Charlotte died she was dehydrated, had overgrown fingernails and hair riddled with lice.
Susan Moody, 24, pleaded guilty to child neglect but claimed she was unwell at the time and had left responsibility for Charlotte to her 33-year-old husband, who also enterred a guilty plea.
However, that did not stop her trying to become a surrogate mother for a family in Manchester in exchange for £10,000, the court was told.
Judge Joan Butler, QC, said that the couple didn’t understand “the enormity” of their failure to protect Charlotte.
“It’s quite plain that the death of Charlotte was a tragic but preventable accident.
“All it would have taken to keep her safe was for somebody to go in to that room and see how it was. Your bedroom was on the same floor so it is hardly an onerous task to go across the hall and check.
“Instead, she was left in a foul and filthy mess for four weeks. For 12 hours every night for those four weeks you left her in that stinking room and on the day she died you had left her for 14 hours in that room”.
William Harbage, QC, prosecuting, said: “A number of very experienced police officers described it as the worst smelling and filthiest room they had ever encountered.
“It’s beyond the comprehension of any parent, indeed any normal person, how a mother or father could allow a child to spend a single night in that room.
There were no bedclothes in the bedroom and Charlotte’s dirty clothing, much of it covered in her own excrement, was strewn around the room.
Her mental condition meant she had a fascination with her own excrement. She was locked in her bedroom from 7pm each evening until 7am the following morning, sometimes later at weekends.
Her parents claimed that they needed to lock her in because she sleepwalked and it was for her own safety. Social Services had become involved in 2004, and in 2006 Charlotte had been referred for specialist help.
When her school raised concerns in March 2009 her parents transferred her elsewhere.
The court was told that they received £1,300 a month in benefits to care for the youngster, even though Simon Moody had a job as a window manufacturer while his wife stayed at home as a housewife.
Mr Harbage said that the couple had a “number of people to turn to should the need arise”.
Times Online
