It was an image that no one in Mold crown court will forget: a teenage girl sitting up in her filthy bed, head slumped forward, surrounded by dirty incontinence pads made for puppies. Kaylea Titford, a “funny” and “fiercely independent” 16-year-old who was so good at basketball that she had try-outs for the Paralympics, was dead.
A police officer wearing a bodyworn camera made his way around her cluttered bedroom, every surface covered. There were teetering piles of detritus, one topped with a dirty deep fat fryer, grease dripping down the side. There was a pressure washer, an old fridge, McDonald’s cups, a two-litre bottle of Dr Pepper and an uneaten cake, bought for Kaylea’s birthday two weeks earlier.
It was more of a “dumping ground” than a teenager’s bedroom, said one witness. “It had the look of a storage facility”, said PC Liam Donovan. He noticed the hoist above her bed was covered with cobwebs and fly faeces.
Two strips of fly paper hung from the ceiling, with 110 insects trapped. Milk bottles and fruit juice cartons filled with urine surrounded Kaylea’s bed. There was faeces on the floor of her en suite bathroom. The smell was worse than anything Donovan had ever encountered, making him retch.
Kaylea herself, lying on “puppy pads” sodden with urine, was clearly very overweight: morbidly obese, it turned out, weighing 146kg (22st 13lb), despite being just 1.45 metres (4ft 8in) tall. Her legs were unusually short, a symptom of the spina bifida she developed in the womb, along with hydrocephalus (water on the brain). When police rolled her over, maggots wriggled where she had been lying.
The jury had to watch the footage of this horrendous scene of the Titford family home in Newtown, Powys. Sitting behind bulletproof glass in the dock, Kaylea’s dad, Alun Titford, looked away from the screens. On the video, Titford was never in the bedroom where his daughter lay dead. It was one of his five other children, a young adult, who let in the paramedics and police officers. Titford sat at the bottom of the stairs smoking. Kaylea’s mother, Sarah Lloyd-Jones, remained upstairs.
Both parents were ultimately charged with killing Kaylea, accused of manslaughter by gross negligence. In December, a month before the trial, Lloyd-Jones, who had their first child aged 16, had pleaded guilty. Her partner continued to protest his innocence, saying that while he had been intimately involved in Kaylea’s care when she was little, he had stepped back once she entered puberty, leaving it all to Lloyd-Jones. “I just didn’t feel comfortable,” the 45-year-old told the jury.
It was difficult to understand his defence. Under cross-examination by the prosecuting barrister, Caroline Rees KC, he admitted he was jointly responsible for Kaylea’s care. He blamed everything on his “laziness”. Not helping out with the food shopping or the cleaning or the cooking. Not washing Kaylea or helping her go to the toilet with dignity. He left everything to Lloyd-Jones. He did not even open the post.
In his closing speech, David Elias KC, defending Titford, sought to persuade the jury that just because Titford had agreed in the witness box that he was as much to blame for Kaylea’s death as his partner, “does not mean he is legally responsible” for it. In the run-up to her death, Titford had been working long hours for 15 days straight, said the barrister. But Kaylea’s mum also had a job, as a care worker.
Titford’s case was weak and contradictory. Interviewed after his arrest in October 2020, he told detectives that Kaylea had not left her bed since the first lockdown in March 2020. Yet giving evidence he tried to claim that she was able to get herself out of bed and into her wheelchair until shortly before she died.
The evidence suggested otherwise. Not least because when she died on 9 or 10 October 2020, Kayleigh was 20kg (3st) too heavy to fit in her wheelchair. Police found it in the kitchen, the seat stained with faeces and piled up with dirty pillows.
Titford insisted he had not noticed anything wrong the last time he went into her bedroom, on 27 September 2020, 13 days before she was found dead on 10 October. That was her 16th birthday, and he said he gave her a hug and a kiss.
He did not pull back her duvet to reveal her sore-covered legs, or her feet, which a podiatrist examining photos of her dead body said were the worst he had seen in 30 years of practice. Or her toenails, which she could not reach because of her morbid obesity and mobility issues, and had not been cut for six to 10 months.
It was “laziness” again that caused him to text Kaylea to be quiet when he heard her screaming the night before her body was found, rather than go downstairs to see if she was OK. “If you have a bad chest, stop screaming,” he wrote to her shortly after 10.30pm on 9 October 2020, explaining to the jury that she had a cold.
At 8am the next morning, her mother discovered Kaylea dead in bed. By the time a paramedic arrived 10 minutes later, rigor mortis had already set in.
In interviews with police, Titford blamed the Covid lockdown for the fact Kaylea had not seen a medical professional in the nine months before she died. Covid, the prosecution suggested, provided a useful cover for Titford, allowing the family to “hide her away”.
Newtown High, the mainstream school she attended, was shut from March to September 2020. The school repeatedly phoned Lloyd-Jones to ask why Kaylea had not turned up for the autumn term, only to be given various excuses, such as Kaylea hurting herself falling out of her wheelchair.
Pre-Covid, Kaylea had enjoyed school, though had complained of bullying, the court heard. Madeline Ottoway, who worked as Kaylea’s teaching assistant from when she was 11 to 14, told the jury Kaylea was “fiercely independent and on occasion stubborn … she didn’t like asking for help”.
She wheeled herself around buildings and took part in sport. Basketball was a particular favourite. At one point, Kaylea was signposted to the Disability Sport Wales pathways programme, which scouts potential Paralympians, and attended a sports day at Maldwyn leisure centre in Newtown along with national performance coaches.
But as her weight increased, Kaylea had become less keen on sport, said Belinda Jones, another learning support assistant: “As she got older her attitude to sport changed and she wasn’t as enthusiastic as before. I feel it was because of her weight. She was getting bigger for her wheelchair and she used her hands to push the wheels on the wheelchair to get around. Her legs were very tight.”
Kaylea’s obesity was key to the trial, the prosecution argued, because it was her weight that stopped her being mobile, particularly once she outgrew her wheelchair. Her parents were responsible for her diet, with Titford admitting that the family would eat takeaways four or five times a week.
They knew Kaylea had been overweight since she was three, when she was in the heaviest 1% for her age, and had been referred to a dietician while at primary school. She was known to social services and until 2012 was classed as a “child in need”, which meant she was considered unlikely to reach a reasonable standard of health or development without intervention.
Between the ages of eight and 12, the family managed her weight quite well, the court heard, but let it slide after that, when she was admitted to hospital for a series of operations and was able to help herself to food in the kitchen.
During lockdown Kaylea put on an extra two or three stone, Titford accepted, but said he “didn’t really think about” her weight when ringing for another Chinese takeaway (his favourite). He did not consider her to be dangerously heavy because “I just thought she was big like the rest of the family”. Titford himself is a slight man who looks far older than his 45 years. He personally did not eat much, he told the jury.
But it was her diet and inactivity that ultimately killed Kaylea. Her cause of death was recorded as resulting from “inflammation and infection in extensive areas of ulceration arising from obesity and its complications, and immobility in a girl with spina bifida and hydrocephalus”.
A jury found her parents could and should have managed her weight, and that her morbid obesity was a significant contributing factor to her death. They will have to live with that knowledge for ever.
