Just 39 days after Finley Boden was returned to the care of his parents, the 10-month-old was dead.
In that short period of time he suffered “significant, substantial and repeated acts of severe violence” at their home in Old Whittington, Chesterfield, leaving him with 130 separate injuries and almost every bone in his body broken.
A postmortem found 71 individual bruises on him as well as two burn marks – one thought to be “from a cigarette lighter flame” – and 57 fractures to his pelvis, shoulder, ankle and ribs.
These injuries led to Finley developing a chest infection, pneumonia and sepsis, and ultimately caused his death on Christmas Day 2020, while heavy Covid restrictions remained in place.
Questions are now being asked about how a baby, who was on the radar of Derbyshire county council social services before he was even born, was left to die in such horrific circumstances, and what chances to save him were missed.
Finley was placed in the care of relatives after his birth in February 2020 because concerns about his parents, Shannon Marsden, 22, and Stephen Boden, 29, who were known to be regular cannabis users, and visits to their home during pregnancy had raised questions about their parenting ability.
The jury at Derby crown court, where Marsden and Boden were tried for murder, heard that Finley was “fit and well, safe and happy” until he was returned to their sole care on 17 November 2020 after their request for custody.
In October, the family court had ruled Finley should be returned to his parents under an eight-week plan, including unsupervised visits and overnight stays of varying durations, although a social worker report recommended a six-month transition instead.
Finley was last seen alive by care professionals on 27 November when a social worker found him lying alone on the sofa in the living room, with Boden and Marsden saying they were listening to music upstairs, the court heard.
The last visit by a social worker to the family was on 23 December, when Boden said Finley couldn’t be seen as he was asleep upstairs, and Marsden was seen down the road carrying out “what looked like a drug deal”.
Blood tests showed the couple to be “heavy regular users” of cannabis, the court heard, and toxicology tests showed cannabis in Finley’s blood, indicating he had inhaled smoke in the 24 hours before his death.
During the trial, the jury were shown a photograph of Finley taken shortly before his death, where he was lying with his eyes closed. “Do you understand that at the date of this photograph, your son’s bones were all broken, apart from his left leg and skull?” Marsden was asked in court.
“Obviously I am aware now,” she replied.
Evidence showed that on the evening of 23 December, Marsden searched on the internet for sepsis symptoms, and registered Finley for a Covid test.
She claimed all of Finley’s injuries were inflicted by Boden, who she said was in charge of most of the boy’s care. She said Boden told her she was “overthinking” and being “delusional” when questioning whether the child had sepsis.
“I think it is technically my fault because I didn’t see any injuries,” she told detectives after Finley’s death.
There was evidence Marsden was a victim of domestic abuse, and she was allocated an independent domestic violence advocate, which she declined.
She did not have access to her own mobile phone and on 21 December, Marsden messaged a relative saying: “Get the police to mine, tell them I’m scared of Stephen [Boden] around the baby. He’s just hit me again … Tell them he’ll kill me. He just tried. Please, I will be dead. Not joking.”
The couple took Finley out twice in his pushchair on Christmas Eve, into Chesterfield town centre and to a nearby Tesco, when he would have been “obviously” suffering from sepsis and in pain owing to his broken bones, the prosecutor, Mary Prior KC, said.
“Because of the large number of rib fractures, Finley struggled to breathe as well as he had done before,” she told the court. “He got a chest infection which spread around his body. He developed pneumonia. He developed endocarditis, a life-threatening inflammation of the inner lining of the heart’s chambers and valves. By the time he died he had developed sepsis.”
She said when the couple were taken by police to a relative’s house after Finley’s death, “the detectives were surprised that the topic of conversation was what food they were going to have on Christmas Day”.
Police who attended the scene reported the couple’s house smelled strongly of cannabis and animal faeces, and rubbish covered the floors and surfaces.
At the hospital, Boden was heard joking that he would sell the boy’s pushchair on eBay, later telling police he had done so to “lighten the mood”.
Giving evidence in court, Boden admitted he told police he may have rocked Finley “too hard”, causing the injuries. He also admitted he continued an intimate relationship with Marsden after their arrests, despite their bail conditions stating they were not allowed contact.
The pair sent Valentine’s Day cards to each other in custody in 2022 in which Marsden said she would love Boden “forever”, although she told the court she only continued the relationship so she could try to get Boden to tell her what had happened.
The case will raise even graver concerns about the country’s social services, following the deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, both of whom were killed by their parent’s partners after abuse during the Covid lockdowns.
Six-year-old Arthur was murdered by his stepmother, Emma Tustin, in June 2020 after being poisoned, starved and beaten in the weeks before his death. Social services had investigated but failed to detect the abuse, and Arthur was not in school because of lockdown.
Star Hobson was killed at 16 months old by her mother’s partner, Savannah Brockhill, who hit her with “massive force” on a level associated with “a road traffic accident” in September 2020. Social services investigated twice but both times closed the case.
In Finley’s case, questions will need to be answered about why the family court decided to return him to his parents’ care, and how the monitoring designed to protect him from harm failed to detect the most serious levels of abuse in the subsequent weeks.
Last year Derbyshire county council’s children’s services team, specifically those caring for children in need and on protection plans, were praised by Ofsted, although its report found caseloads were too high for staff dealing with complex cases.
Margaret Burke, an Ofsted inspector, concluded: “Children and their families are well supported by committed social workers and managers who know them well, have a sound understanding of their needs and what should happen to improve their lives.”
It does little to explain how Finley’s tragic death could have been prevented.
