RACHEL and Nyomi Fee have been found guilty of murdering their two-year-old son Liam.

Jurors returned a majority verdict convicting the couple on 10 separate charges, including abuse against Liam and two other children. They were also found guilty of neglecting the child at their home in Thornton, near Glenrothes in Fife.

In the days leading up to his death they failed to seek proper medical attention for a broken leg and a fractured arm.

Details of the couple’s daily abuse of the three children emerged over seven weeks in what was a harrowing and difficult trial that often left the jury of eight women and six men in tears. One boy told of how he was imprisoned in a home-made cage, and another spoke of being tied naked to a chair in a dark room where snakes and rats were kept.

Liam was found dead in March 2014, his heart had ruptured as a result of severe blunt force trauma to his body.

The two women claimed one of the other boys was responsible for the toddler’s death, though that began to unravel quickly.

Mostly due to the testimony of the two other children living in the house and the evidence from the pathologist, but also due to the internet search history on the women’s phones.

“How do you die of a broken hip?’’ and “how long can you live with a broken bone?’’, “morphine for children”, “broken hip in baby”, “will a hip fracture heal on its own?”, and “how long can a broken leg take to heal?” were all searches carried out by the two women three days before Liam died.

The two murderers showed little emotion as the verdicts were returned. Liam’s father Joseph Johnson was in tears as he left the court.

Police said it was clear there was a “significant change” in Liam’s treatment once his mother, then known as Rachel Trelfa, had left his father and moved from Ryton, Tyne and Wear to Scotland with Nyomi.

Once together, the new couple found the boy was “somewhat of an inconvenience”.

Detective Inspector Rory Hamilton said: “Nyomi [Fee] would certainly appear to be quite a domineering part of the relationship, certainly from what the investigation uncovered.”

Judge Lord Burns deferred sentence on the couple until 9.30am on July 6 at the High Court in Edinburgh, so that he could seek background reports.

The judge told the women: “I would like a social work report that I need to get in any event on your background before I pass sentence upon you.”

The judge then addressed jurors, thanking them for their service and excusing them from jury duty for 10 years.

He said: “It’s recognised, of course, that this sort of work is potentially highly distressing and difficult work, and requires you to take decisions which are quite unusual decisions and difficult ones with unfamiliar material and under unfamiliar circumstances, and for that reason alone I have to extend the court’s thanks for the work that you have done.”

Assistant Chief Constable Malcolm Graham, lead officer for major crime and public protection, said: “Liam’s murder has had a profound effect on everyone involved in the investigation and our thoughts are with his wider family.

"The death of a child is always traumatic but the murder of a child has a terrible and lasting impact on the family, on the wider community and on the carers and professionals involved.”

Harrowing testimonies of young victims helped police reveal truth behind couple’s abuse

IN just two years of life it seems as if Liam Fee rarely knew love, those who were supposed to care for him, subjected the toddler to horrific abuse and left him to suffer.

His last days were spent in agony. When he was found in March 2014 there were more than 30 external injuries on the blond-haired, blue-eyed toddler’s body, many of them recent.

There were fractures to his upper arm and thigh, an abrasion and laceration to the back of the head, bruises on his shin, and external injuries to the genital area.

He weighed less at the time of his death than he had eight months before.

The pathologist examining Liam’s body said the child’s injuries, the severe blunt force that eventually ruptured his heart, were similar to those found on someone in a car crash.

When Liam was alive, Nyomi and Rachel Fee would tell people the injuries were his own fault, that he was autistic. Often when he was out in his buggy it would be with a blanket over his head.

It was the gruelling and harrowing testimony of two other boys in the care of the couple who lived in that house that revealed the truth about the women.

They were older, primary-school aged, and they too suffered horrifically at the hands of Trelfa and Fee.

In one final, cowardly, move Trelfa and Fee blamed one of the boys for Liam’s death. Insisting that that he been “acting in a sexualised way” towards the two-year-old.

It took a female police officer and male social worker a great deal of time to talk to the boy, to build up a rapport, to move the boy on from one-word answers to talking fully about his daily routine and Liam.

He would respond when the grown-ups talked started talking about his toys and comic-book movies, but so terrified was he of the women, that he would retreat back into his shell when any mention was made of Liam, Trelfa, Fee or the house they all shared.

But eventually, slowly, feeling safer, he opened up.

The jury heard the boy tell how he was forbidden from going to the toilet during the night, and how if he wet the bed, the two killers would punish him with a shower so cold it left him shaking. They wouldn’t let him dry himself, instead he would have to stand, naked, on a towel, left to drip dry.

Fee would shout “dirty boy’’ at him. Later he told how he had been tied to a locked cage made from a fire-guard and some bars, his hands and feet bound with cable ties. Occasionally he would be put in the cage, naked, his hands tied behind his back.

At other times he would be tied to a cot with a dressing-gown cord and coat belts. Once he fell unconscious when Fee put her foot on his neck as he lay on a floor.

Three times he tried to escape, each time, he was caught and the beating continued.

He believed he was responsible for the toddler’s death.

On the day Liam died, Fee took the boy to the child’s body and said: “Do you want to see what you’ve done to Liam?”

The child continued: “I said yes but I knew I hadn’t done anything.

I think when I saw him he was dead.

“She got my hands and put them in his mouth. Nyomi said, “You’ve killed Liam.”

Police realised soon enough that the boy was not the killer, and that this wasn’t a tragic accident, but rather murder carried out by the adults. The two boys were separated soon after Liam’s body was discovered, and their evidence taken separately, backed up the other’s.

The other boy too said he was punished with 20 minute-long cold showers for wetting the bed. One day he was forced to spend the whole day in the cold shower.

He said Fee would leave him tied naked to a chair all night, alone, in a room with snakes and rats in boxes.

She would tell the boy that the snakes, including a boa constrictor, “eat naughty little boys”.

The boy said he was also threatened with a drill-like device that Fee claimed was for “chopping off willies”.

On one occasion the boy told police of a horrific experience where he had been force fed his own vomit: “She tied me to the chair with the belt off a dressing gown so I couldn’t move my arms and I couldn’t get off the chair.

“It [the belt] was pink and fluffy. She left me there all night.”

The child said: “I’d been sick in a bowl and she [Fee] made me eat it all. My sick. I kept spitting it out as well. I kept being sick. She held up a jacket so she couldn’t see me.”

Senior investigating officer Detective Inspector Rory Hamilton said the evidence of the children was the key to securing the conviction of the two women. He said the two boys were “thriving” now, going to school and “doing really well”.

Once, while being interviewed by police, one of the boys was asked to explain why he loves Batman and the characters in The Avengers.

“The good guys always win,” he replied.

Social worker admits it was a tragic case that ‘fell off our radar’

When Liam first started at the Sunshine Nursery in March 2013, staff soon noticed the bruises. At first his mum, Rachel, said he was autistic and nipping himself.

But he kept coming back with more injuries: a bruised bottom, a swollen lip, a black eye and bruising on his ear and nails.

When the nursery workers told Fife Council’s social work department about the boy’s injuries in June, Fee withdrew the boy immediately.

Before nursery Heather Farmer, Liam’s childminder, had also shared concerns, contacting the Scottish Childminding Association and the Care Inspectorate when the boy turned up with scratches and bruises to his face. It was the second time in days the boy had been left in her care with injuries.

Another woman who knew the couple contacted social workers after she saw them with Liam outside a shop in Fife in September 2013 and thought the toddler looked “deathly”.

Social workers and police had been to see Liam in January that year after reports of injuries but said there was an explanation for them.

Then the member of staff with responsibility for Liam’s case went off sick and no-one else was assigned to his case. Liam, one senior social worker told the court, “fell off our radar”.

Douglas Dunlop, the vice-chairman of Fife’s Child Protection Committee, which represents all the agencies involved, said there would be a significant case review into Liam’s death.

He said: “The circumstances of supporting families in situations such as this can be complex and there were a range of agencies involved in supporting Liam and his family and the details of that will be looked at through the significant case review.”

The review is to be chaired by Professor Jacqueline Mok, a retired consultant who was the lead paediatrician for child protection in Edinburgh.

She will look at all the records and interview the staff involved in the circumstances leading up to Liam’s death.

The No to Named Persons (NO2NP) campaign group were accused of politicising Liam’s death to suggest a named person may lead to more tragic cases. Fife is part of the named person pilot scheme, and a spokesperson for the group said the public was entitled to ask if “this universal scheme got in the way of the kind of targeted intervention we all wish had been used to save his life”.

A spokeswoman for Fife Council said it was “not accurate” to say that the scheme was universal in Fife, and that since 2009 the named person programme was being introduced incrementally. They refused to say if Liam Fee had been a named person.

Former Children’s Panel member and SNP MSP Rona Mackay said NO2NP had politicised “the tragic murder of a young child”.

“The only people responsible for the death of Liam Fee are those convicted of his murder. Attempting to use this death to score political points is insensitive and disrespectful.”