A mother who wheeled around the body of her toddler in a pushchair for three days after she was beaten to death by her partner was cleared of her murder today.
Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell , 24, choked back tears as a jury unanimously cleared her before convicting her boyfriend Scott Jeff, 24, of the murder of two-year-old Isabella Wheildon after deliberating for just over seven hours.
A six week trial at Ipswich Crown Court heard how Isabella had been subjected to ‘a regime of escalating brutality’ before she died in a homeless families unit.
The court heard how Jeff had repeatedly beaten Isabella, leaving her with multiple fractures and soft tissue injuries and gave her cold showers as punishment as he was frustrated about potty training.
Jurors were told how nursery nurse Gleason-Mitchell ‘stood back, watched and did nothing’ as Jeff carried out his ‘callous, cruel and ultimately fatal’ assaults.
Gleason-Mitchell denied physically harming Isabella and claimed that Jeff had repeatedly kicked and punched her.
Jeff also tried to deny harming Isabella, pointing the finger at Gleason-Mitchell by saying he had returned to their room to find the toddler seriously injured shortly before her death.
But the jury rejected his account and he showed no emotion in the dock as he was also convicted of two counts of cruelty to a child. Gleason-Mitchell earlier admitted causing or allowing her death, and two charges of cruelty to a child.
A jury convicted Scott Jeff, 24, of the murder of two-year-old Isabella Wheildon after deliberating for just over seven hours
Mr Justice Garnham remanded both of them in custody before sentencing on December 13 and told Jeff: ‘I make it clear publicly that I am obliged by law to impose as a life sentence, and I will have to fix a minimum sentence for you to serve.’
The judge told the jurors that it had been a ‘difficult’ trial and excused them from doing further jury service for ten years.
Isabella was believed to have died from her injures on June 26 last year while staying with her mother and Jeff at the East Villa temporary accommodation unit in Sidegate Lane, Ipswich, Suffolk.
But the couple kept her death a secret, and carried on pushing around her lifeless body in her chair with the hood pulled up to shield her face, even taking her corpse on a shopping trip to buy computer gaming equipment.
Isabella was dead for four days before police found her body on June 30 under blankets in a shower in the bathroom attached to her room
The discovery was made after a friend of Gleason-Mitchell reported getting a message from her, saying that her daughter had ‘died in her sleep’ three days earlier and was in her pushchair in a bathroom
The friend Jo Gardiner did not know where Gleason-Mitchell was staying, but inquires by police led them to the East Villa unit, operated by Ipswich Borough Council, said prosecutor Sally Howes KC.
Staff opened the door to Room 15A where Gleason-Mitchell and Jeff had been staying, and officers were greeted by a ‘very strong smell’ when the bathroom was unlocked.
Ms Howes said: ‘PC Ryan Wegg saw an object in the shower area with blankets piled on top. As he removed the last blanket, he saw the face of a young child who was not moving. He was aware of severe bruising on her face. She was cold to the touch.’
Isabella was declared dead at the scene by a paramedic and a later post mortem showed she soft tissue injuries to her head, neck, torso, limbs and back, and a torn vagina.
She also had fractures to both her wrists, and a complex pelvic fracture involving several bones, likely to have been caused by ‘kicking or stamping’.
Some injuries occurring up to two weeks before her death and others as little as six hours before she died.
Ms Howes said it was clear that Isabella had ‘a number of episodes of violence inflicted on her over a period of time.’
Her cause of death of was given as a bone marrow embolism due to bone marrow from her fractures getting into her blood stream, and causing embolisms in her lungs which reduced her capacity to breathe.
Ms Howes described Isabella ‘a healthy, contented and well developed little girl’ before Jeff came into her life in May, 2023, when he started a relationship with Gleason-Mitchell.
She added: ‘From that time up to her death, Isabella was subject to a regime of escalating brutality which was callous, cruel and ultimately fatal.
‘It is the prosecution case that her mother Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell stood back, watched, did nothing and allowed this to happen.’
The court heard how Gleason-Mitchell grew up in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, and had got a childcare apprenticeship at a nursery in the town.
She quickly fell pregnant early in her relationship with former partner Thomas Wheildon and had Isabella, later returning to work at her nursery, but the couple’s relationship fell apart in April last year.
Gleason-Mitchell then went to live with her mother until May when she started a relationship with Jeff who suggested that he might be the real father of Isabella as they had dated shortly before she realised she was pregnant. Later DNA tests proved that Thomas was the father.
She left her nursery job on May 24, and a week later headed off with Jeff and Isabella to stay at the Nelson Hotel in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
Gleason Mitchell told her sister Jade Anglum in a message that she was ‘trying to get her head in the right place’ and was going to give her relationship with Jeff ‘a go again’, said Ms Howes.
The couple stayed four nights in a hotel before renting a caravan for four nights at the Haven holiday park in nearby Caister-on-Sea where they were captured on CCTV walking around on ‘numerous occasions’ without Isabella, suggesting they had left her unsupervised.
The court heard how Jeff had claimed he was getting DNA tests done to see whether he was Isabella’s father, and later falsely claimed to Miss Anglum that a paternity test had proved he was.
They later checked into the St George Hotel in Great Yarmouth used by homeless families on June 9, even though Gleason-Mitchell’s sister was pleading with her to come home.
A receptionist at the hotel said they remembered Gleason-Mitchell and Jeff regularly going outside to smoke, leaving Isabella in the room, and returning smelling strongly of cannabis.
A 14-year-old boy who was staying in the hotel with his mother went into the couple’s room to roll a cannabis joint and saw Jeff kicking Isabella’s pushchair, and slap her around the face with his open palm which made her cry.
Miss Howes added: ‘Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell witnessed this but apparently did nothing and said nothing.’ The teenager said he then saw Jeff put Isabella’s pushchair in the shower, and turn the water on.
He added that he, Jeff and Gleason-Mitchell later went out to smoke the cannabis, leaving Isabella alone in the room.
Another adult resident of the hotel said she heard Isabella crying constantly one night and knocked on the door at 2am. When she was let in, she saw Jeff repeatedly hitting the wall with a towel in his hands
The couple left the hotel on June 12 and started camping in a small tent on the beach at Caister, having earlier gone to Great Yarmouth Borough Council to ask for accommodation.
The court heard that Gleason-Mitchell and Isabella had been offered accommodation by the council, but Jeff had not, so she had turned down the offer.
Jeff had asked for work at the Old Hall Hotel in Caister, telling staff that he and Gleason-Mitchell had been escaping from domestic violence, but was told no jobs were available.
Miss Howes said they were shown ‘great kindness’ by staff at the hotel and regulars at the bar who gave them meals, groceries, towels , £20 in cash and allowed them to use showers.
Isabella was said to have been seen at the hotel in a pushchair, wearing a zipped up puffa jacket with the hood up, despite the hot weather.
One staff member was so concerned that she contacted police who carried out a welfare check on Gleason-Mitchell on the beach when Jeff was at the hotel.
The officer told her that she had to accept any accommodation offered to her or Isabella would have to be taken into care by police.
After camping for four days on the beach, the couple moved to the Wild Duck holiday park in Belton, Norfolk, where they were once again seen walking around alone, leaving Isabella unsupervised.
They left the site on June 19 and caught a train to Ipswich with Isabella wearing her puffa jackets and sunglasses to apparently hide her black eyes after being offered a place at East Villa.
Voice notes made by Jeff on his phone on June 21 showed him saying he was ‘****ing fuming’ that Isabella kept wetting herself, despite his efforts at potty training.
A video clip on Gleason Mitchells’ mobile in the early hours of June 22 showed Isabella ‘lying motionless in her cot with two distinct black eyes’.
CCTV from the unit, showed her repeatedly being pushed around in her chair, wearing sunglasses with the hood up, concealing her head.
Jeff made a google search on June 24, saying, ‘two-year-old bleeding from vagina’, said Miss Howes.
The court heard how Jeff had texted a friend Hannah Smith on the evening of June 26, saying: ‘I am so stressed, I actually can’t cope’. When she replied, ‘Why, what’s up?, he responded: ‘Absolutely everything’.
Earlier in the day, Jeff had done a google search asking: ‘What happens when my child is breathing, but not responding?’
The court heard that CCTV pictures of Isabella being wheeled around after June 26 had been taken following her death.
Miss Howes added: ‘Scott Jeff and Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell are in effect pushing around a dead child in that pushchair.’
Miss Howes said that they had taken Isabella’s body to the nearby Applegreen service station to buy a bottle of lemonade just after midnight on the night of June 26.
CCTV at the unit showed Jeff pushing Isabella’s body in her chair with Gleason Mitchell ‘smiling at his side’ as they headed out to the nearby Royal George pub just after 7pm on June 28.
The following day on June 29, they took Isabella’s body into Ipswich town centre on a bus, visiting shops including Cash Converters and Cash Exchange, where they bought X-Box equipment and chargers.
Miss Howes added: ‘They put their purchases in a yellow plastic bag which they put in the pushchair on top of Isabella.’
She said that Gleason-Mitchell messaged Miss Gardiner that evening, confirming Isabella’s death, saying: ‘She stopped breathing in her sleep.’
Her friend urged her to go to the police, but Gleason-Mitchell replied that Isabella was ‘covered in bruises’ and had black eyes, and they could not do so as they would get into trouble.
Instead, she said that they planned to bury her and ‘hope for the best that nobody would find her’.
The couple told other residents of the unit that Isabella was with her grandparents in Ipswich as they went out in a taxi, shopping once again in Ipswich town centre and visiting a pub.
They then caught a train to Bury St Edmunds where they went to the town’s JD Wetherspoon pub. They were arrested on suspicion of murder in Bury St Edmunds in the early hours of July 1.
Jeff initially made no comment when interviewed by police, but gave a prepared statement on July 2, denying any responsibility for Isabella’s death and insisting he had never beaten her or harmed her, other than when he tried to revive her.
He said that he had started to notice bruising on her body five days before her death, but had accepted Gleason-Mitchell’s explanation that they were ‘nothing to worry about’.
Jeff claimed he had woken up to find Isabella ‘floppy and unresponsive’ and could not find a pulse. He said it ‘quickly became apparent that she had died’.
He accepted that they should have called emergency services, but had not done so.
Jeff said: ‘Having not contacted the police or ambulance service initially, it became harder to do so afterwards, although I knew we would have to do so at some stage. In part at least our failure to do so arose from us being in denial about what had happened.’
In a later statement given before the post mortem was carried out, he suggested that Isabella may have hurt herself by slipping over in the shower, and that he believed her death was ‘a tragic event arising from unseen natural causes’.
Gleason-Mitchell told police that Jeff had ‘beaten Isabella constantly until her death’, punching and kicking her ‘from head to toe’, hitting her backside with a shoe and making her scream and cry.
The assaults left her covered in bruises, with two black eyes, a bloodshot eye and a soft spot on her head.
She added that Jeff would push her out of the way if she tried to intervene, and she didn’t say anything to anyone due to her mental health.
Gleason-Mitchell who has ADHD also claimed that he gave Isabella cold showers and would force feed her to the point of her being sick.
She claimed that the abuse started when they went to stay in Great Yarmouth, and that when Isabella had wet her nappy, Jeff had stated: ‘If this carries on, she is going to get killed’.
Gleason Mitchell added in her interview that Jeff ‘wanted to bury Isabella in a forest or a lake’ and that they had gone to Bury St Edmunds ‘to try and escape what had happened’.
The court heard how Isabella was found to have low traces of a cocaine derivative in her body, suggesting she may have been nearby when crack cocaine was smoked. It was also stated that cannabis traces were found in her hair.