It took just just on eleven months for 17 month old Peter Connelly to succumb to the sadistic abuse which began when Stephen Barker moved into his home and into his mother’s bed. In just under a year Barker, and later his brother, would work as a team to inflict the most shocking torture on the little boy while mother, Tracey Connelly, ignored his cries and his suffering. She ignored him so much he eventually died in his cot; alone and with his front baby teeth knocked down his throat, bones broken, every inch of his body bruised and paralysed with his spine snapped in half. While the nation reacted in horror at this story and Peter’s plight it would be hard to imagine that at the same time his mother and killers were preparing for their trials another child was enduring the same ordeal. It is incredible to think that anyone at that time involved in abusing a child could not have been brought to their senses in some way by what they saw on the news about Peter – his story was everywhere and yet despite this two people were doing exactly the same thing to another little boy.

It took just four weeks for little Ryan Lovell-Hancox to die. Three year old Ryan (above) was a normal, active little boy. His mother, Amy Hancox, wanted to do some decorating around her house and decided she was unable to cope with both Ryan and the decorating so she gave him to a cousin Kayley Boleyn, (both below) and her crack-addict boyfriend Christopher Taylor, to be looked after. She paid Boleyn £40 a week to care for her child – the dysfunctional and barely literate 18 year old Boleyn and her boyfriend proceeded to abuse the child, inflicting over seventy injuries on his little body before he was admitted to hospital with severe head injuries on 22nd December 2008 where he died two days later.

The catalogue of abuse and terror Ryan was subjected to at the filthy flat in Slim Avenue, Bilson near Wolverhampton is sickening to read. He was not fed, he was locked in cupboards, he was screamed at so violently he wet himself in sheer terror – his face had been rubbed in his own urine until the skin was scraped from his nose. His eyes bore the same injuries as those suffered by head-on car crash victims. What makes a mother like Amy Hancox, who by all means was said to be a loving mother to her son, hand her child over to two sadists like Taylor and Boleyn? how could she be so stupid as to not even sense that something so wrong was happening to her child? how could she put decorating her house above the welfare of her own son…

Once again a litany of mistakes cost Ryan his precious life; housing officers who called at the flat and failed to report what they saw, social workers supervising Boleyn who was living in the flat provided for her by a support group, neighbours who heard the child crying and being screamed at constantly and did nothing, care agencies monitoring both Boleyn and Taylor who did not communicate with each other…a mother whose instincts left a lot to be desired. She claimed her child was a “really sweet and loving little boy…” - so why did she need to give him away…?

Just reading about the lives of Boleyn and Taylor make you wonder why you would ever leave a dog in their care let alone a three year old child. Boleyn; the sixth of eight children of an addict mother and fathered by several different men – barely literate and totally incompetent with regards to young children, a poorer choice you could not make. And Christopher Taylor; a violent crack-addict with poor mental health and alcohol problems. And into this squalid, chaotic environment one day walked three year old Ryan Lovell-Hancox. Four weeks later, on Christmas Eve, he was dead.

Both Taylor and Boleyn have been convicted of murder and are due to be sentenced soon.