'I put a bag on his head and held him until he died': Mother shows court how she suffocated baby son and his sister, five, in Spanish hotel room as she feared social services were going to take them away

Calm: In a video interview with police shown in court, Lianne Smith demonstrated how she used a plastic shopping bag to suffocate Rebecca, five, and 11-month-old Daniel in their hotel beds on the Costa Brava.

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A Spanish courtroom fell silent yesterday as a British mother described calmly how she killed her two children after treating them to a ‘perfect’ beach holiday.

In a video interview with police, Lianne Smith demonstrated how she used a plastic shopping bag to suffocate Rebecca, five, and 11-month-old Daniel in their hotel beds on the Costa Brava.
As Daniel struggled for breath, she drew the bag closed around his neck and ‘did not stop squeezing’ until he was dead, Girona provincial court in north-east Spain heard.

Lianne Smith's daughter Rebecca, the weekend before she was killed.

Charges: Miss Smith, who is originally from Lichfield, in Staffordshire, is accused of killing the youngsters in their sleep after booking into the hotel before spending the night with their bodies.

Then she did the same to her daughter before giving her children a cuddle and spending the night beside their bodies.
She said she tried to kill herself before telling the hotel receptionist to summon police.

 

The interview officers recorded in May 2010 in the room next to the one where the killings took place hours earlier was made public for the first time yesterday.
Smith, 45, from Lichfield, Staffordshire, showed no emotion as the jury watched it.

 

Proceedings: Miss Smith said in the video that she tried to kill herself before telling the hotel receptionist to summon police.

Asked what she had done by police Miss Smith replied matter-of-factly: 'I ended the lives of my two children'

She is asked what she had done and replied matter-of-factly: ‘I ended the lives of my two children. Then I lay in the bed beside them, I gave them a cuddle.

'I talked to them until about 9 o’clock then I went into the bathroom.’ Using her hands, she demonstrated how the shopping bag had covered the mouths and noses of the youngsters.

THE TV PSYCHIC PAEDOPHILE WHO TRIED TO HYPNOTISE HIS VICTIM

Martin Smith, who once appeared on Living TV’s Most Haunted show, was jailed for 16 years having been found guilty on 11 counts of rape, attempted rape, indecency with a child and indecent assault.

At his trial in 2010, the court heard how he used violence and hypnotism to abuse his victim for almost a decade, starting in May 1995 when she was seven. What could not be reported at the time was that his victim was none other than Sarah, Lianne Smith's own daughter.

Sarah later waived her right to anonymity to tell the disturbing story of how her 'controlling' stepfather was a ruthless abuser who turned her mother into a stranger. By the time Sarah was ten, Smith had started to use hypnotism to try to put her in a trance before raping her.

‘He’d say to me: “You are getting sleepier and sleepier”, and I’d pretend to go along with it because he was going to do whatever he wanted to me anyway,’ she says. ‘Afterwards he would count me back out of the trance and say something like “you’ve had a dream” or “you’ve been somewhere nice and warm”.

‘He’d finish by asking: “So what have you been doing?” and I’d say: "Oh, I’ve had a nice dream”, and he would think that was great and send me off to bed. ‘I think he hoped I wouldn’t remember the abuse, because if I didn’t know it had happened, he didn’t need to feel guilty.’
Smith fled to Barcelona with Leanne in 2007 after he was arrested and questioned by police over allegations he had sexually abused his step-daughter.

They travelled to Spain with their daughter, Rebecca, three, and began building a new life eventually setting up a business among the thriving expat community In Barcelona.

But police never gave up the hunt and  Smith, from North Shields, was tracked down in May 2010 and extradited back to the UK to face charges.

Smith - a former manager at Cumbria county council’s children’s services department - described how she had killed Daniel first, saying: ‘I put a bag on his head.

'All of the head was in. [I knew when he was dead] because I was holding him.’

Asked if her daughter had put up a struggle, Miss Smith replied simply: ‘She moved, yes.’

Miss Smith then spent the night in the hotel room with her dead children, writing a series of notes.

One to Rebecca and Daniel said: ‘I love you very much. I wanted to give you a lovely life together. I’m very sorry.’

The eight men and three women of the jury stared at Miss Smith but she never once returned their gazes, preferring to look at the courtroom floor.

She wore sparkly flip-flops, beige linen trousers and a black cardigan.

Smith claims she killed her children because she feared they would be taken from her by social services after her partner – TV psychic Martin Smith to whom she wasn’t married – was arrested on child sex charges.

The couple fled to Spain in December 2007 but in May 2010 Martin Smith was tracked down and deported to face trial in the UK.
Obsessed with the idea that social services were coming to get her children, Lianne Smith said she took them to the £53-a-night Hotel Miramar in Lloret de Mar.

She began to cry as she told officers: ‘I gave the children a three-day holiday, a perfect holiday. We were very, very happy.
‘[But] it was the end of the road. I knew they were going to take my children to England.’

'I know it's not right to take a life. I felt I was in a corner. My intention was that my children and me together would go. It wasn't just the children.'

The jury must decide whether Smith is criminally responsible for the deaths.

Prosecutor Victor Pillado Quintas called for Miss Smith to be jailed for 38 years, telling jurors the children were 'totally incapable of defending themselves'.

He said: 'Knowing full well that their young age and the surprising nature of her behaviour would not allow them to react, more so since they were asleep, and taking advantage of the trust the children would have had in their mother, she took her son in her arms and put a bag over his head, closing it around his neck.

'She did not stop tightening the bag until she had killed him. Immediately she did the same to the five-year-old, closing the same bag around her neck and tightening it until she killed her daughter.

'After ending the lives of her children she spent the night with their lifeless bodies.'

Prosecution witnesses include two members of hotel staff - a cleaner and a receptionist - and nine police officers who saw Miss Smith at the scene where the children were killed.

The prosecutor said that at 1.30pm the following day, Smith went to the Miramar's reception and asked for the police and an ambulance to be called.

Mr Pillado Quintas told the jury of three women and eight men: 'You will have to decide whether Lianne Smith knew that she was killing her children and whether she knew it was wrong, or whether she was suffering a mental disease at the time.

'The prosecution says she was not suffering a mental disease. You will also have to decide whether she was suffering insurmountable fear when she killed her children.

'To decide on this you will hear evidence from psychiatric experts and the defendant herself, but you will also have to use your common sense.

'Would a person who is afraid of someone hurting her children kill those children? Is this logical?'

Miss Smith refused to answer more than 100 questions from the prosecutor, but spent five minutes answering questions from her defence lawyer Jenifer Lahoz Abos.
She wept as she told the jury: 'I love my children.' Miss Lahoz Abos said her client admitted killing but called for her to be acquitted on mental health grounds.

Martin Smith, 46, (left) was discovered in his cell by wardens at Strangeways prison. Rebecca, five, along with her 11-month-old brother Daniel, were found dead at the Miramar Hotel in Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava.

She said Miss Smith had had 'an absolute emotional dependence' on Martin Smith, with whom she shared a surname although they never married.
Martin Smith was convicted of repeatedly raping Lianne Smith’s daughter from a previous relationship, Sarah Richardson, when she was a child.

Sarah, now 24, waived her anonymity after Smith was jailed last year in Manchester. He hanged himself in prison last January.

Miss Lahoz Abos added: 'The defendant came to Spain fleeing the British judicial authorities and social services because her husband Martin was accused of sexually abusing another daughter she had from an earlier marriage, which they considered a totally false accusation.

'In Barcelona, Lianne not only took care of her children but was also the only member of the family who worked. She worked as an English teacher and was the family's only breadwinner.'

Ms Lahoz Abos said that after Martin's arrest, Smith felt 'persecuted, hounded and threatened'.

Lianne Smith, pictured with her son Daniel, has been placed on suicide watch after learning of her partner's hanging in prison.

She said: 'She tried to carry on in this state of psychological instability, going back to work and hiring a girl to look after the children.

'But on May 15 she went out shopping early in the morning with both the children and saw two people in a car who she later saw walking down the street.

'She felt observed and threatened and made a clean break with reality and thought she was being chased by the two people, who she thought could be members of the British social services.

'She thought they were going to come and take her children away and give them to other families in adoption, so she started to run when someone, who may have been a journalist, asked her if she was the woman with two children whose husband had been arrested.

'At this moment she entered a state of panic and lost contact with reality, interpreting events in a totally distorted manner, with delirious beliefs that she was in danger and there was a serious threat to her life and that of her children.'

Gathering baby bottles, food and clothes, Lianne took the children to Lloret de Mar.

The Barcelona apartment block where Lianne Smith lived with her husband Martin Smith, before his arrest.

Ms Lahoz Abos added: 'It was the only other place she knew in Catalonia because that is where she and Martin had gone when they first arrived from England, so she withdrew money and went there to hide with her children.

'After spending two days at the Miramar Hotel, and not seeing any way out for them, she decided to end their lives.

'At 1.30pm the next day, after failing in her attempts to commit suicide and still finding herself in a different psychological reality, she went to the Miramar's reception and asked for the police and an ambulance to be called, and confessed what had happened.'

Lianne and Martin Smith, who were not married but shared the same surname, first met in October 1992 through a dating agency.

Smith was going through a divorce from her first husband at the time and was then living in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear.

Martin Smith, originally from North Shields, had been a singer in a band in clubs in the North East before working as a TV psychic.

The couple lived together in Cumbria and in 2007 they moved to Lichfield, Staffordshire, but only stayed there for a few months before fleeing to Spain with Rebecca.

Daniel was born in Spain in June 2009. The court yesterday heard that it was not clear who was the father of Rebecca and Daniel. The trial continues.

 

Culled from The Daily Mail UK.

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