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A Mansfield mother was found guilty of murdering her 19-month-old daughter by deliberately scalding her.
Katie Crowder murdered Gracie Crowder by exposing her to hot water at her home on Wharmby Avenue and then spent the next hour “cleaning up” before taking the girl to her parents’ home down the street.
Gracie was pronounced dead shortly after her arrival at the hospital on March 6 after suffering deep burns that covered 65% of her body.
A trial in Nottingham Crown Court, which lasted almost three weeks, heard that upon arriving at Paul and Karen Crowder’s home, the defendant appeared “in a panic” when he knocked on the door before telling his parents ” she’s dead, she’s dead. “
She wept in the dock after the verdict was rendered Tuesday morning, and when jurors were relieved of their duties, a woman in the public gallery screamed in apparent frustration.
Crowder, 26, had denied the only murder charge, claiming he would “never hurt” his daughter.
The jury dismissed her claims that she had been “cleaning up a puppy mess” and found her daughter face down in the bathroom next to a mop bucket.
The prosecution said a pathologist from the Home Office had concluded that Gracie would have screamed “forcefully” until the pain was relieved and would not have suffered organ failure for about an hour.
On the night of the murder, Karen Crowder asked the defendant “what the hell have you done?” after Gracie went into cardiac arrest, to which she replied, “I don’t know, I found her like this.”
Opening her indictment, Sally Howes QC said: “The death of Gracie Crowder was not an instant death. It would have taken him about an hour to die.
“You may ask: why the delay in asking for help?
“It is the case with the Crown that the delay was Katie Crowder covering her tracks – she knew what she had done. She was cleaning herself, she was cleaning, she was thinking of a way to explain what she had done. “
Jurors were told that the amount of cocaine found in Crowder’s blood four hours after the incident was consistent with the defendant taking the class A drug one hour before Gracie’s death.
The killer had made comments about his daughter in the past, saying, “I need to take her to daycare, I never have a break.”
She was arrested at King’s Mill Hospital at Sutton in Ashfield, and when warned, she said, “What? I would never hurt her. “
Crowder will be sentenced at a later date.
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