A baby boy who was found with twine looped and knotted round his neck and wrapped in a 116-year-old newspaper was unlawfully killed, a coroner has concluded Crispin Oliver on Thursday said the child, known only as Baby Auckland, had been garrotted by an unknown person. He said it was an “unusual case, legally and evidentially”. The whole story, he added, was “very sad and singular”.
Oliver said: “Clearly, this was a terrible thing that happened to a defenceless infant. It happened in our community. But it happened over a century ago, and it is heartwarming how the public and individuals in this community have stepped up to do the right thing by Baby Auckland.” The inquest heard that the skeletal remains of the baby had been found during renovations on the second floor of a late 19th-century house in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, on 29 July 2024.
They were found by the house owner, Peter Moody, while he was laying a new floor. In a statement he said he had made the discovery when he lifted up a floorboard. He contacted the county council, unsure of whether he needed to call the police.
DCI Mel Sutherland told the inquest he had been on duty in Bishop Auckland when he was alerted to the discovery of skeletal remains in a town centre house. After they were confirmed as human, he supervised the sealing of the house to keep it forensically sterile, while a forensic anthropologist was contacted. That scientist, Dr Micol Zuppello, travelled up that evening and spent two days at the house investigating.
The baby’s skeleton was mostly complete, the inquest in Crook heard, bar a missing toe tip. The remains were partly mummified. Carbon dating could conclusively establish only that the baby died between the 17th century and 1955.
A postmortem of the skeleton was carried out by Zupello and Dr Louise Mulcahy, a Home Office pathologist for north-east England based at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. Mulcahy said the baby had been 38-40 weeks, with no signs of traumatic injury, and had twine looped around his neck. She said it had been looped around the neck three times, knotted, and then looped again.
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