The investigation lasted almost three decades
It was a mystery that might never have been solved. The horrifying discovery, on a Saturday morning near the popular Gulliver’s World theme park, spawned a homicide investigation which lasted almost three decades.
The remains of a baby boy, placed within two knotted bin bags, had been discarded in a wooded area in Warrington. Police had no idea who the child was, or who his parents were. It was a crime that rocked the community – and the nation.
With limited information, hundreds of investigators, scientists, detectives and officers more set about the daunting task of discovering who he was, and who killed him. Named Baby Callum, after the Callands district of Warrington in which his body was discovered, they sought justice in his name.
A funeral was organised for him by the community. After he was laid to rest, decades went by without any breakthrough. But after a DNA hit, the truth would finally be revealed.
Joanne Sharkey was unmasked as the mother of the child. She would eventually admit that she had killed her newborn son, while suffering from severe post-natal depression.
After she faced justice in the courts, Detective Inspector Hannah Friend, from Cheshire Constabulary’s Cold Case Unit told of the huge investigation, which finally saw Callum’s true identity revealed.
Operation Wistful, the codename given to the probe into Callum’s death, was established in 2020. One of 21 cold cases that the unit were faced with, Callum’s death was the case selected, as detectives believed there was a better opportunity of resolving it than others.
“It’s obviously a case that dates from 1998, so it’s relatively more modern,” Det Insp Friend told the Manchester Evening News.
“We knew that we had DNA profiles for both the baby, who had obviously been recovered from bin bags and from the blood that was on the bin bags, which was attributable to the baby’s mother.”
The case had been reviewed in 2016, and the team had run the two DNA profiles against the national DNA database, which revealed 500 names in total.
The detective added: “We had to decide what we were going to do with this information because it had been run but never actually picked through, and nobody had really known how to go about that.
“That’s when Detective Constable Beth Colbourne stepped up and went ‘right, I’m going to try and get to grips with this information and actually do something with it to see if there’s a clue in there as to who might be responsible’.”
Liverpool Crown Court heard a breakthrough came when Sharkey’s first child Matthew was arrested. During a review of the DNA database in 2023, his DNA was found to be a ‘very close match’ to the samples they already had.
Joanne Sharkey and her husband Neil both became suspects. Det Insp Friend said: “I made the decision that they would both be suspects because I didn’t understand the involvement of the family at that stage.
“And that’s really difficult because often you’re walking into a family who are already grieving. They know that their loved one has died.”
“But in this situation, it was quite unique because they had no idea that there had been a child. And then to have to then tell them that that child had been killed was, as you can imagine, really, really difficult both for the family, but also for the officers having to manage that.”
It quickly became clear Mr Sharkey had no idea that his son had existed, and subsequently been killed, she said.
The detective added: “She’d managed to conceal her pregnancy from not just her husband, but all her friends, her family, her work colleagues. It’s quite an unusual situation.”
The post mortem which was conducted at the time showed Baby Callum had two wads of tissue, one at the back of his mouth and another pushed further down his throat. Despite employing experts in the field to look into it further, the cause of death could not be confirmed.
After Sharkey was arrested, she was subjected to examination by psychiatrists to understand how things were for her 27 years ago.
“There were obviously challenges around that because it was such a long time ago,” Det Insp Friend added. “But as a result of that examination, both the prosecution and the defence were satisfied that it was highly likely that she’d been suffering with post-natal depression at the time.”
During a hearing at Liverpool Crown Court on Friday (April 4), Sharkey was sentenced to two years in prison, suspended for two years. Det Insp Friend looked back on the impact of the crime, both back then and today, and how Baby Callum is still affecting the community.
“I think there’s a real temptation with these cold cases to think that people have forgotten and moved on,” she said. “And actually, this case really served to show us that that wasn’t the case at all.
“From a police perspective, we’ve always known about this little unresolved case. You know, it kind of lives on. And there are officers within the investigation team that have worked on this investigation, whose parents are also police officers who worked on the original investigation. So it gets passed down.
“The same happens within the community. There are loads of people who are still really affected by this and not knowing who he was and what happened to him. The fact that people still visit his grave and leave little toys and trinkets and flowers for him just shows that his kind of memory is lived on.
“The investigation really rippled across the community and people were really affected by it. People get a real kind of palpable sense of relief that the day has finally been resolved, that it’s been answered. Because I think it plays in people’s minds.
“Certainly people who were spoken to at the time of the investigation or who provided DNA swabs or the schoolgirls who were interviewed and it’s really kind of brought everybody in. I think it’s brought a lot of peace to people to finally be able to draw a line into the matter and know the truth.”
The team had worked tirelessly on the case, and following Sharkey’s conviction, it was a ‘relief’ it had finally been brought to an end. “I think it’s a relief that we’ve done it and I’m proud that we’ve done it,” Det Insp Friend said.
“It’s been a really difficult investigation sometimes. We said at the beginning that we were setting out to try and get justice for Callum.
“We wanted to know who he was and what had happened to him, and to be able to give him his name. Because without a name, you don’t have an identity. And the thought of a baby being left in bin bags with no one coming forward to claim them. It’s heartbreaking.
“It’s devastating for the community and for Callum’s family and he had such an untimely death. It’s sad, but I’m pleased that justice has finally been done for him.
“We’ve lived and breathed this for a long time. There have been times when I’ve cried about this because of the pressure and the sort of responsibility and wanting to do a good job for him.
“There have been really difficult days, but then there have been really amazing days as well.”
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