21 Treated like a dog, used as a punchbag: The life and death of a baby boy called 'Smiley'

Most of You Would Have Read This Story On Reddit.It's A True Story:

Baby P's happy smile masked months of pain and terror inflicted by his mother and stepfather.

The toddler was speaking his first words and had already learned to call his mother's boyfriend 'dad'.

In return, he was used as a punchbag by the sadistic thug who trained him 'like a dog' - the child instinctively put his head to the floor when the brute approached.

Known to family as Smiley, the toddler would be wrapped in layers of clothing until he began sweating and gasping for air.

His fingernails were pinched - and possibly ripped by pliers - until they fell off.

All this while his 27-year-old mother chain smoked, gossiped on internet chat sites and played online poker.

She and the stepfather now face jail over the 17-month-old's agonising death, meaning the infant's horrifying story can finally be told.

When police searched the family home, they found dog mess and human faeces on the floor and rat holes burrowed into the walls. The bodies of dead chicks, mice and a dismembered rabbit were strewn around along with items of pornography.

The baby's cot and bedroom walls were stained with his blood. He weighed as little as a child five months younger and had been inflicting pain on himself by headbutting walls and floors.

Social workers and doctors had seen many of his bruises and other injuries and raised suspicions that he was being abused. Police even arrested his mother twice but decided there was too little evidence to prosecute.

Crucially, none of them knew that she had moved her pain-obsessed lover into her home. She was desperate to keep her son - and the £450-a-month child benefit and other pay-outs - and kept the man's presence a secret.

A knife-obsessed sadist, he wore combat gear, collected Nazi military memorabilia including helmets and daggers decorated with swastikas and was always seen with his beloved Rottweiler.

He even kept martial arts weapons and a crossbow at the family's home.

Relatives described how as a child he had tortured guinea pigs and particularly frogs, which he would skin alive before breaking their legs.

He had been prosecuted by the RSPCA for torturing animals and faced a police investigation over claims he tortured his own grandmother, allegedly to make her change her will in his favour.

The elderly woman died of pneumonia before a decision was taken on whether he should face prosecution, police sources said.

Baby P's wounds began within weeks of the 32-year-old illiterate odd-job man moving into his mother's four-bedroom council house in Haringey, North London.

Senior detectives believe she was blinded by her new love, after being raised by a drug-addicted mother and a disastrous marriage to a violent alcoholic.

Extraordinary resources were lavished on her, with social services paying Ann Walker, a registered childminder, to look after Baby P four days a week.

She said: 'He came to me always very dirty and smelly. You could see he was a child who was neglected. He had the most sad eyes. You knew something was wrong.'

Baby P was born on March 1, 2006, four months before his parents split up.

By November his mother was living with her new lover. Her son, who had previously suffered only relatively minor infections and bruises, began to suffer serious injuries.

On December 11, he was admitted to hospital with a two-inch bruise across his forehead and further bruises to his chest and shoulder.

Doctors said his wounds were 'very suggestive of non-accidental injury' and referred him to social services.

His mother and grandmother were arrested on suspicion of assault and on December 22 he was put on Haringey's child protection register.

But the investigation proved inconclusive and on January 26 last year Baby P was returned to his mother - against police advice.

In March, when her case worker, Maria Ward, 39, noticed a red mark on Baby P's face, she claimed he had hit his head on a side table and 'bruised easily'.

Doctors checked this claim and ruled out the mother's theory but their report reached social workers and police only after the child's death on August 3 last year.

That April, just after his first birthday, Baby P was admitted to hospital again, this time with a large swelling and bruises on his head.

ocial services were informed but once more the child was returned to his mother and Miss Ward recorded she had 'no concerns'.

His mother missed appointments with her health visitor, Paulette Thomas, and in June she was told to take Baby P to hospital for a child protection order check-up.

Doctors reported 12 separate areas of bruising and scratches, including a 'grip mark' on his leg. The mother was arrested a further time on suspicion of assault.

But astonishingly she was allowed to take her son home again and continued to miss check-ups.

Police twice asked for cross-agency meetings but, in the week before Baby P's death, Haringey's lawyers said there was not enough information to begin care proceedings.

By July, a lodger, Jason Owen, 36, had moved in with the family together with his three children and his 15-year-old girlfriend.

Before Miss Ward's final visit, four days before Baby P's death, Owen said the boy's mother and stepfather smeared his face, hands and clothes with chocolate and nappy cream so the social worker would not see his injuries.

She did not see him cleaned and at a hospital check-up two days before his death Sabah Al-Zayyat, a consultant paediatrician, seemingly also missed his injuries.

On July 29, Baby P spent his final weekend with his natural father, who said the toddler's head had been shaved and his hand bandaged to cover a missing fingernail.

He returned him to his mother on July 30 and recalled: 'As she walked away he screamed 'daddy, daddy, daddy', so much so that she brought him back so I could say goodbye.'

On Baby P's final day alive, August 2, police told his mother that they would take no further action over suspicions she had assaulted him.

Medical experts told the trial that Baby P probably received a final, fatal blow that night which stopped him breathing and knocked out a tooth, later found in his stomach.

He was found dead in his blood-spattered cot the next morning and police summoned to the North Middlesex Hospital were struck by his mother's lack of emotion.

She was arrested on suspicion of murder and her lover quickly arrested.

The nightmarish scenes discovered by police at the house were a far cry from the picture his mother had tried to paint of herself, telling officers she was a 'damned good mum'.

A senior officer said: 'She knew how to play the system, how to tell social workers what they wanted to hear, and how to press the right buttons to get what she wanted, whether it was a new council house or child care.'

Baby P's mother had grown up around social workers and had plenty of practice in how to manipulate them.

She did not know her natural father until adulthood and as a teenager had been told to choose between going into care or being sent to a boarding school.

She chose the boarding school but left at 15 with a handful of GCSEs and worked as a barmaid and hairdresser.

Within a year she had embarked on a relationship with a 33-year-old man.

They married in 2003 but the relationship collapsed soon after Baby P's birth three years later.