‘Unimaginably cruel’ parents get life for murder of their baby son

A MOTHER and father who murdered their baby son 39 days after he was handed back to them by social services were jailed for life yesterday.

Shannon Marsden, 22, and Stephen Boden, 30, subjected ten-month-old Finley Boden to ‘vicious and repeated’ assaults.

He was found to have had 57 fractures among 130 injuries when he died during the Covid lockdown on Christmas Day 2020, as well as sepsis and pneumonia.

The injuries included a broken pelvis, broken shoulder, fractured shinbone, fractured collarbones, fractured ribs and four thighbone fractures, as well as 71 bruises and other burns.

Jailing Marsden for 27 years and Boden for 29 yesterday, Mrs Justice Tipples told them at

‘I can only describe you both as monsters’

Derby Crown Court: ‘You subjected your own baby son to unimaginable cruelty.’

The judge said the pair ‘worked together’ with one holding the baby to keep him quiet while the other attacked him. She added that Finley was in terrible pain in the period before his death but the couple did nothing.

Instead, the ‘persuasive and accomplished liars’ claimed he had Covid to keep social services and relatives from finding out the truth.

The pair, from Old Whittington near Chesterfield, showed no emotion in court.

Finley had been removed from his parents only days after he was born amid concerns about their violent relationship and heavy cannabis use.

But he was handed back after Derbyshire social services recommended he should be returned even though tests showed they both continued to smoke cannabis. A report by the family’s social worker recommended a sixmonth transition back to the parents’ care but a family court ruled it should happen over a much shorter eight-week period instead.

They were handed the ‘healthy, chubby, happy little boy’ on November 17, 2020 – but a little over a month later he was dead.

Only hours after his son’s death, callous Boden was heard saying that he was going to sell Finley’s pushchair on eBay. In a victim impact statement read to the court, a relative said: ‘Neither of you have shown any remorse. I can only describe you both as monsters.’

The NSPCC said the Government must implement changes recommended by previous reviews to ‘transform the child protection system and ensure the different agencies involved are able to work together effectively to focus on children and babies like Finley’.