How detectives cracked cold case of mum who killed her baby – after 25 years

“When I heard about it and I saw her name, I thought ‘that’s not that woman – that’s not the same woman that we’ve lived by all these years’.”
That was how a resident of a cul-de-sac in Liverpool described the moment she learned her neighbour for more than 30 years – Joanne Sharkey – had been charged with the 1998 killing of her baby boy.
Another neighbour said when police first arrived at the family’s “immaculate” semi-detached house in July 2023, she had thought one of the lodgers they sometimes hosted must have been in trouble.
It simply did not make sense that someone like “kind, funny and normal” council worker Joanne Sharkey could have committed a crime.
But the truth was detectives had, finally, cracked a cold case that had lingered unsolved on the books of Cheshire Police for 25 years.

Courtesy: BBC