Lianne Smith found guilty of murdering children

During the four day trial in northeastern Spain
the court had heard how Smith gave her children “the perfect holiday” at the
Costa Brava resort before suffocating them with a plastic bag and spending
the night beside their lifeless bodies.

The next day she calmly gave herself up to police and recorded a full
confession in which she said she had killed them because she feared they
would be taken into care by social services.

The killings, described by the prosecution as “abominable”, happened after
Smith fled her home in Barcelona with the two children following the arrest
of her 46-year-old partner, who had been on the run for child sex offences
in Britain.

Martin Smith, a psychic and hypnotist, was extradited the day of the killings.
He was subsequently sentenced to 16 years in prison last year but hanged
himself in his cell in January.

The court had heard how the defendant had “a pathological emotional
dependence” on her partner and that the relationship with him “was the most
important in her life”.

The court case took a bizarre turn on Wednesday when DNA tests showed neither
child had been fathered by Mr Smith, her partner of 18 years, and with whom
she had fled to Barcelona in 2007 from Lichfield, Staffs, when he was
accused of repeated sexual abuse against her eldest daughter, now 23.

Smith had been convinced she was being pursued by social services who were
going to remove her children and send them back to England.

She had told psychiatrists while on remand that she had felt death was a
better outcome for her children than them being taken into care, that she
had “killed them out of love”, and that she had also intended to take her
own life.

The trial failed to explore how Smith had been left free to escape authorities
with her children and why they were not immediately removed from her custody
on the arrest of her partner.

Prosecutor Victor Pillado Quintas had said when summing up, that after hearing
the evidence, he acknowledged that Smith suffered a “pathological emotional
dependence and a psychotic disorder which impaired her faculties” when she
killed her children.

But he claimed it was not so severe that she could not be held accountable for
her crimes.

Outside court on Thursday he said: “Today justice has been done for two
defenceless small children who were murdered in the most abominable and vile
way – by their own mother.

“The prosecution was never looking for blood, we were looking for justice.”

Smith will serve her sentence in a regular prison somewhere in the province of
Catalonia, not in a psychiatric hospital.

She was expected to be put on suicide watch.

Smith will be sentenced at a later date.

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