Killer stepmum ‘poisoned with salt by cellmates’ in revenge attack
A woman jailed for murdering her stepson has been poisoned by her prison inmates.
Emma Tustin, 32, is currently serving life behind bars for the murder of her stepson Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, 6, in West Midlands County in England last year.
Tustin’s former cellmate at Eastwood Park Prison, Elaine Pritchard, told The Sunday Mirror inmates laced her food with salt as payback for the pain she inflicted on Arthur.
"Some of the things we did were cruel – but she was crueller to Arthur so she deserved it,” she told the paper.
The poisoning of Tustin is a reference to what she did to Arthur. Before the little boy was beaten to death Tustin laced his food with 34g of salt.
Pritchard also claims Tustin told fellow inmates she was in jail because Arthur’s dad Thomas Hughes, 29, neglected him. Hughes is serving 21 years’ jail after a manslaughter conviction.
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Arthur had been subjected to a "cruel and systematic" campaign of cruelty which amounted to the "medical definition of child torture", the court heard last month.
Tustin inflicted a fatal head injury on Arthur after shaking him and repeatedly banging his head against a hard surface, BBC reported. Hughes was not present during this but encouraged violence against Arthur and would also regularly beat him.
The court was shown audio files which Justice Mark Wall QC said showed Arthur "crying, calling out for his grandparents and uncles, hitting himself in a way which anyone would recognise as a cry for help from a deeply unhappy child, and saying that nobody loved him and that he was hungry and thirsty".
He called the case "one of the most distressing and disturbing" he has come across.
with Yahoo!UK
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