In a horrific turn of events, a devoted other drowned her two-year-old son in a bathtub after believing she had to protect him from demons.
According to reports, Natalie Steel, 32, of Bridgend, South Wales in the United Kingdom had been playing with her son Reid Steele in the bathroom at the family’s nearly Rs 6 crore mansion in Bridgend, South Wales in August last year when she suddenly held the child underwater ‘to send him to Heaven’.
The woman was detained under the Mental Health Act on Tuesday, May 3.
The toddler was revived by paramedics but died in hospital of drowning and hypothermia the next day.
Steele denied murder, but admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility after two forensic psychiatrists found she had been mentally ill when she killed her son.
The mother-of-one told police she needed to protect her son from her own family and their ‘creepy eyes’ by sending him to Heaven.
On Tuesday, Steele was sentenced to a hospital order under the Mental Health Act, where she will receive treatment.
Judge Michael Fitton QC told her: ‘All life is precious and the value of Reid’s young life is beyond calculation or measure but likewise the impact of his death on those who loved him is equally also beyond calculation or measure.
At her sentencing hearing at Cardiff Crown Court, reports said, prosecutor Michael Jones QC said Reid’s mother Steele had been behaving oddly in the days leading up to her son’s death.
Jones said Steele’s family described her as a ‘devoted mother’ who was inseparable from her son ‘from day one’ but that they had been concerned when she reported hearing and seeing things.
She told her mother, Amanda Prescott, that she had been ‘seeing lights’ and told her ‘demons are dark and real’. Steele also told Prescott ‘the rooms feel different’.
The court heard Steele had been interested in ‘New Age theories’ – and had become a Christian in the months before Reid’s death by attending church regularly.
She and Reid were on the church-organised camping trip when fellow campers became concerned about her behaviour and asked a friend to collect her.
Friend Heidi Ackland drove to the campsite near New Quay in West Wales to visit Steele and see how she was before deciding best to bring her and Reid home.
The night before Reid’s death, the defendant had been on a camping trip with her church in New Quay, west Wales, but friends became concerned when she demanded to be immediately baptised.
Ackland, who was not on the trip, drove to New Quay early on the morning of August 11 to speak to Steele and persuade her to come home with her.
Ackland described Steele as ‘speaking gibberish’ and telling her that she had to be a sacrifice.
On the journey home, Ackland noticed that Steele was compulsively checking on her son in his car seat in the back, saying things like ‘I love you Reid’ and also kept taking her own seatbelt off.
Later that evening, after dropping Steele at the home she shared with her mother, step-father and brother, she received a text from her saying: ‘I’ve done something terrible, I had to protect Reid from my family.’
When she arrived at the property, she found the emergency services were already there.
Steele’s mother Amanda Prescott told police her daughter had taken her grandson for his bath at around 6pm on August 11, but had come downstairs at around 7.30pm saying: ‘I think I done.’
Prescott said she had ‘gone into panic mode’ and rushed upstairs to find Reid unconscious and wrapped in a towel on the bathroom floor.
Steele later told police officers she had been playing ‘cups of tea’ with Reid in the bath and had breastfed him before holding him underwater.
The defendant said she was ‘really worried’ about her family, saying they had ‘creepy eyes’ and adding that she had ‘problems with spirits’ and ‘spirits had been touching her’.
She told her mother: ‘I felt I had to protect him from you’.
In her police interviews, she said her mother, step-father and siblings had ‘big eyes’ and ‘contorted’ faces, and she believed they were possessed by demons. A forensic psychiatrist’s report later found Steele had been suffering from ‘as unrecognised, undiagnosed and untreated mental illness’.
It continued: ‘[Steele] was so deluded that she drowned her son to protect him from demons and send him to Heaven.’
