A mother and her partner have gone on trial accused of murdering her two-year-old Liam Johnson at their home in Fife and blaming the killing on a seven-year-old boy.
Nyomi Fee, 28, and Rachel Trelfa or Fee, 31, are also charged with a catalogue of assault, cruelty and neglect charges involving three children in their care, including the dead toddler.
The couple, originally from Ryton, Tyne and Wear deny committing the offences at the home they shared in Thornton between 12 January 2012 and 22 March 2014.
Their trial before Lord Burns at the High Court in Livingston, West Lothian, is expected to last for between four and six weeks.
Both women are charged with assaulting little Liam, who was also known as Liam Fee, by repeatedly inflicting blunt force trauma to his head and body between 12 January 2012 and 14 March 2014.
They are accused of murdering him by inflicting similar blunt force injuries between 5 and 22 March 2014, injuring him so severely that he died.
They are also charged with wilfully ill-treating, neglecting and abandoning Liam in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health between January and March 2014 leaving him in a darkened room without physical or mental stimulation, giving him Calpol to make him sleep and failing to provide and seek appropriate, timely and adequate medical aid for him when he was injured.
They further deny attempting to defeat the ends of justice following Liam’s death by delaying contacting the emergency services and falsely claiming during a 999 call and later to police, friends and family that one of the seven-year-olds was responsible for his death.
The Crown also alleges that prior to the arrival of police and paramedics on 22 March, they grabbed the hand of the seven year-old they blamed and forced it into the dead toddler’s mouth.
The cruelty and neglect charges include allegations that they deprived all three boys of food, refused to let them go to the toilet at night and forced them to stand naked and shivering under a cold shower if they wet the bed.
They told the older boys that their penises would be cut off with a saw and said to one of them that they had killed his dad with a saw, the Crown claims.
The Fees allegedly made a cage out of a metal fireguard and piece of wood and imprisoned one of the youngsters in it with his arms and legs bound to the structure for prolonged periods of time.
They allegedly forced the same youngster to eat his own excrement and dog excrement, put soap in his mouth and shut him in a darkened drawer to sleep.
The other seven-year-old was allegedly compelled to eat his own vomit and had his face rubbed in underwear soiled with urine and faeces.
One of the seven year olds had a cage of rats put on his head and the other was tied naked in a room where rats and snakes were kept and told that a the boa constrictor there “ate naughty boys”.