Lianne Smith jailed for 30 years for murdering her baby son and his sister, 5

A British mother who suffocated her two children with a plastic shopping bag in their Spanish hotel room will be locked up for 30 years.
Lianne Smith, 45, was jailed for 15 years for each count of murder, in a written judgment released by the Girona Provincial Court.
She was found guilty last month of killing daughter Rebecca, five, and 11-month-old son Daniel, in May 2010.

Lianne Smith's son Daniel

daughter Rebecca the weekend before they were killed

When Rebecca said she wanted to stay with her mother, Smith took the children to the resort of Lloret de Mar to give them ‘a perfect holiday’.

They checked into room 101 of the Hotel Miramar on May 15, 2010.
After two days of playing together and posing for seaside snaps, she put them to bed at about 7pm and waited an hour until they were asleep.


In a video interview with police, she demonstrated how she used a plastic shopping bag to suffocate her children.
As Daniel struggled for breath, she drew the bag closed around his neck and ‘did not stop squeezing’ until he was dead.
The next day – having tried to commit suicide – she instructed reception to summon Spanish police.
During her trial Smith refused to answer more than 100 questions from prosecutor Victor Pillado Quintas.
The jury were shown the chilling video of Smith calmly confessing to detectives as she sat on a bed in the next-door hotel room.
She told officers: ‘I have ended the lives of my two children. I gave the children a three-day holiday, a perfect holiday.
'I knew they were going to take my children to England.
‘My intention was that my children and me together would go. It wasn’t just the children.’
Smith - a former manager at Cumbria county council’s children’s services department - described how she had killed Daniel first, saying: ‘I put a bag on his head.
'All of the head was in. [I knew when he was dead] because I was holding him.’
Asked if her daughter had put up a struggle, Miss Smith replied simply: ‘She moved, yes.’

Miss Smith then spent the night in the hotel room cuddling her dead children, writing a series of notes. One to Rebecca and Daniel said: ‘I love you very much. I wanted to give you a lovely life together. I’m very sorry.’

The court heard Smith was ‘pathologically obsessed’ with her partner Martin Smith. The couple, who were not married but shared the same surname, first met in October 1992 through a dating agency.
Smith was going through a divorce from her first husband at the time and was then living in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear.
Mr Smith, originally from North Shields, had been a singer in a band in clubs in the North East before working as a TV psychic.
The couple lived together in Cumbria and in 2007 they moved to Lichfield, Staffordshire, but only stayed there for a few months before fleeing to Spain with Rebecca.
Daniel was born in Spain in June 2009. The court heard it was not clear who was the father of Rebecca and Daniel.

In May 2010 Martin Smith was tracked down and deported to face trial in the UK. He was convicted of repeatedly raping Lianne Smith’s daughter from a previous relationship, Sarah Richardson, when she was a child.
Sarah, now 24, waived her anonymity after Smith was jailed last year in Manchester. He hanged himself in prison last January.

News credit: Daily Mail

What a tragedic story!