PROSECUTORS in the Reece Kelly murder trial had no direct evidence of the moment when his baby son Dallas was fatally injured.

The 31-year-old defendant is the only person who knows for sure what happened to his son, four-month-old Dallas, when he sustained a traumatic and ultimately fatal head injury on October 15, 2021.

From day one, Kelly constructed an alternative reality, striving to hide the brutal truth - that his violence that day led directly to his son's death. Even when confronted by medical evidence, Kelly still believed his lies would save him.

He was wrong.

Perhaps the most crucial clues that exposed his lies were those discovered by medical experts – the succession of expert medical practitioners who examined the four-month-old after his death and used their findings piece together how Dallas really died.

Their evidence fell into place like jigsaw pieces, creating a picture of Dallas's tragic last hours - a medical portrait of murder.

In forensic detail, the expert witnesses – including Home Office pathologist Dr Alison Armour – set out their findings for the jury, detailing how Dallas had sustained the traumatic head injury that led to his death.

The baby suffered that catastrophic injury at his Workington home on the morning of October 15, 2021, while he was in the sole care of his father, 31-year-old Reece Kelly.

Dallas’s mother Georgia Wright, 23, had left the family home that morning in a taxi, travelling to the burger van where she worked.

In court, she said she had no idea that Kelly had been capable of harming their son, though when he finally admitted causing the injuries she told jurors that her view had changed: she now regarded the man she once loved was a “monster.”

Under questioning from her defence KC David Mason, she recalled the day she sat with her son as his life support machine was turned off. She had been distraught, she said, weeping as she spoke.

When she and Kelly were charged, she said she felt confused.

Mr Mason asked Wright how she felt after hearing Kelly’s admission – that he accepted being responsible for the death of their little boy, considering what he had been telling her in the two years up to this point?

“I can’t describe it. The pains that I felt – they’re unbearable,” she said.

“I feel like you can’t trust… I could not believe that he had spent all that time holding me, promising me that he would never hurt our baby… saying that they’d find out what really happened, and then that we’d find someone who had answers.”

At 12.22pm, on the day Dallas was hurt, Reece Kelly dialled 999, asking for an ambulance because Dallas was not breathing. At that point, the child at the heart of this case was the victim of an unexplained medical episode.

By pure chance, an ambulance was nearby.

The paramedics who treated Dallas that day were on the scene in just two minutes, and his treatment was underway less than a minute later.

Tragically, despite their best efforts and treatment at Whitehaven’s West Cumberland Hospital and then at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Hospital, Dallas was simply too gravely injured to be saved.

After his life support machine was switched off on the afternoon of October 19, the grim process of establishing what had happened to the baby began.

It was only after he was confronted with the details of what those medical examinations uncovered – multiple brain bleeds, retinal detachments, and six rib fractures – that Kelly abandoned his denials of any wrongdoing.

He admitted manslaughter, but provided a new version of what happened. Dallas was choking and he shook him only gently, for a few seconds, to rouse his son, he claimed.

In court, prosecutor Richard Littler KC told the jury: “This plea of guilty [to manslaughter] is a step closer to the truth but the prosecution suggests, it still falls far short of what actually happened.

The barrister told jurors: “This case is about the intention that Reece Kelly had towards Dallas. In short, the prosecution suggests that the injuries sustained by Dallas was so extensive and severe that they can only be explained away by Reece Kelly intending really serious injury.

“He used, say the prosecution, considerable and severe force towards Dallas, squeezing and gripping four-month-old Dallas when he picked him up; and forcefully and vigorously shaking him, causing Dallas’s head on his neck to oscillate backwards and forwards, causing severe head injury and ultimately death.”

For hours, the jury listened to detailed accounts of Dallas's injuries, including the evidence that he had sustained an earlier brain bleed and rib fracture. Neither parent sought medical attention for this.

Neither could explain those injuries.

The jury did, however, hear some compelling evidence that suggested Wright at least was trying to look her son's medical needs. Several weeks before the tragedy, frustrated that her son was suffering “extreme reflux” and losing weight, she had on her own initiative, taken him to the A&E Department of Whitehaven’s West Cumberland Hospital.

She demanded that her son should be treated, securing heart scans that led to Dallas being diagnosed with a hole in the heart.

But underlying the tragedy was the corrosive and damaging effect of drug addiction: both Kelly and Wright became hooked on street-bought opiate medication, particularly Pregabalin and Tramadol.

They insisted that they needed the pills to control their pain. Shockingly, even as his son lay dying in a Newcastle hospital, Reece Kelly was making desperate and repeated efforts to buy more pills.

During her evidence, Wright said Kelly took the pills because he was "crippled with pain." He had suffered chronic pain throughout his life, she said. 

Of the pills she took, she insisted that they did not "hinder his capabilities” as a parent. She and Kelly suffered from bad anxiety when unable to get the pills, she said. Without them, she had felt anxious, sweaty.

She also spoke of the desperate need to stop taking the pills.

Most crucially, the jury had the task of deciding whether Kelly, when he shook his son, had done so violently and with an intention to harm his son.

As they considered the evidence, jurors were clearly not convinced by Kelly’s lies, his claim that he had not acted that way, and intended no harm to his son.

As one expert concluded, it truly was 'inconceivable' that his account of what happened on October 15 - an act of gentle shaking to rouse his son - could in any way account for the traumatic multiple injuries Dallas sustained.

Kelly was convicted of murder and child cruelty, while Wright was cleared of "causing or allowing" the death of her son.

Both defendants were convicted of child cruelty by failing to take Dallas to medical appointments and by exposing the child to illicit drugs in their home.

The defendants will be sentenced on Monday, November 20 after background reports are prepared. Kelly is facing years in jail, while Wright’s future is also uncertain.