The scream cut through the dark house at half past five in the morning, urgent and full of distress. Both parents claimed they woke instantly. Paul said he got out of bed and went to the cot where thirteen-month-old Poppy sat up on her knees, rigid and stiff. She was clenching her teeth.
She wouldn’t take her pacifier. She was pushing down against his lap as if she were straining. He thought she might be constipated. He undid the snaps of her onesie, checked her diaper, saw nothing unusual, no blood, and decided she had simply had a bad dream.
Instead of following the usual routine of taking her downstairs so she wouldn’t wake the other children, he carried her into his own bed and laid her down on her back. He told her half-asleep mother he was going to fetch a clean diaper. He was back within ninety seconds. Poppy was very still and silent.
He thought she had fallen asleep in the short time he was gone. He decided not to disturb her. He lay down beside her, intending to doze off for just a few more minutes. Five or ten minutes later, he reached over and touched her arm.
It was limp. He tapped her face and called her name. No response. He picked her up, and her little body just slumped in his arms.
He came thundering down the stairs shouting for an ambulance. Poppy Iris Worthington was born at Furness General Hospital on October 12th, 2011, in the town of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England. She was a beautiful, happy baby, described by her mother as alive, bubbly, and funny. She slept well, followed a routine of a couple of naps during the day, and went to bed around 7:30 in the evening.
She never went to bed without her pink elephant pillow. She was the family alarm clock, waking up reliably between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning, rattling her bottle against the sides of her cot and calling out, “Mom! ” ready to play. She had three older half-sisters who doted on her and a twin brother who was her companion in mischief.
She was generally healthier than her twin. Aside from a brief hospitalization for bronchitis when she was about three months old and a bout of conjunctivitis, she hadn’t had any serious health issues. That fact would become incredibly important later. Poppy’s mother had faced significant hardships in her own upbringing and had spent time in foster care due to family violence.
She seemed to be a competent mother coping with a rapidly growing family, though she could have benefited from more support from social services. Her father, Paul Worthington, was around forty years old when he began a relationship with her 23-year-old mother. He worked in a supermarket, was known to the police, and officials later admitted they knew nothing about him in terms of assessing his role as a parent. The relationship between Poppy’s parents was on and off.
They were not married. By 2012, they were more like ex-partners co-parenting than a stable couple. Sometimes Paul lived in the house with the family, and other times he did not. Despite this, the family had plans to move to a new town to make a fresh start, and those plans included Paul.
The family lived in a modest three-bedroom rented house that belonged to Paul’s sister, Tracy Worthington. Poppy’s mother and Paul shared the master bedroom, but her mother often chose to sleep downstairs on the sofa. In that master bedroom, two travel cots were set up for the two youngest boys, Poppy’s twin brother and her two-year-old brother. Poppy herself slept in a cot in one of the other bedrooms, sometimes sharing with one of her older sisters, while the remaining two girls shared the third bedroom.
In the summer of 2012, Poppy’s mother noticed blood in her daughter’s diaper and mentioned it to a nurse. Because it wasn’t persistent, it was chalked up to constipation. In the early winter of 2012, Poppy suffered a broken leg. The injury went untreated.
There was no record of any accident that could explain how a child so young could have broken her leg. In early December 2012, many members of the household were suffering from flu-like symptoms. Poppy came down with what seemed like a bad cold around the 11th. She had a runny nose and was more lethargic than usual.
She slept longer than normal during her afternoon nap and had to be woken up, which was unusual for her. She had a slight fever, so her mother asked Paul to give her a dose of paracetamol. Despite feeling unwell, Poppy ate a bit of lunch and tea that day. Whatever was bothering her didn’t seem severe.
But in the late afternoon, she threw herself back in her high chair and screamed out in pain, as if she had a sudden stomach ache. Her mother thought she might need to use the bathroom. She picked her up, rubbed her belly, changed her, and noticed evidence of digestive issues but no blood. Poppy was playing and socializing again that evening.
Her mother went out briefly to pick up one of the older children from school, leaving Poppy at home with Paul and one of his friends who had stopped by to visit. After returning, she put Poppy into her pajamas and set her into her cot with her bottle and pink elephant pillow. Sometime around 8:45 p. m.
, Poppy’s brother woke up crying, and Paul comforted him. Afterwards, Paul stayed in the master bedroom and played on the computer in bed for a time. He said he went to bed around 9:30 p. m.
, taking his laptop with him. He later admitted that he typically checked football results and then spent about ten minutes looking at what he referred to as X-rated adult stuff online before going to sleep. In the early hours of December 12th, Poppy’s mother briefly came upstairs to the master bedroom. She woke Paul up between 2:15 and 2:30 a.
m. because she wanted to use the laptop and needed a charger. She also noticed that Poppy’s twin brother had a stuffy nose, so she took the boy downstairs with her to sleep in his stroller, claiming it would help clear his nose. Paul, half asleep, later claimed he couldn’t fully remember this interaction, but he didn’t dispute that it happened.
Then came the scream at 5:30 in the morning, and the chain of events that ended with paramedics performing CPR as Poppy’s mother stood by, sobbing and pleading for her child to wake up. The ambulance reached Furness General Hospital, the same hospital where Poppy had been born just thirteen months earlier. Medical staff worked on her, but there was nothing they could do. Poppy Worthington was pronounced dead at 7:20 a.
m. on December 12th, 2012. She had likely died at home or in route. The initial assumption among first responders was that this might be a case of sudden unexplained death in childhood or accidental suffocation.
The post-mortem examination was conducted by Dr. Allison Armour, a Home Office forensic pathologist with experience in child deaths. Externally, aside from a small amount of blood around the nostrils and some slight bruising on the face from CPR, Poppy’s body showed no major trauma. But internally, there was a lot of blood.
So much that it could be seen dribbling down her legs. Even five hours after her death, blood kept leaking out of her body. Dr. Armour discovered redness and bruising on Poppy’s inner thighs, as well as other injuries and tears.
There was also bruising in the deep soft tissues at the back of her throat, suggesting possible force airway obstruction or an object being pushed into her mouth. There was ambiguity about whether these injuries may have occurred during resuscitation efforts. After thoroughly examining Poppy’s body, Dr. Armour’s conclusion was that her injuries were strongly consistent with sexual assault.
She also identified the healing fractures in Poppy’s right leg. Then another significant piece of forensic evidence came to light. Poppy’s DNA was found on Paul’s privates. This was determined through swabs and tests done during the investigation.
When confronted with this, Paul claimed the DNA transfer occurred innocently when he was handling Poppy during the emergency and then later went to the bathroom at the hospital. He suggested he might have transferred her DNA by not washing his hands and then urinating. Experts found this unconvincing given the nature and location of the DNA. Cumbria police did not properly investigate Poppy’s death for a full nine months following the incident.
They did not secure the house as a potential crime scene. A used diaper, extremely soiled and foul-smelling, was found lying on the living room floor by Poppy’s aunt Tracy, who arrived shortly after the ambulance left to help with the other children. An on-scene police officer gave her permission to dispose of it, so she tied it up in a plastic bag and tossed it into an outside bin. The bedding, the pink elephant pillow, and the pajama bottoms Poppy had been wearing were not seized.
Those items went missing in the shuffle. Paul himself was not formally interviewed or arrested on the day of Poppy’s death, despite being the lone adult present with her. An initial doctor didn’t find a cause of death, listing it as undetermined pending further tests, leading some officers to mistakenly think there might not be a case here. But Dr.
Armour’s suspicions of assault were known. A later independent police complaints commission inquiry identified at least twelve major errors or omissions in the handling of the case. Eight months later, in August of 2013, the police finally arrested both Paul and Poppy’s mother and formally interviewed them. Paul was arrested on suspicion of assaulting his daughter, an allegation he vehemently denied.
Both were released on bail as the investigation continued. In March of 2015, the Crown Prosecution Service announced they would not charge anyone in relation to Poppy’s death. The reason given was lack of sufficient evidence to have a realistic prospect of conviction, largely due to the botched investigation that failed to get any forensic evidence. But parallel inquiries were shedding more light.
In March 2014 and again in November 2015, a High Court judge, Mr. Justice Peter Jackson, held fact-finding hearings as part of care proceedings for the surviving children. In January 2016, Justice Jackson found on the balance of probabilities that Paul had sexually assaulted Poppy shortly before she died. The family court ruling didn’t send Paul to jail, but it brought the case into public awareness.
The public outcry was enormous. Facing vilification as the alleged perpetrator, Paul fled abroad in January 2016, right after the judgment was made public. His sister told reporters he left the country due to death threats and harassment. Community members had threatened vigilante justice.
He was described as being in hiding hundreds of miles away, fearing for his life. Paul maintained his innocence. Through his sister, he complained that the authorities had failed him by destroying evidence that might have exonerated him. His sister Tracy stood by him, asserting that he doted on those children and would never harm them.
She said if she believed he was guilty, she would not protect him, and she truly believed he was innocent. Given the lack of criminal charges, the coroner decided to hold a full inquest into Poppy’s death as another route to establish the truth. The second inquest took place in late 2017, with senior coroner David Roberts presiding. It called dozens of witnesses over three weeks, including paramedics, doctors, social workers, and both of Poppy’s parents.
Paul was compelled to give evidence, though he was allowed to do so from behind a screen to shield him from the public. When he took the stand in November 2017, he refused to answer questions 252 times, repeatedly invoking his right not to incriminate himself. Every question about what happened that night was met with silence or “no comment. ”
Poppy’s mother felt his non-answers frustrated the inquest’s search for the truth.
The coroner noted that Paul’s earlier accounts did not stand up to scrutiny and were inconsistent or unlikely in many respects. One puzzling detail was that Poppy’s pink elephant pillow, her favorite comfort item that always stayed in her cot, was found on the double bed in Paul’s room afterwards. Paul claimed he had no idea how that pillow got into his bed. Investigators suspect he might have grabbed it to silence her during the assault.
Also, a bottle of milk was later found lying on the bed with a damp patch of milk on the sheet, indicating that Poppy had been in bed long enough for a bottle to spill, contrary to Paul’s timeline. Poppy’s mother also stated that there was a partially unraveled roll of paper towels on the bed, something they never kept in the bedroom to begin with. And Poppy’s pajama bottoms could not be seen in any of the pictures taken that day. Her mother stated that she tried very hard to search for them at home, but she has never found them since.
On January 15th, 2018, Coroner Roberts delivered his official conclusions. Poppy died as a result of being suffocated while sleeping in an unsafe environment after being sexually assaulted by her father. Paul argued these words went too far for a standard inquest. He claimed that because the assault itself hadn’t directly caused Poppy’s death, it shouldn’t be part of the formal record explaining how she died.
He seemed motivated by the fact that this record would be permanent and commonly referenced by the public. The court reviewing his complaint rejected it outright, ruling that the coroner was right to include the assault in the inquest record because it explained why Poppy was placed in an unsafe sleeping position that led to her death. The coroner, constrained by legal standards, recorded the cause of death in a narrative form rather than labeling it unlawful killing because he could not be sure beyond a reasonable doubt whether the death was murder or manslaughter. But he emphasized that there was no natural cause to explain Poppy’s death, and that no one else could have been responsible except the adult with her at the time.
The coroner himself took the unusual step of formally sending his findings to the Crown Prosecution Service for review. Poppy’s mother, through her lawyer, made an impassioned plea that after all these years and three court findings, the agency should take another look and try to prosecute Paul. In January of 2018, the Crown Prosecution Service announced it had no plans to prosecute Paul, essentially standing by its earlier decision due to insufficient evidence. They reiterated that without any new evidence, a prosecution would not succeed.
Poppy’s mother was disappointed. She expressed through her lawyer that the past five years had been a complete nightmare. Despite this, she said she was relieved to finally have some answers after the 2018 inquest and was closer to the truth, even though that truth was devastating. As of July 2025, Paul Worthington remains a free man.
His whereabouts are completely unknown to the public, and he has never been charged or convicted of anything related to Poppy’s assault or death.
