Magdelena Luczak: Mom Who Killed Her Own Little Daniel Avoids Life Term By Hanging Self In Cell

Magdelena Luczak, 29, was convicted in one of the most heartbreaking and sickening cases of murder by child abuse on record. She and her live-in lover beat four-year-old Daniel Pelka to death — with one of them dealing a fatal blow to the head — after months of starving and torturing the helpless child.

Daniel weighed only 23 pounds when he died in March of 2012 at his home in Coventry, a city in England’s West Midlands region.

More than a year later, Luczak and her partner, Mariusz Krezolek, 34, were convicted of what one police investigator called the “planned, premeditated” killing of little Daniel after months of subjecting the child to levels of abuse that the appalled judge in the case described as “incomprehensible” and “unprecedented.”

The judge also described Daniel as looking like “a concentration camp victim” by the time he was killed. The boy’s body weight was closer to an 18-month-old baby than a four-year-old boy.

According to courtroom evidence and testimony, Luczak and her boyfriend locked Daniel in a bedroom for days on end, forcing him to eat salt when he pleaded for water, and making him defecate in his bed.

The little boy became so hungry that according to his teachers he instinctively ate out of trash cans, picked up and ate pancakes that had been thrown on a muddy floor, and when, at his school, students planted beans in the ground as part of a science experiment, Daniel dug them up and ate them.

He often stole food from his school classmates, which caused him to become socially ostracized by other children, adding to his constant misery.

Daniel’s mom and her lover would also torture the boy by holding his head underwater until he nearly drowned, and beating him severely.

Both Luczak and Krezolek — who each accused the other of landing the killing blow to Daniel’s head — were sentenced to 30-years-to-life in prison. Krezolek attempted to appeal his conviction earlier this year, but was rebuffed.

Luczak, however, took the only sure way out of her life sentence. On Tuesday morning, she was found dead in her prison cell. An inquest into her death on Friday said that the brutal and heartless mom committed suicide by hanging.

The Daniel Pelka case caused a national controversy in Britain, with political leaders and a horrified public left to wonder how the extreme abuse suffered by the little boy could have gone unnoticed for the last six months of his brief life.

An independent report issued about a month after Luczak and Krezolek’s convictions blasted the boy’s teachers, as well as police, health care professionals, and social workers for treating Daniel as “invisible.”

Teachers, for example, would lock fellow students’ lunchboxes away so that the starving Daniel could not get into them to steal food — yet those same teachers did nothing to address Daniel’s obviously desperate condition, the report pointed out.

“He must have felt utterly alone and worthless for much of that time, being the subject of his mother and stepfather’s anger and rejection,” the report stated. “The extent of his abuse, however, went undiscovered and unknown to professionals at the time.”

Had Daniel Pelka survived, he would have turned eight-years-old on Wednesday, July 15. Magdelena Luczak chose the day before her murdered son’s birthday to end her own poisonous existence.

[Images via Sky News]