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Profiles: Sibling’s arrival was trigger for fatal violence
Ben Bailey11.08.09
Since Baby Peter's death Steven Barker stands alongside Soham double child killer Ian Huntley as the most hated man in the prison system.
Now aged 32, he will be freed only when considered no longer a threat to the public. He may never be released.
The third of five siblings, he grew up illiterate and with low self-esteem and, says his sister Susan Barker, was bullied by eldest brother Jason Owen.
At 6ft 4in, Barker towered over his brother in the dock, but as children Owen was the dominant force.
Barker told police: “There are lots of things I
could tell you about Jason … but I'm scared because I really believe he will try to have me killed.”
The court was told Barker has “mental limitations” and had treatment in 2000 for alcoholism.
Like so many victims of bullies, he started bullying — and the trigger was the arrival, five weeks before Peter's death in the Tottenham house, of elder brother Owen, now 37.
He had split with his wife, the mother of his four children, and was accompanied by a 15-year-old girlfriend.
Owen — he changed his name by deed poll and tried to do so again when awaiting trial — is an arsonist, a burglar, and a bully with a disturbing interest in under-age girls.
A former crack cocaine addict who burned down his
home to try to get rehoused, he has had medical treatment for depression.
Baby P's mother Tracey Connelly hated Owen and he thought nothing of threatening her with a knife, Susan Barker says.
After Peter's death, Owen took the teenage girl on the run. They were found living in a tent in Epping Forest.
More than a decade before Baby Peter died, the brothers drove their 82-year-old grandmother to an early grave.
Former neighbours say they beat her “black and blue” during holiday visits to her home in Whitstable, Kent, and locked her in a wardrobe to try to get her to change her will.
After Hilda Barker died in 1996, Barker and Owen were arrested by police, but released. Barker, then 18, and Owen, 22, had visited her throughout
their teenage years.
Some neighbours suggest that if the brothers had been taken to court Baby Peter would be alive today.
However, a Kent police spokesman said the grandmother had failed to tell on them.
In May, Barker and Connelly were tried in secret over the rape of a two-year-old girl just before Peter's death. Barker was convicted but Connelly was cleared of child cruelty.
They were tried under different names to make sure the jury would not link them to the Baby P case.
The brothers and Connelly were jailed later that month. Owen was sentenced to a minimum of three years for causing or allowing the baby's death.
Barker was told he had played the major part in Peter's death and was given 12 years on the same charge and Connelly a minimum of five years.
Barker was jailed for life, with a minimum term of 10 years, for raping the two-year-old.
Reader views (2)
My husband and I have been going through the adoption process for over two years now - and we haven't even got to the approval stage yet, never mind being matched with a child.
We are just an ordinary couple with two jobs (I'm giving up work once we've adopted), nice home who couldn't have our own children. We are nothing exceptional and have what most people would think are normal backgrounds.
We have been quizzed, questioned and examined countless times in so many ways about whether we would make "suitable" parents - despite my husband having children from a previous marriage.
The intrusiveness of these questions range from having to show our bank/savings statements to being questioned on the extent of our sex life.
Any previous partners of over 2 yrs standing have been written to and asked their views on us (that was fun!) We have been assessed in our home for the past nine months and our parents/friends/work places have been contacted or interviewed so social services can double/ triple/quadruple check everything we've told them. Even my husband's children were interviewed.
And I am not complaining about this for one minute.
HOWEVER, what a crying shame that as much scrutiny isn't given to these birth parents who have the potential to ruin a child's life forever and leave either the care system or adoptive parents to pick up the pieces.
The unspoken truth here is that social service staff are victims of their own system.
- Daisy, London UK
When you think how many decent, loving, couples would like to adopt a child, to have left this one to this terrifying and drawn-out end is appalling. And when you think of the families who have had their children removed for utterly spurious reasons and who are battling for years in courts to get them back, you see how utterly random the standard of care and intervention by Social Services is across the country . . .
- Roz, France
