Liz Neailey last saw her son Wesley, 11, as she waved him off on his bike to buy sweets nearly 26 years ago. What happened next ruined her life for ever.
Wesley was befriended by a known sex offender who bludgeoned and strangled him before hiding his body in woodland. His remains were found by police in July 1998, a month after his disappearance.
Among the agonising memories Liz has from that terrible time is that the 50p she’d given her son was still tucked into the pocket of his shorts.
But while the 59-year-old still struggles with the unending grief of his brutal murder, the man who so callously took Wesley’s life has his sights set on freedom.
Denied parole three times since serving the 20-year minimum term of his life sentence, Dominic McKilligan, 44, has now been granted a personal Parole Board hearing after taking his case to the High Court last month. It is a move which has, understandably, devastated Liz and her family.
‘The Parole Board should make no mistake, this isn’t a man, he’s the devil himself and he’ll do his best to manipulate them because he knows how to play the system,’ Liz says.
Dominic McKilligan committed a string of sex attacks on young boys in his home town of Bournemouth in 1994
Wesley, 11, was befriended by the known sex offender who bludgeoned and strangled him
Liz Neailey says the killer should never be considered for release because he has never shown remorse
Indeed, an investigation by this newspaper raises serious concerns about releasing the killer who had been convicted of sexually abusing four children by the time he killed Wesley. He still refuses to admit his guilt.
The judge at his trial at Newcastle Crown Court in 1999 described him as ‘a dangerous, manipulative, callous paedophile and killer’ with ‘nerves of steel’.
McKilligan’s mother has described him as a ‘psychopath’ and cut off contact, saying she fears what he might do if he is ever released.
His estranged half-sister has spoken exclusively to this newspaper, on the condition that we do not use her name, to warn that the killer should never be set free.
‘He may have served his minimum sentence requirements but he certainly should not be released,’ she says. ‘He is still a danger to all those around him, not just children.
‘You cannot reform or rehabilitate a psychopath.’
Her words are echoed by those of Trevor Fordy, the former Detective Superintendent who found Wesley’s body in a bin liner behind bushes near the village of Healey, in Northumberland.
While investigating the child’s murder more than quarter of a century ago, he says he was forced, again and again, to unpick McKilligan’s evil lies.
‘All the way through the investigation he looked for opportunities to lie and manipulate,’ says Fordy.
Liz Neailey last saw her son Wesley, 11, as she waved him off on his bike to buy sweets nearly 26 years ago
Dominic McKilligan leaves Newcastle Moot Hall Crown Court during his trial for killing Wesley
‘He was calm, detached and without emotion. He never showed any remorse for what he did. I don’t believe it’s possible to rehabilitate someone like him. It would be dangerous to release him.’
Born in Bournemouth, the son of a hotel waitress and a Turkish father whose name was not put on his birth certificate, McKilligan was already a hardened criminal and arch manipulator by the time he committed murder. He was just 14 when he was first convicted in August 1994 of gross indecency against four boys aged seven, eight, nine and 11 in his home town. He admitted 11 offences after inviting the children to play games before torturing them.
One of his victims was beaten with an iron bar.
Because of his age he was given a three-year supervision order in a secure children’s unit in Aycliffe in County Durham. His name was kept out of the public domain.
He was not charged with rape because the law, which ironically changed the day after he was sentenced, deemed a child his age to be incapable of such a crime.
According to his sister, who has a different father to McKilligan: ‘He was not a normal kid. You couldn’t believe anything he ever said.
‘He would twist your words and inflict pain by whatever method would affect you most – physical or psychological.’
Courts issued photo of 19-year-old student Dominic McKillingan, who was found guilty of the murder and rape of 11-year-old Wesley Neailey
Wesley Neailey, 11, who was lured to his death in 1998 by paedophile Dominic McKilligan, 18,
She adds: ‘A friend of my mother once described us as children sent from heaven and hell. Him being the latter. He was always in trouble, from skipping school, hurting other kids, lying and making up fantastical stories. From the moment he went into the young offenders’ institute, in my mind I became an only child being raised by my single mother.’
Another fluke of timing meant that McKilligan’s supervision order at the secure unit expired the day before the sex offenders’ register came into effect on September 1, 1997. Northumbria Police were not informed about his release. Social workers quickly lost track of him.
He moved to Newcastle upon Tyne, studying music technology at a local college while working part-time as a takeaway delivery driver. Sharing a house with two female students, he became part of the community in Newcastle’s West End, not far from where Wesley lived with his mother and younger brother Robert.
McKilligan’s baby face and ‘posh’ southern accent gave him a veneer of respectability.
No one who met him had any idea that there was a wicked paedophile living in their midst.
But alarm bells rang for Liz when Wesley told her that a man had approached him, offering him money if would help fix the brakes on his car.
‘I warned him to stay away from strangers and kept him in for a while after that,’ she says. ‘But I couldn’t do that forever.’
When summer arrived, she began letting him play outside after school.
Ten months after McKilligan was released from the secure unit, Wesley, just 4ft 9in, disappeared without trace in the middle of the afternoon after school on a Friday.
His pink and white bike was discovered two days later in the street where McKilligan lived.
Police, who had checked lists of paedophiles in the area – which of course McKilligan was not on – had no reason to suspect him when they conducted door-to-door inquiries, asking if anyone had seen the missing boy. Sickeningly, among the reported sightings of Wesley, was one fabricated by McKilligan.
Liz recalls Wesley told her that a man had approached him, offering him money if would help fix the brakes on his car
Police Searching for Wesley Neailey 21 days into his disappearance back in 1988
The net finally closed thanks to a female social worker who, having heard of Wesley’s disappearance, handed McKilligan’s file to detectives. ‘It was clear from the file that he was a very experienced manipulator,’ says Trevor Fordy.
He saw this for himself after arresting McKilligan. A fingertip search of his house uncovered a torn-up cheque for £150 made out to Wesley.
The date on it matched the day Wesley had told Liz about the man offering to pay for help with his car. During interviews, McKilligan remained calm while spinning lie after lie.
He claimed he often wrote out blank cheques and denied ever writing one out to Wesley until forensic tests proved otherwise.
‘He lied in tremendous detail,’ says Fordy, ‘and every lie he told would have to be disproved before he would shift.’
Forced to release McKilligan on police bail, Fordy ordered surveillance teams to watch him and was horrified by what they saw.
‘He bought false number plates and purchased boxes of aspirins and rope and razor blades. I wasn’t sure if he was going to harm himself or somebody else so we brought him back in. He eventually admitted abduction but said he’d handed Wesley over to a group of paedophiles and claimed he was still alive.
‘We spent a couple of days looking for this group because the priority was getting Wesley back alive.’
Throughout this time Liz was in agony, not knowing what had happened to her son.
‘The wait for news was unbearable,’ she says. ‘It took the police days to break him so that he would even tell them where he had taken Wesley.
‘He didn’t have enough decency to take the police to him; he left him lying there for weeks.’
Nearly a month into the investigation, after all his lies had been disproved, McKilligan finally offered to show Fordy where he had hidden Wesley’s body.
‘He was almost bragging,’ says the retired officer.
‘He was unlike anyone I’ve ever dealt with before. He was confident to the point of being arrogant. He had this hard streak in him. He showed no remorse.’
Directed by McKilligan, who travelled in the car with him and other officers, Fordy drove 20 miles west of Newcastle to a wooded area reached via a country lane.
‘He just said: ‘He’s down that lane’,’ recalls Fordy. ‘There was no remorse. I walked down the lane and that’s when I saw Wesley’s feet were sticking out of a bin bag.
‘I’ll never forget it. When I returned to the car, McKilligan said to me, ‘I don’t know why you’re upset. He was just a little s**t’.’
Yet still McKilligan denied murdering Wesley despite luring him into his garage on the day he went missing.
He claimed instead that the boy had climbed on top of his car and fallen, banging his head on a wrench on the floor.
He said he panicked and dumped his body.
That wicked lie meant that on top of the agony of losing her son, Liz was put through the ordeal of a trial.
When she saw McKilligan in court, she realised with horror that she had seen him before, playing football on the school playing field with her son and his friends.
‘I just assumed he was someone’s older brother,’ she says. ‘I felt absolutely sick.’
At one point during the trial, she made eye contact with the killer who smirked at her.
‘He is the devil. He has no soul,’ she says. ‘Not a day goes by when I don’t grieve for my son.’
McKilligan showed no emotion as he was found guilty of rape and murder by the jury.
The rape conviction was overturned the next year due to lack of forensic evidence – which means that if he is released he will not be on the sex offenders’ register – but his sentence for murder was life.
Whole life tariffs are reserved for only a handful of the nation’s killers. McKilligan, who is in Category A prison Frankland in County Durham, now has the opportunity to convince the Parole Board that he is fit to be released and, if successful, he could soon be walking the streets again.
For Liz, the idea is almost incomprehensible.
‘He shouldn’t ever be considered for release because he has never shown a shred of remorse.
‘In my eyes he will always be a danger to children,’ she says. She points out, too, that McKilligan, who has changed his surname to Ngqobe-Kunuk while in prison and is said to be in a relationship with another man, is still only 44.
‘He’s still a young man,’ she adds. ‘He has his health. Wherever he lives the children around him wouldn’t be safe.’
If he had been allowed to live, Wesley would be 37 now. Not a day goes by when his mother doesn’t think about the kind of man he might have grown into and the life he might have had.
‘He was my first born and I’ve missed out on all those years with him,’ says Liz. ‘I often think about the children he might have had. All those memories that were never made and those I do have are overshadowed by what happened to him.’
McKilligan’s half-sister says she too feels sorry for all the killer’s ‘known and unknown’ victims and their families and friends.
She adds: ‘I include my mother as a victim too. He caused physical and emotional pain to so many for his own gratification and need for control.
‘He is not someone who can be ‘fixed’ and released back into society. He will only find new ways to harm those around him and he will kill again.
‘The problem is, he’s learnt from the last time – he’ll be better at it and less likely to be caught the next time.’