New photos show how starved child Jeffrey Baldwin was ‘healthiest baby possible’ in mom’s care

Jeffrey Baldwin as a healthy toddler after he was removed
from the care of his mother, Yvonne Kidman, pictured

The English poet Philip Larkin was talking about one sort of parent — the merely normally flawed — when he wrote a couple of his most famous lines: “They f— you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”

For Exhibit A of the other kind, consider Elva Bottineau, who did the same thing, but on purpose.

Bottineau and Norman Kidman are the maternal grandparents of Jeffrey Baldwin, the little boy they starved, degraded and abused for months, probably years.

Convicted in 2006 of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and of forcible confinement for their regular locking-up of his slightly older sister, who survived the ordeal likely only because of kindergarten snacks, the grandparents are now serving life sentences.

Jeffrey was five when he died of septic shock and pneumonia, the underlying cause chronic starvation. The sister who had been subjected to the same maltreatment and also locked in a dank bedroom was six.

Their mother, Yvonne Kidman, is now testifying at the coroner’s inquest examining Jeffrey’s Nov. 30, 2002 death in Toronto.

She was still in her teens, 19, when she had him, her third child. All three, plus another little boy born later, ended up in the legal custody of her parents, Bottineau and Kidman.

Ms. Kidman and the children’s father were hapless, inept, careless, true.

They existed right where they’d been raised — on the margins, poor, she on assistance, he on assistance or working at low-end jobs. And they were scrappers. They fought and screamed at one another, often, given the basement apartments that were all they could afford, in front of their kids.

But as Ms. Kidman said Monday, drawing a line in the sand that others might never see, there was “maybe shoving, but not punching each other; none of that.”

There must be thousands of parents just like them.  (more...)

New photos show how starved child Jeffrey Baldwin was ‘healthiest baby possible’ in mom’s care