A paedophile child killer has won a legal fight that could see him released from prison after 26 years.
Dominic McKilligan was 18 when he kidnapped Wesley Neailey, 11, beat him to death and left him in a woodland.
McKilligan, who has been serving a minimum 20-year sentence, has previously been denied parole on three occasions. He was found to be a pathalogical liar and highly manipulative. Later he was branded “wicked” by the policeman that caught him.
The now 44-year-old McKilligan has just been given a personal Parole Board hearing after taking his case all the way to the High Court.
Wesley’s devastated mum Liz, 57, told The Sun: “He should never be let out.
“When he has his hearing, I want to be in the room too so I can tell everyone exactly how he has destroyed my family. He is a deceitful, evil monster and monsters deserve to be behind bars.
“Some people don’t deserve a second chance and he is one of them.”
Little Wesley was out riding his bike in the Newcastle area that he grew up in in June 1998. But he never came home.
During the search for the child it emerged that McKilligan, who had been convicted of abusing boys in 1994, lived nearby.
McKilligan later admitted killing the boy, but claimed it was an accident. He was convicted of murder.
Det Supt Trevor Fordy, the officer who caught McKilligan, said: “He is highly intelligent, very articulate, very convincing and he showed no remorse whatsoever. He is a wicked man.”
When McKilligan was 14, he was convicted of the gross indecent assault of four young boys in Bournemouth, Dorset. At the time that was where he lived, however he was sentenced to three years in a secure unit in Aycliffe, County Durham.
He escaped the Sex Offenders’ Register because the act which brought the register into law only came into force the day after he was released for the crimes. As a result, nobody was informed of his past.
When McKilligan was found guilty of Wesley’s murder, Det Sgt Neil Claughton of Dorset Police said that officers involved in his earlier conviction believed he was “likely to kill somebody in the future”.
He said in 1999: “We really do believe that there is a lad who probably was born evil. At the ages of 12, 13, 14 he was committing serious sexual offences on very young children.
“I believe that someone like him should never, ever come out of prison, because he’s always going to be a danger to society, particularly to children.”
