Missed probabilities to cease a killer: Kian Moulton, 14, first confirmed behavioural issues aged 2. In this forensic investigation, we reveal how TWO police forces did not act on assaults and neighbours’ chilling reviews lengthy earlier than he killed Leo, 12

On a winter’s day in January last year, 12-year-old Leo Ross went to school but never came back.

Making his way home across the park, hood pulled up against the cold, his route crossed paths with Kian Moulton.

Moulton, himself only 14, dressed in black and on a bicycle, stopped, pulled out a 4in kitchen knife and stabbed Leo in the stomach.

The older boy was much bigger than his victim and the attack was unprovoked and entirely out of the blue. Leo, as his mother later fondly recalled, was ‘the most beautiful soul’, a gentle child whose main interests were fossils, Pokemon and animals.

There was no sign of a struggle.

As Leo lay on the ground, bleeding to death, Kian did not flee. Instead, he pretended to be a witness, alerting a member of the public who called the police.

‘He was lay there like that when I got here… I didn’t touch him because that could put me in the case,’ he lied to an officer as paramedics battled in vain to save Leo’s life.

A sick ‘game’, and one that did not fool police. Hours later Kian, still smirking at what he had done, was arrested at his home.

Charged with murder, in January this year he pleaded guilty and last month was jailed for life with a minimum term of 13 years.

Following a legal challenge by the Daily Mail, the judge agreed that the teenage killer could be named, telling him: ‘I hope you realise how cowardly your actions were.’

All this happened in the past few weeks.

Yet, in today’s world, the sad reality is that the death of a boy at the hands of another in an inner-city park does not linger long in the national psyche.

As Detective Inspector Joe Davenport of West Midlands Police observed: ‘Leo just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

But was the ‘motiveless’ crime really just a case of bad luck?

Or was it, in fact, all-too depressingly predictable given Kian’s troubled upbringing and well-charted descent into a life of increasingly violent crime and disorder?

Because if you were looking for red flags, the teenager’s short life was littered with them.

For starters, Leo’s death was the culmination of three days of random violence perpetrated by Kian, which left three elderly women badly injured in the same park.

Prior to that there had been a childhood scarred by problems at school, mental health issues and increasingly violent assaults on neighbours, a teacher, care worker and police.

It was also during his formative years that, according to sentencing judge Mr Justice Choudhury, Kian was ‘exposed to domestic abuse’, though the judge did not identify the victim, or perpetrator.

Indeed, the Mail has spoken to two women who were so worried about aspects of Kian’s home life that they raised concerns with two separate police forces, West Midlands and West Mercia Police, in 2021 and 2024 respectively.

It can be revealed that both forces are now facing serious questions over their handling of these allegations, prompting an urgent review into officers’ failure to act.

As one of the concerned women told the Daily Mail: ‘Although Kian pushed the knife in, he has gone through a hell of a lot as a child. I don’t believe Kian’s a monster, he’s a child who has been abused.’

She added: ‘When I saw police say there was no motive, I thought “Oh, there was a motive” – there were signs that this boy was going to commit a murder.’

Meanwhile, speaking publicly for the first time Kian’s father Simon Moulton – who strongly denies that the abuse was anything to do with him – is critical of the role played by schools and mental health services.

He told the Daily Mail: ‘Does anybody know the mind of a killer? When I piece it all together in my head, the warning signs were probably there, but I didn’t see them.’

Kian Moulton was born in March 2010, the youngest of his father’s six children by various women. His mother left the family home when he was seven months old and he grew up in the Yardley Wood area of Birmingham. By the age of two, he had started displaying behavioural problems.

He suffered from both ADHD and what psychiatrists would later diagnose as childhood conduct disorder, a condition typically marked by traits including persistent defiance, severe aggression and anti-social behaviour. Kian struggled in mainstream education and was sent to a special school, where his behavioural problems persisted, including episodes of violence.

But, his developmental issues aside, some who know the family believe his descent into violent delinquency was accelerated by a deeply troubled domestic life.

One woman, an ex-partner of Mr Moulton, claims she and her son spoke to officers from West Midlands Police when she was reporting an unrelated offence in August 2021 – telling them they had seen Mr Moulton hitting his son.

‘My son said (Mr Moulton) grabbed Kian by the throat and punched him round the face and split his lip open,’ she said, adding that she later saw Kian’s split lip for herself. ‘I’ve personally seen him booting Kian in the back and hitting him with a slipper.’

The ex-partner also alleged Mr Moulton displayed controlling behaviour towards his children.

‘It wasn’t a normal household, Kian wasn’t allowed to do a lot of things,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t allowed to just go into the fridge and get something to eat, he had to ask. He had to dress a certain way and have his hair cut a certain way – how his dad wanted it. He was controlling with me too.’

Mr Moulton says the allegations are ‘absolute rubbish’, insisting he ‘never assaulted Kian, I’ve never put my hands on him in any way, that’s a lie’. He also claimed the ex-partner had a history of fabricating police allegations, which he says she had admitted to him in the past.

West Midlands Police confirmed it had received the allegations of abuse and officers visited the family home with a social worker to speak to Kian, ‘but he did not disclose any offences to officers’.

The force said ‘another individual was also spoken to who again did not disclose any offences’.

The second woman who spoke to the Daily Mail was also in the orbit of the family in 2021 and echoed concerns about what she said was the controlling behaviour of Mr Moulton, alleging she had seen Kian phoning his father to ask for permission to get a drink.

She says she explicitly warned officers from West Mercia Police about Mr Moulton’s parenting when she was interviewed about an unrelated allegation in 2024.

‘I clearly stated [my concerns] in my video interview,’ she said. This clear warning was made to officers just months before Leo’s murder.

But the Daily Mail can reveal that the force took no action to escalate her concerns, missing a potentially critical opportunity to intervene.

Contacted by this newspaper, West Mercia Police said it would mount an urgent review into its failure to pass on the woman’s claims to the relevant safeguarding authorities.

The force did, however, say it had passed information ‘relating to potential child safeguarding concerns to West Midlands Police’ in 2021 relating to ‘a separate matter’, while ‘further information also for a separate matter, was also passed in 2025’.

For his part Mr Moulton rejects that he was controlling of his children or romantic partners. He believes his son’s downward spiral had a simpler explanation. Kian was – and still is – deeply unwell.

He told the Daily Mail Kian would report hearing voices and said the boy even went to a police station on one occasion to ask officers to ‘put referrals in for him’. There was also a pattern of suicidal thoughts and self-harm, for which he claimed Kian never received consistent support from mental health services.

And, whatever the truth, these accusations were only part of a wider picture amid Kian’s deteriorating behaviour.

Around six months before the murder – in the middle of 2024 – Kian was expelled from his special school for assaulting a teacher and had to be home-schooled.

A care worker visited the boy six times over the weeks that followed, but, according to his father, Kian assaulted her during her final visit in October 2024 and then ran away. Police later found the boy on a railway bridge, apparently considering suicide.

He was also accused of assaulting two police officers on one of the occasions they were required to bring him back home, although prosecutors later agreed not to pursue these charges.

It was around this time that Kian began terrorising the local neighbourhood with acts of wanton violence and vandalism.

CCTV obtained by the Daily Mail captured Kian assaulting a woman in a shop near his home in August 2024.

Police were called, but despite the attack being caught on camera, no arrest was made. Kian was free to return to the shop the next day and smash its glass front door – causing £900 of damage. Incredibly, officers only showed up to take a statement from staff after Leo’s murder, five months later.

The shop’s manager, who asked not to be named, said: ‘The police could have done something before. That boy [Leo] could still be living today if they did.’

This was a view expressed time and again to the Daily Mail, with the community left exasperated that West Midlands Police failed to take Kian’s criminality seriously until it turned deadly.

The force confirmed it had investigated the shop assault, but ‘unfortunately, no one was ever identified as responsible’.

In another indication of Kian’s worsening mindset, the ex-partner of Mr Moulton who spoke to the Daily Mail claimed she was subject to a campaign of harassment by the teenager during 2024.

Police were repeatedly called out to her house on bogus reports, including that she was hiding a dead body – leading officers to search every room.

More sinister still, the woman said Kian once posed as her to make an online report that ‘Kian was in my front garden and he was going to stab me with a knife’.

This detail took on a chilling resonance following Leo’s death.

‘I always believed that knife was intended for me,’ she said. ‘When I heard what happened, it turned my stomach.’

Which brings us to the events of last January. Kian’s first victim was Valerie Mann, 82, who was on a Sunday walk on Trittiford Mill Park, a nature reserve south of Birmingham city centre, when she was approached from behind and pushed into a water-logged ditch. She saw Kian standing over her.

‘I tried to drown you, but now I’m going to kill you instead,’ he said as he used her walking stick to deal a vicious blow to her head, leaving her seriously injured.

In a tactic he would repeat, afterwards he posed as an innocent bystander and told a passer-by: ‘There’s an old lady in the water and she needs help.’

The following day, he attacked Christine Canty, 72, leaving her bleeding ‘profusely’ from a head wound.

The day after that, on January 21, he targeted Diana Copplestone, 79. This third assault was interrupted and Kian fled.

But he did not go far. After spotting Leo, he attacked and killed the schoolboy.

Mr Moulton, despite being long aware of his son’s troubles, says his arrest for murder came as a shock.

‘I thought Kian might get into trouble, maybe shoplifting,’ he said. ‘I did not think he was ever capable of assaulting women or murder. That blew me away.’

He added: ‘My record with children’s services consistently demonstrates my commitment as a responsible father to Kian.’

Meanwhile, Det Insp Davenport, who led the investigation into Leo’s death, is of the view that Kian’s mental health problems were at the root of the tragedy.

He said: ‘It’s clear to me he wasn’t of a sound mental state, not just immediately before Leo’s murder, but probably for quite a few years in his life.

As for the two women with knowledge of the family, they say they have been left shaken by the horror of what happened.

‘When I found out about Leo, I was absolutely heartbroken, I genuinely was,’ the ex-partner said.

The other woman agrees: ‘The police have been disgusting, they’re an absolute disgrace. Why are they incapable of putting a bigger picture together?’

A child safeguarding practice review is expected to examine whether authorities did enough to stop Leo’s killer.

A spokesman for West Mercia Police said: ‘(In 2024), concerns were raised for the welfare of a child who resided in Birmingham. On that occasion, information was not passed to West Midlands Police or any other agency and a review of the case is now being carried out to establish why this information was not shared.

‘We will continue to work with partner agencies to establish if there is any further learning.’

A spokesman for West Midlands Police said: ‘We have reviewed the previous offences and no misconduct has been identified, however we continue to work with partner agencies to establish if any further learning is required.’

A spokesman for Birmingham Children’s Trust said it was participating in the safeguarding review and, while it recognised

Mr Moulton’s ‘desire to understand how his son came to carry out such a terrible act of violence’, it would ‘not be appropriate to comment further’ in response to his criticism of the support Kian received.