Emma Tustin's ex-partner gives disturbing insight into child killer after she ...

Arriving at the home of Emma Tustin and Thomas Hughes, social workers were greeted by a ‘playful and boisterous’ six-year-old, his cheeks flushed from running around in the garden.

As for the severe bruising on Arthur’s left shoulder that had prompted his worried grandmother to call in the authorities, all they later recalled seeing was a faint mark.

And, anyway, any lingering concerns were calmed when they quizzed Arthur about the injury. He and one of Tustin’s other sons claimed it had been caused by a play-fight with boxing gloves.

For the social workers, that was good enough. They concluded it was a ‘happy household’ where everyone got on well. Case effectively closed.

Less than two months later, Arthur was dead, having suffered an ‘unsurvivable’ trauma to his head. A total of 130 injuries, both old and new, were found all over his body. He had also been tortured, poisoned with salt and forced to stand on his own for up to 14 hours a day.

A happy household? More like hellish.

The apparent failures of the authorities to safeguard this little boy were numerous and shocking. His school, the police and social workers all had opportunities to intervene.

Why they did not will form the basis of multiple investigations. And at their heart will be their interactions with one individual. Not Arthur, but with Emma Tustin, his stand-in mum.

Because it was she who coached Arthur to lie to the social workers about the cause of his injury. And it was she who had ensnared his father in a twisted, toxic relationship in which the pair had completely lost their ‘moral compass’.

That is not to say Hughes is not also to blame. But what has emerged is that he was far from the first man to fall foul of Tustin. In court the 32-year-old was described as a ‘ruthless predator’. She saw Arthur as her prey because she wanted something he had – his dad.

Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, the father of one of Tustin’s four own children uses a similar description. ‘She’s a black widow,’ he said. ‘She sucks the life out of each man she gets together with.’

The man, who asked not to be named, added: ‘She had no maternal instinct whatsoever. She wanted children for the attention they brought her as newborns, and for the child benefit. But once the attention died away and she was left at home with a baby, she didn’t want to know.’

Money meant for the children was spent on tattoos, clothing, jewellery and the latest smartphones for herself. As for the authorities, she was an old hand at dealing with them. Ahead of visits the home would be tidied and toys brought out for the kids.

When the ex-partner and his family alerted social workers to Tustin, she simply ‘turned on the water works’, inflicting injuries on herself and accusing him of beating her and the children instead.

‘Social services have blood on their hands,’ he said. ‘If they had heeded our warnings then little Arthur might still be alive. Unfortunately, in terms of child welfare and social services, it is a woman’s world. The man is never believed.’

Following the birth of their child, Tustin threw herself out of the bedroom window – breaking her leg – to stop her partner going out with his best friend to wet the baby’s head.

‘I couldn’t tell social services about it because I was worried they’d take the baby away’, he said. ‘She was unhinged.’ When another lover left her eight years ago, she jumped off the top floor of a multi-storey car park near her home in the West Midlands.

She spent five months in hospital with a shattered pelvis, fractured skull, spine and ankle. ‘She’s very manipulative and it’s easy to end up under her spell,’ the man said. ‘Thankfully I came to my senses.’

Tragically, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes found himself in a situation over which he had no control – the final misfortune in a life marked by misfortune. But it could have been so different.

His privately educated birth mother, Olivia Labinjo-Halcrow, had the world at her feet. A former Solihull School pupil, where sixth form fees currently cost £14,600 a year, she was a talented debater and keen cadet who went on to become a lance corporal in the Territorial Army.

But while studying philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Nottingham, she met Thomas Hughes through Facebook, and dropped out in her final year when she became pregnant with Arthur.

The father-to-be was hardly a catch. After leaving school at the first opportunity, he became a Saturday morning football coach before working as a plasterer and then a builder’s labourer. By the time Arthur was a toddler, his mother’s life had descended into a world of drink and drugs as she struggled with declining mental health.

She began two-timing Hughes, but the new relationship was volatile and violent and in February 2019 – in a ‘drink and drug-fuelled rage’ – she fatally stabbed her new lover. Her arrest and jailing for manslaughter meant Arthur found himself in the full-time care of Hughes, who is now 29.

He and his son moved into an annexe of his parents’ home in Solihull. Hughes’s mother Joanne is a secondary school teacher.

But in August 2019 the fuse was lit when Hughes met Tustin through the Plenty of Fish dating website, quickly falling into her thrall. The court heard Tustin had left school with no qualifications and never worked.

At the age of 14 she was reprimanded over a brawl with another girl and at the age of 16 was cautioned for shoplifting. A year later she had her first child. Her second arrived two years after that. She would go on to have four children with three different men.