It's the closest relationship in nature - the love between a mother and child. So what could cause a mother to poison and risk the very life of her new-born baby? Chris Webber reports.

A MOTHER hears her baby cry, cry with a desperate pain and gnawing hunger. It is a sound to madden a mother, make her stop at almost nothing to pacify her baby. But Rebecca Graham knew exactly what was causing that scream. It was salt she had mixed in her baby daughter's bottle which, she knew, could kill her.

Unchecked, it would cause the infant to suffer seizures, coma, brain damage and, in the end, a pain-wracked death.

Graham, from South Moor, near Stanley in County Durham, was yesterday sentenced to jail for poisoning and cruelty to her own child. The facts had been established in the formal surroundings of Newcastle Crown Court. Sentence had to be passed.

Sobbing, the 20-year-old was led away, but there was no feeling of scorn around the courtroom. For those who sat through the story of how Rebecca Graham had come to poison her child, there was only pity.

Graham was and is a desperately unhappy woman with a disturbed childhood. She had a difficult relationship with her father and eventually was fostered for a short time with a family in Seaham. It provided a brief moment of peace in her life, as she later told a psychiatrist, they were a lovely family, she felt safe. But it was all too brief. Later she returned home, and she was badly bullied at school.

At 18 she had sex for the first time with her first boyfriend and fell pregnant. It could have been a time to settle down and start a new life but her relationship with her boyfriend was also fraught with difficulties. Last week, the court heard, he told Graham he could not go to court to hear the case because he would "rather watch the football". No friends or family were in the public gallery to hear her sentence yesterday.

After she had her unplanned baby, the teenage mother felt she had no support from her family. She told a psychiatrist completing a report on her before she was sentenced: "I wanted to be in hospital. I felt safe there, I felt I had the support I didn't have from anywhere else."

So, in order to stay in the place where she, and her new-born baby could be looked after, she began to stir small amounts of salt into the milk in her baby's bottle. As Rebecca's mother, Marie, would later testify, the new mother had been told that salt could be dangerous as a baby's kidneys are not designed to deal with the substance. Eventually, and not surprisingly, her subterfuge was uncovered. After initial denials, Graham confessed to what she had done.

The new mother's baby was taken away from her. Graham lives with the knowledge that she will probably never cast eyes on the child, now nearly two, for the rest of her life. In her grief, she has asked for her fallopian tubes to be tied so she can never have another child.

No doctor would perform such an operation on a woman so young but, Graham knows, if ever she gives birth again there is a very high chance social services will take that child away.

"She is not a person who regards her past with any happiness or who regards the future as any kind of friend," summed up her lawyer David Callan. Few would disagree with the assessment, including Detective Inspector Simon Orton, of Consett and Stanley CID, who led the investigation.

"We worked very much on the premise that this woman was suffering from Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, a mental condition where the mother makes her child ill to gain attention for herself and the child," he says.

"Of course, the main thing for us is it was discovered early. There are cases where parents have actually killed the child. This was a tiny baby who could easily have died so we were extremely glad that we were alerted so soon.

"But it was difficult to know how to proceed. We needed help, in a case like this, about how to really get to the truth. We ended up using the services of an expert policeman in this type of crime who came up from London. He gave us pointers which really made a difference. The baby is now with an adopted family and is safe and well."

Although there was no official diagnosis of Munchausen's, police used an expert in dealing with sufferers of the syndrome in interviewing Graham. Psychiatrists are reluctant to pin a term which provides a label for life on someone as young as her, instead relying on the broader assessment that she was seeking attention.

Munchausen's itself is thankfully rare, according to Dr Terri Apter, an American research psychologist and lecturer at Cambridge University, who specialises in relationships between mothers and daughters.

Perhaps the most famous example in Britain is that of Beverley Allitt, a Lincolnshire nurse jailed in 1993 and who hit the headlines across the world for murdering four children in her care, attempting to murder three others and causing grievous bodily harm to six more. The briefest of perusals through newspaper archives and the Internet reveals dozens of other cases.

Dr Apter attempts to shed further light on the syndrome. She says: "You can love people and do this, in fact that is nearly always the case. These people have serious problems, and, almost can't help themselves, although of course there comes a point where what they have done is so bad that they must be sent to prison.

"They nearly always feel themselves completely worthless and that certain kind of attention a mother with an ill child gets is so satisfying to them. It is a certain kind of person with a craving for a certain kind of special attention."

A craving for attention from a human being who feels herself worthless that can invert the most basic instincts of humanity. A craving that can cause a mother to harm her own child and leave two lives in ruins.