EVERY PARENT’S

He was a quiet expat kid whose mother moved him to Spain to avoid his abusive father and violent bullying at school… but when he became withdrawn and locked himself in his room, she had no idea he would become a globally infamous hacker. Walter Finch unravels the tragic, complicated story

His teenage years in Liverpool were fraught, as he suffered from bullying by other kids that he could not understand.

Sandra confessed that she had not been ‘emotionally available and nurturing’ to her youngest child (with his other two brothers born to different fathers). She described herself as ‘effectively broken’ by the violence she had suffered at the hands of Joseph’s father, who had not wanted the child and at one time inflicted such a severe beating on her she required 17 stitches to her head.

“I just went to work on autopilot,” she recalled.

“But it's the children who suffer the most as those crucial early years of loving nurturing are absent and damage results.”

Unwelcome efforts by Joseph’s father to come back into his life in secondary school reopened unhealed wounds.

“Joseph was always saying how sad it was that his father had ruined my life, and that it would have been better if he had not been born,” Sandra told the judge in one heartbreaking missive.

“I reassured him that he was worth it, and I would not change the situation if it meant he was not born.

“He told me I was rubbish at choosing men,” she continued, “and that he hoped one day I met someone who was kind and would treat me well.”

Sandra’s father, who had been an excellent father figure for Joseph’s two older brothers, died unexpectedly while she was pregnant with him.

“Not a day goes by that I do not think about him and miss him and feel saddened that Joseph never got to receive the love and care his grandfather provided to his siblings.”

Sandra would constantly tell Joseph of his grandfather, and in turn Joseph would speak about him as if he had known him himself.

“He would tell me lovely things about his deceased grandfather,” his grandmother Agnes reminisced in another letter.

“When you're bereaved, it is very comforting. It was as if he knew I almost needed this to help me cope.

“He would tell stories with so much love and add funny anecdotes about what his grandfather would say if he were here.

“He was such a sweet, funny boy and so kind to others,” she added.

As his mother explained: “When younger, he would try to encourage me to meet someone who could be his dad, which is so sad.

“He saw his young friends with their loving families and he effectively only had me.”

Having moved Joseph back to Estepona at the age of 17, Sandra watched him retreat from the perplexing world that had treated him so cruelly into an online one. One where his anxieties and peculiarities vanished and he made friends and found respect. how his life had gone so wrong. In another sad knock-on effect, the enormous costs of the proceedings have depleted Sandra’s financial resources and imperilled her retirement.

But so obsessed did he become with his gaming and his computers that in turn he became oblivious to the real world around him.

Conversations and constant nagging had little effect as he withdrew almost entirely to his room, even refusing to eat meals with his mother and instead ‘eating himself fat’ and snacking on processed foods.

When she flew to Liverpool for work trips, the lawyer would have to leave pre-prepared foods and snacks that just needed heating in the microwave.

And upon her return, she would be faced with a chaotic pigsty of dirty dishes and cups piling up, which he noticed not one iota.

When Covid struck, Sandra found herself stuck in England and unable to get back to look after Joseph. Instead she hired a housekeeper. It was during this period Joseph finally managed to find friendship, albeit with a community online.

“There will be no inheritance for Joseph and his brothers,” she wrote, adding her own inheritance from her father is gone, and Agnes only has enough to pay for her own funeral.

Joseph has so far been spared this tragic full understanding of the long-term impact his deeds will have on his family.

His cousin, Niamh, 23, told of an anecdote during one visit to Joseph in prison that summed up the difficulty he has dealing with life.

“He told Sandra his mum, she looked pretty,” she wrote. “She thanked him. Then he said, ‘well you are, even with your wrinkles and you being old, you should try and get Botox before you start looking as wrinkly as nan.’”

The people he was chatting with were not gamers but, in fact, hackers

Sandra would get back to hear him laughing loudly with his online friends - ‘something he rarely did.’

“For me, this was comforting and a good sign,” she wrote.

It was preferable he was laughing in his bedroom rather than exposed to ‘a world on the outside where he was ill-equipped to navigate.’

“I believed he was safe from this world, where he was not in touch with any dangers [such as] alcohol, drugs, bullying and the worst aspects of society,” Sandra told the judge. But she had no idea the people he was chatting with were not gamers but, in fact, hackers. And it would be they who led Joseph down the path that would finally find him languishing in a New York jail, struggling to understand

They all burst out laughing.

“He was just being how we all know him to be, honest without realising that it can be too much to hear sometimes,” Niamh went on.

“He had no idea why we were laughing and there is little point in explaining it to him.”

For his mother’s birthday in June, Joseph arranged through a friend to send her a personalised card with a huge beautiful bouquet of flowers, a gift-wrapped perfume, and a box of gold decorated cupcakes with messages on the cakes.

Attached was a personalised card. Inside, it read: "Happy birthday to the one who has loved, cared, helped, worried and been there for me through it all.

“Thank you for always being there for me, you're a great mother and I love you a lot.

“You are the smartest woman I know and will ever know and very kind and beautiful. “Everyone who meets you, or their families, always say you are their favourite