An 18-year-old woman is on the run in England following the death of a 10-month-old baby on 7 March 2025.
This is a hoax. No such murder has been reported on that date and the posts claiming this use a mugshot that dates back to 2016.
Facebook posts which claim an 18-year-old woman is on the run following the death of an infant are hoaxes.
The posts appear in various Facebook community groups, including several local buy and sell groups. One post, published on a group for those living in Wellingborough, says: “HOMICIDE SUSPECT ON THE RUN in #wellingborough. A 18-year-old girl has been identified by the Homicide Bureau as a suspect responsible for the death of 10-month-old baby Courtney Chatfield. The baby’s death accured on 7 March, 2025 ,baby Chatfield was a victim of blunt force trauma. AMY SHARP, has been charged with murder and is still at large. Anyone who knows her whereabouts is asked to call the Police. LETS BUMP THIS POST TO HELP LOCATE HER [sic]”.
Similar posts with the same pictures have been shared in other Facebook groups for towns and cities across England, including Harwich, Whitworth, Wantage, Chichester, Leeds and Norwich, as well as the counties of Cheshire, Essex and Northamptonshire, all claiming the suspect is on the run in those locations.
However, the details in these posts are false. We’ve not been able to find any reports of incidents involving the death of a young infant or any appeals to locate an 18-year-old on the run in connection with such a crime.
In addition, a reverse image search reveals the mugshot which accompanies the posts was released by police in New South Wales, Australia in August 2016, after a woman named Amy Sharp escaped from a custody centre. She was being held in connection with property crimes, not the murder of a child.
Her case briefly went viral when she asked the media to use a more flattering photograph instead of the image the police had issued. She was detained a few days after her escape.
We regularly fact check hoax posts in Facebook groups, which include false reports of abandoned children, lost elderly relatives or serial killers on the loose. We have seen instances in which these sorts of posts are edited later to offer cheap housing, links to surveys or other freebies, with comments often disabled so other social media users are unable to identify the posts as a hoax.
Hoaxes can damage people’s trust in local community news, because groups can become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine posts may be ignored or dismissed as false.
In February, we found at least 47 communities across the UK had been the victim of the nine different hoaxes we fact checked that month. We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem. We also have a guide with seven ways to spot if a Facebook post you’ve seen may be a hoax.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because no such crime has been reported and the image used in the posts was taken in Australia in 2016.
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