By Helen Weathers
Pale blue, lifeless eyes, devoid of any recognisable human emotion, stare from a pasty face bloated from years of junk food and vodka.
So, now, we finally know what the "monster" looks like.
A face on to which it is all too easy to project the hatred, disgust and revulsion her crime has universally provoked.
More than two years have passed since Baby P was found dead in his cot with a broken back, fractured ribs and 50 other injuries in one of the worst cases of child abuse Britain has ever witnessed.
But it was only last week that the identity of his reviled mother Tracey Connelly, 28, was made public, after a court order protecting her anonymity expired, prompting a fresh wave of outrage.
This is the mother who boasted on an Internet chatroom of spending her days in a vodka haze, watching pornographic films and having sex with her "fantastic" new boyfriend Steven Barker, a sadistic thug whom she allowed to torture her beautiful, blond-haired infant son Peter.
Within hours of her identity being revealed on Monday night, Connelly's own mother - 59-year-old Mary O'Connor and father Richard Johnson, 52, - had publicly disowned her, branding her "evil" and expressing the wish that she "rot in hell".
An irredeemable monster, it would seem, but one troubling question remains unanswered: what turned her into one?
The Daily Mail spoke to those closest to Tracey Connelly, who was given an indeterminate jail sentence - with a recommendation of five years - in May after pleading guilty at her Old Bailey trial to causing or allowing the death of her son.
The disturbing portrait that emerges is of a woman whose whole life was shaped by abuse. At one time she might have been regarded a victim herself, inspiring our sympathy, had she not turned her own son into the most tragic victim of all.
Born on June 29, 1981, in Leicester, Tracey Cox - as she was known then - was not yet two when she moved to a London council estate with her Irish-born mother Mary and older brother.
This followed the break-up of Mary's marriage to delivery driver Garry Cox, who would later die from a heart attack in 1988, aged 44.
Garry was the man Tracey regarded as her father, until the age of 12 when Mary told her daughter she was the product of a drunken one-night stand with married family friend Richard Johnson.
Tracey had grown up in a household where beatings were a daily ritual, witnessing Garry hitting her mother so violently that the family dog ran away in fear.
Richard came back into Tracey's life shortly before her son Peter was born. "One day she told me how awful her childhood and teens had been. She said she'd been raped a couple of times by a relative, but didn't do anything about it because she was so scared," says Richard, who has a conviction for the rape of a 14-year-old.
Her mother turned increasingly to alcohol. "Tracey had a horrible childhood and was badly neglected," says one former friend. "We'd often go round to Tracey's home to find Mary in bed, smoking drugs, with some boyfriend. She was always shouting at Tracey to clear out of the flat and my mum told me she'd sometimes see Tracey wandering around, alone, late at night."
She learned to display a tough veneer, especially after she complained to her mother that she was being physically abused by a close male relative, only to be accused of being a liar.
Lonely, fatherless and lacking any self-esteem, Tracey went in search of whatever affection she could find.
"Even at 10 or 11, Tracey was quite promiscuous. She'd let local boys take her into dark alleys or stairwells," says a former friend.
With family relationships reaching breaking point in the Cox home, social services became involved. A place was found for Tracey, aged 12, at Farney Close boarding school in West Sussex, catering for children with special education needs and behavioural and social problems.
Says one former pupil: "Tracey's family never once visited her at the school. My mum used to come for my birthday, or watch me in a play, but there was never anyone for Tracey."
She left Farney Close with a handful of GCSEs and ideas about being a hairdresser, but, as she told her best friend at school, what she really wanted was a "houseful of kids".
Aged 16 she met a railway worker, 17 years her senior, and they married in a civil ceremony. They moved into a council house, where Tracey gave birth to three daughters in quick succession before Baby Peter arrived.
Peter was three months old when Tracey split from her husband. Within three months, 33-year-old Steven Barker, whom she'd met when he was doing maintenance work on a friend's flat, was her boyfriend. He moved in with her in February 2007.
They managed to conceal Barker's presence from the authorities, who had already identified Tracey's children as being at risk on account of disturbing, unexplained injuries to Peter.
Peter was first referred to the child abuse investigation team on December 12, 2006, before Barker moved in, after being admitted to Whittington Hospital in London with bruising to his forehead, nose, breastbone and right shoulder.
According to Tracey's best friend, she seemed blind to the obvious thuggishness of Barker, a man with an IQ of 60 and himself the alleged victim of abuse. She affectionately called him "nuts" in her chatroom conversations. He and his brother, Jason Owen, 37, once beat their grandmother black and blue, locking her in a wardrobe in an attempt to force her to change her will.
Barker, who was cleared of murder but convicted by a jury of allowing or causing the death of a child, claimed he was abused and dominated by his older brother, Jason Owen - a former crack addict, arsonist, burglar and bully with a disturbing taste for underage girls.
"She said everything was great between them until Jason arrived. Tracey hated Jason and wanted him to leave, but Steven refused point blank. She said they were arguing all the time and Steven had stopped having sex with her."
And sex mattered to Tracey, who once wrote on a social networking site: "It's funny when you meet someone and fall in love. You spend as much time as poss kissing and touching and having sex. You want to make them feel so good you just can't get enough of each other. It's great."
So great that Tracey didn't care about the bite marks where Barker had trained his Rottweiler to attack Peter, or the bruises, or baby Peter's missing fingernails.
In May, Barker was convicted of raping a two-year-old girl and Tracey cleared of cruelty to that girl. This second trial was why the trio's identities were protected for so long - it was feared the jury in the second trial might be swayed if they knew about their involvement in Baby P's death.
So is Tracey Connelly a victim or a monster? Possibly both. But among those who once felt sorry for the damaged little girl she once was, all sympathy has gone. - Daily Mail