‘Cold, calculated and scheming young man’

MICHAEL Hamer’s ferocious attack on “little angel” Joe Geeling was the culmination of a three-week plan by a “cold, calculated and scheming young man”.

The teenage killer had been a lonely child, without a father figure, seeking the company of younger children after being bullied by his own peers.

His crime will inevitably draw comparisons with the killing of toddler James Bulger by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson — although Hamer, at 14, was older than the ten-year-olds who tortured and murdered two-year-old James.