Police Raid Sheffield Flat After Hospital Tip — Then the Family Tree Behind Baby S’s Ki@lling Left Detectives Stunned
South Yorkshire detectives are piecing together how a newborn girl, known in court only as Baby S, died within hours of birth at a house on Holywell Heights in Wincobank, Sheffield. Four adults now face murder charges. A 15-year-old girl faces a separate count of perverting the course of justice. All five have been remanded in custody. A trial has been listed for 12 April 2027.
Officers were first drawn to the case not by a scream from the street, but by a hospital alert. In the early hours of Sunday 30 August 2026, Andrea Skopova, 20, gave birth at about 37 weeks at the Holywell Heights address. Shortly afterwards she presented at hospital. Staff realised she had just delivered a baby. The infant was not with her. Police were notified just after 5am. They went first to her listed address, then to Holywell Heights. There they found the child.
The body, prosecutors later told magistrates, was in an outhouse, on top of a washing machine, wrapped in a towel inside a blue bag. A post-mortem established death from stab wounds. The court was told there were 33 wounds from 15 separate stabbings, to the face and torso, front and back, and that the baby had been alive when the attack began. A bloodstained knife was recovered from the property. Neighbours later left flowers and toys at the cordon.
Charged with murder, causing or allowing the death of a child, and perverting the course of justice by taking steps to conceal the killing are Skopova; her boyfriend Peter Horvath Jr, 19; his father Peter Horvath Sr, 38; and his mother Nina Horvathova, 37. All four are Slovakian nationals. Skopova formerly lived on Robey Street; the Horvaths lived at Holywell Heights. Prosecutors said the baby’s father is not known and is not believed to be Horvath Jr. Two other women, aged 26 and 37, arrested on suspicion of murder, remain on bail and have not been charged with murder.
What unsettled investigators was not a cinematic twist from Horvathova’s distant past — none has been placed on the public record — but the shape of the household itself. The alleged crime scene was a family address. The mother of the newborn, the young man described as her boyfriend, and both of his parents stand accused together. It is further alleged that the bathroom where the baby was said to have been stabbed was cleaned, and that Horvathova and the 15-year-old took part in that clean-up. Those are accusations, not findings. They will be tested before a jury.
Seven people were arrested at the outset. Police obtained extra custody time for five of them as forensic work continued at the house. Detective Chief Inspector Tom Woodward has called the case deeply distressing for anyone who might have loved the child, for emergency crews, and for a community that woke to tape across an ordinary suburban street. Wincobank is a residential pocket of north-east Sheffield, not a place residents associate with an infant found among laundry appliances.
The legal path from here is slow by design. Murder, allowing a child’s death, and concealing a killing are among the gravest charges in English criminal law. The defendants deny them by pleading not guilty in the usual course; the Crown must prove each element. Until April 2027, the public facts remain those already aired: a birth that should have been a beginning, a hospital that raised the alarm, a raid that followed a tip, and a family dock in which a 20-year-old mother sits with the parents of the man said to be her partner.
That is the shock the investigation has so far produced. Not an unverified secret biography, but a newborn who never left the property alive, and four adults — including Nina Horvathova — who must now answer for how that happened.
