Heartbroken Samantha Hardaker today told of her relief after being cleared of the murder of her three-day-old baby, writes Paul Warner.

The 27-year-old said she had endured a ten-month nightmare after her son Adam died in hospital.

Samantha, of Langford Gardens, Bicester, was arrested within days of the baby's death last August at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital.

Yesterday, city magistrates dropped the case against her on charges of murder and causing grievous bodily harm. Samantha, a microfilm technician, said: "The nightmare is over. I was so relieved to hear that the case was finished. This whole thing has made a bad experience even more unpleasant for me.''

Adam was three months premature and although he was allowed home at first, he was readmitted to hospital when a midwife noticed he looked jaundiced.

But two days later he was dead. A post-mortem examination revealed he had a fractured skull. Samantha, who has been numbed by events, said she was bitter that her only child's body was not released until January because three separate post-mortem examinations were carried out.

She now faces the additional trauma of an inquest hearing.

Samantha, who split up with Adam's father when she was six months pregnant, said: "I have got no idea how he received his fractured skull, which was only discovered later. "I went to pick him up in the afternoon at the hospital and I realised something was very wrong. He wasn't breathing and he was getting cold.

"I found it so difficult to grieve for Adam because all this was going on. Some of the police liaison officers who came to see me were very good. I'm just angry that I have had to wait so long to learn that the case against me has been dropped."

The distraught mum was charged with murder nine months after Adam's death.

"After the funeral I was just beginning to get my life back together and I did not think they were going to charge me. "It was a real bombshell when police officers turned up at my house in May and said I was being charged with murder," she said.

A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service said the case had been dropped because of a lack of evidence.

The John Radcliffe Hospital refused to comment.