In prison for bludgeoning my husband — I felt like killing myself but was saved by my sons’ love
After 30 years of abuse, Sally Challen killed her husband. Now, in a powerful series for the Mail, she bravely speaks up for other women who are victims of coercive control by their partners
PAINTED as a vengeful, jealous wife in court, Sally Challen spent over nine years in prison for murdering her husband Richard, after she bludgeoned him to death with a hammer.
But a change in the law in 2015, when coercive control finally became an offence, enabled Sally to appeal her conviction. In a landmark case that gripped Britain, her legal team argued she was incapable of making a coldblooded, premeditated decision to kill Richard, as all rational reasoning had been destroyed by years of his psychological abuse and controlling behaviour.
Finally, earlier this year, her charge was reduced to manslaughter and Sally was released from prison. On Saturday, she recalled the abuse she endured and the day she reached breaking point and killed the man she still loved. Today, she describes what happened next . . .
THE woman sitting before them in a stark visitors’ hall at Bronzefield women’s prison in Surrey was not the mother James and David Challen remembered.
Dishevelled and dressed in a rough, cheap, prison tracksuit, Sally Challen’s fingers trembled. Her hair was unwashed, and her manicured nails had been clipped off roughly — bagged as evidence after her arrest. Her eyes were swollen from crying and lack of sleep.
The tears started again when she saw her sons for the first time since she had been arrested for killing their father. What could she say? What could anyone say?
As Sally recalled in the Mail on Saturday, on August 14, 2010, she had bludgeoned her husband Richard, 61, to death with a hammer. Driven to the edge by, as she puts it, nearly four decades of a constant ‘drip feed’ of verbal abuse, sexual humiliation, psychological mind games and infidelity from the man she loved, she finally flipped.
And as she drove away from the family home in Claygate, Surrey, where her husband’s body now lay in the kitchen, Sally felt that there was only one course of action open to her: suicide.
‘I thought, “Right, that’s it I’ve got to go to Beachy Head” [the notorious suicide spot in East Sussex]. I’d just killed the man I loved, I was in a dreadful state.’
While Sally had been hoping for a reconciliation with her husband, at the time of his death they were separated and she was living elsewhere.
After the killing she made the short drive back to her own house in a state of shock, got a bottle of wine from the fridge, and climbed into bed.
Her younger son David, then 22 and living with her, returned home later in the day. ‘ He says he saw me, but he didn’t know anything was wrong,’ she recalls.
‘After I had a sleepless night, the next morning David asked me to take him to work. As he climbed out of the car, I told him, “You know I love you, don’t you?”
‘We weren’t the kind of family that said I love you all the time. He looked at me in an odd way, and said: “Yes, of course”.’
Her initial plan was to throw herself off a multi-storey car park but she was thwarted because it was closed. Plan B was driving the 70 miles to Beachy Head, though that wasn’t straightforward either.
‘I’d printed off a route map, but then I got lost so I had to ask somebody.’
Eventually Sally found the path to the cliff edge. ‘I was walking along and I saw this man, and he said, “You’re not going to jump, are you?” I said, “Oh no, no, no.’”
‘I must have looked a bit odd for him to say that, because he said, “You know people don’t often die when they jump”.
‘I thought “What the hell’s he on about.” I thought you died when you jumped off Beachy Head.’
Sally made one last phone call, to her cousin whom she had been due to meet for lunch.
‘I told her, “I want you to write down these phone numbers for James and David. I’m at Beachy Head, I’m going to kill myself, I’ve killed Richard.”
‘She said, “It can’t be as bad as all that.” And I disconnected. Then I went and I found a place where there were some flowers, somebody had obviously died there.’ Then Sally climbed over the wire netting to get closer to the cliff edge. But as she stood there, she was approached by a member of the Beachy Head Chaplaincy, a charity that offers crisis intervention for those seeking to end their lives at the beauty spot.
It then took three hours of painstaking negotiation with a police negotiator to talk her down from the 531ft-high cliff ledge.
‘But you’ll be leaving your sons without a mother and a father,’ the police negotiator pleaded, and that finally hit home.
She allowed herself to be led away to a police car by two female officers. Of her first night behind bars, she says: ‘They told me I slept that night. I didn’t.’
Sally wasn’t sure about many things: years of having her selfconfidence eroded by a cruel, controlling husband often had left her doubting her sanity.
But she was a good mother. She loved her boys — David, now 32
‘I’d just killed the man I loved, I was in a dreadful state’ She climbed over wire to get near the 531ft cliff edge
and an account manager and James, 36 — and they loved her.
recalling their first visit to her on remand a few days later, she says: ‘I really cannot remember what we talked about that first visit. It’s a blank. I think we talked about everything except their father. I wanted to know if they were OK, what they’d eaten, if they were looking after themselves.
‘They weren’t angry. I think they were just so sad — so sorry for me.
‘I remember David telling me to lie on my coat in bed, because the prison pillows were so filthy.’
Although she had killed their father, her sons supported her from the outset and would go on to campaign for her release.
James and David had suspected for some years that there was a dark side to their parents’ marriage but even they had no idea of the extent of it.
materially, they’d wanted for nothing. both were educated privately, there had been holidays to Florida and the maldives.
Home was a beautiful, doublefronted, £1 million house in a leafy Surrey suburb.
Their father had run a successful car dealership business while Sally, worked as an office manager for the Police Federation.
but as they grew older, they gradually realised other people’s fathers didn’t speak to their wives the way theirs did to their mum.
David puts it this way: ‘I could sense that there was something morally wrong with my father.
‘ He was always putting my mother down, and talking to her like she was nothing.
‘She was constantly criticised, over everything, from her cooking to her physical appearance.
‘She was called embarrassing, humiliating names in company. He didn’t like her having friends. He didn’t like her speaking to other people when they went out.’
richard, meanwhile, felt at total liberty to have several mistresses and visit brothels.
One Christmas, he had a personal card made, of him posing with his Ferrari, surrounded by topless glamour models. It was intended to embarrass and humiliate Sally — and did the job perfectly.
David remembers it standing on the family mantelpiece. ‘Anyone could see that was not normal behaviour,’ he says.
‘Of course, we couldn’t defend what mum had done, but we knew that she wasn’t a murderer,’ says David.
David had volunteered, without being asked, to be the person to identify the body of his father, who had been subjected to 18 blows with a hammer. ‘I felt I needed to see what he went through, see what my mother did to fully understand what had happened.
‘If there was anything I could offer my father in death it was a fair hearing of what happened. He was still my father.’
Prison visits from her boys were always very painful — particularly because initially Sally seemed to show no interest in defending herself. She still loved, and missed, richard desperately, and blamed herself wholly for what had happened.
‘ I didn’t give a damn about anything, I didn’t care. I wasn’t interested,’ says Sally. ‘The whole thing was surreal. I don’t even really remember my trial.’ David and James do, however. It was a disaster for Sally. In preparation for taking the stand, Sally’s solicitor warned her, ‘Juries don’t like it if you speak ill of the dead,’ so no punches were thrown at richard at all.
The jury heard none of what had occurred in the marriage.
Her counsel relied on a defence of diminished responsibility due to depression, and hoped she’d be found guilty of manslaughter. The tactic backfired spectacularly. She was portrayed as a vengeful, jealous wife who’d plotted to kill her husband when she learned he was having an affair.
In June 2011, after a five-day trial at Guildford Crown Court, Sally was returned to bronzefield jail as a convicted murderer with a 22year sentence.
‘I’d have been 77 when I came out,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to reach it. I was depressed and anxious, far worse than I had felt even at my lowest points with richard.’
A typical day for Sally was spent mainly alone in her cell. To pass the endless hours she would watch TV, read or knit — and think about richard, and all the ‘if onlys’.
A middle-aged woman with a posh accent, she had little in common with her fellow inmates — other than the gravity of their crimes (there were other women who’d killed abusive partners, others who’d simply killed).
Yet still, she encountered kindness. She made friends — of a sort. They playfully nicknamed her ‘teardrop’ since anything — a nice word, a compliment, a shared chocolate bar — would move her to tears.
In the meantime, Sally’s lawyers began work on appealing her sentence. regular visits from James, David and James’s girlfriend Jen, with whom Sally had always been close, was the only thing that kept her going.
‘We never spoke about richard during the prison visits. I used to like to hear what restaurants they’d been to and things like that. but they didn’t like telling me too much because they thought it would upset me, but I wanted news from outside.’
All talk of richard’s funeral, a grim, discreet affair in the pouring rain that happened while Sally was on remand, and which David only remembers with anger, was strictly off limits.
Sally did ask, however, to be taken to visit richard’s grave a few days afterwards, and the prison arranged it.
Her lawyers managed to get her sentence reduced from 22 years to 18 years on appeal — a shorter sentence, certainly, but she would still, in all probability, die in prison.
Sally decided to get on with her time, becoming a model prisoner. While on remand she had taken part in counselling sessions called the Freedom Programme, offered to the victims of domestic abuse, and she did other similar courses after her conviction.
Slowly, she began to recognise herself in other people’s stories.
Sally’s nephew’s wife Dalla, herself a lawyer, decided to look for a new solicitor — one that understood the issue of women who kill as a result of domestic abuse.
She came across the feminist campaigning group, Justice For Women. Harriet Wistrich, one of the group’s founders, agreed to
Sally asked and was allowed to visit his grave
look at Sally’s case with fresh eyes. ‘When I heard I would have a new solicitor, I didn’t really care,’ says Sally.
‘I thought it was all pointless. But then I started writing reams to Harriet about my life with Richard.’
Legal experts at Justice For Women went through every single detail of Sally’s case, including trial transcripts and witness statements, to look for the fresh evidence that is required before a judge will consider an appeal against conviction.
When the offence of coercive control was added to the statute books in 2015 — termed as ‘controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship which causes someone to fear that violence will be used against them; or causes them serious alarm or distress which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to- day activities’ — it was clear the abuse Sally had suffered at the hands of Richard exactly fitted the description.
David began to speak publicly, soon after appearing at a high-profile seminar in 2017 about his mother’s case. ‘David became my voice,’ says Sally. ‘He articulated things I wasn’t able to articulate myself. David clearly had understood what was going on. It made me feel sad he had been aware of what was going on all those years.
‘Then I heard on the TV that I had been granted an appeal. It was surreal. I don’t think I was aware that there were so many people rooting for me.
‘I remember seeing David speaking on TV — so eloquent. I was so proud. As my case got more and more publicity, other prisoners, and even some prison officers, would come up to me and congratulate me.’
The night before her appeal, in February this year, Sally couldn’t sleep a wink.
She watched the lengthy hearing at the Court of Appeal via a video link, with her prison chaplain and her senior officer beside her. There was a fault with the sound, so it was difficult to follow proceedings but then Harriet’s face gave it all away.
‘She was beaming, she was euphoric,’ Sally says. ‘I realised I had won!’
Her conviction for murder was quashed. But Sally was not yet a free woman.
The judge had ordered a retrial and still had the power to refuse the application for bail. ‘I felt deflated when they told me that,’ says Sally. ‘The idea of going through another trial was hell.’
But as she’ll reveal in her final, compelling interview tomorrow, freedom was on its way.