Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘I don’t want her to know where I live’
A controlling wife jailed for subjecting her husband to four years of abuse before slicing his hand with a knife has had her hopes of an early release from prison dashed.
Vicious Tracy Hannington, 56, repeatedly attacked partner Tony at their home with weapons including planks of wood, a hammer and even a tin of beans between 2015 and 2019.
At the height of the violence, she held a blade to her spouse’s throat, before moving it towards his stomach and cutting his hand as he tried to shield himself last March. Hannington was put behind bars in October for two years – but it has emerged she has made a bid to have her stay at HMP Send in Surrey cut short through the home detention curfew scheme.
Haulier Tony, 56, said: “When you’re dealing with someone like Tracy, you’d be stupid not to be scared of her. I still have ups and downs. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I think about it. “I think, ‘Why me? Why did this happen?’ Then I start thinking, ‘Will it make me feel better if I cut myself ?’”
If Hannington had been granted an early release, she would have been allowed to live at a set location under curfew and made to wear a tag for as long as four-and-a-half months. However, prison governors decided against the move, deeming that she did not have suitable housing.
If she decides not to lodge an appeal against the decision, she is due to be freed on licence in
October.
“I know what she’s capable of and she’s not a very nice person,” Tony continued. “She’s like a bull with a rag.” Just seven months after first meeting, the pair married at Canterbury Register Office in 2013 and moved into Tony’s flat in Collins Road, Greenhill. The lorry driver, now working for Asda, previously told the Gazette the relationship began to turn sour in 2015 when Hannington started to regularly accuse him of being lazy and “a parasite”.
Violent outbursts soon followed.
But in the last year the abuse became even more unpleasant as Hannington used a variety of weapons to intimidate him with. She clubbed her long-suffering husband with a vacuum cleaner, after swinging it “like a golf club”, and, on another occasion, told him “I’d love to stab you with this” as she held a carving fork.
After Tony missed a train to travel to a Christmas do in 2018, Hannington told him during a series of phone calls: “I don’t want you home. If you come home, I’ll put you in a six-sided box.”
He estimates that she threatened him at knifepoint three times at the height of the violence.
“My counsellor told me it would take me a long time and I won’t start to notice feeling any different until I move properties,” he said.
“I’m living in the flat where it happened and I’d feel safer if she didn’t know where I lived.” Discussions are ongoing between Tony and Canterbury City Council to try to move him.