How she ‘just snapped’

MOMENTS after serving her husband of 31 years bacon and eggs, Sally Challen took a hammer out of her handbag and hit him over the head 20 times.

To make sure Richard Challen, 61, wasn’t breathing, she stuffed a tea towel into his mouth and wrapped his body in old curtains.

Challen, 6 , then cleaned up and wrote a note to leave by the body, reading: ‘I love you, Sally.’ She said after the 2010 killing her husband had lied about suspected affairs and she ‘just snapped’. She initially planned to kill herself too.

She was convicted of murder at Guildford Crown Court the following year and sentenced to 22 years in prison, reduced to 18 on appeal.

Last March she won leave to appeal against her conviction. Her lawyers say that because ‘coercive and controlling behaviour’ is now a crime and she was provoked by decades of abuse, her crime should be downgraded to manslaughter.