Devoted sons who fought ‘lie that their mother was a murderer’
MAKING sense of their childhood years has been a life’s work for Sally Challen’s sons. For while they have never believed their father Richard deserved to die, they do understand why their mother was driven to kill him.
Yesterday, the 65-year-old mother-of-two saw her conviction for murdering her husband of 31 years by hitting him 20 times with a hammer quashed at the Royal Courts of Justice.
She now faces a retrial after a panel of judges at the Court of Appeal ruled she was suffering from two mental disorders at the time of the 2010 attack. She has already served eight years in a Surrey prison.
Behind yesterday’s watershed moment is a tale of extraordinary filial love and a heroic fight for justice by the two level-headed young sons who emerged from the Challens’ ill-fated marriage. There is little doubt that 31-year- old David and his brother James, 35, have been her most powerful allies in winning over public opinion and gathering support for her case.
Even more remarkable is that they have thrown their support behind their mother while respecting the memory of their father, who was 61 when he died.
Or as David put it in an exclusive interview with the Mail last October: ‘We do not justify our father’s killing. We are seeking to stop the lie that our mother is a murderer.’
But it has taken years of dedication by a young man who juggles his job with a film distribution company while campaigning against domestic violence with the group Justice For Women and addressing feminist conferences around the UK.
Even after the ‘deep shock’ of seeing their mother found guilty at Guildford Crown Court in 2011 and sentenced to life imprisonment, they refused to give up their quest.
Shortly after the 2011 conviction, the family contacted Justice For Women, a feminist law reform campaign group which supports women who have killed their partners as a response to domestic violence.
Sally Challen’s case, however, is the first of its kind because although she says she was raped she was not a victim of sustained and persistent physical violence. The abuse her supporters say she suffered was largely psychological, financial and emotional. They say Richard’s behaviour pushed her to the brink.
‘We have had a lifetime of living with this and eight years trying to find the words,’ David said this week. The words he is referring to are ‘coercive control’, a legal term which ultimately enabled the brothers to articulate what they say their mother had suffered at the hands of their father, which wasn’t the kind of physical violence usually associated with domestic abuse cases but something far more psychological.
The Serious Crime Act 2015 created a new offence of controlling and coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship, recognising that a pattern of isolation, humiliation and domination could rob women of their lives as much as physical violence, and was a form of domestic abuse.
It was on these legal grounds that Mrs Challen was given leave to appeal against her murder conviction in 2011 when ‘coercive control’ wasn’t recognised by the law.
Right from the moment in August 2010 that his family life was torn apart, David has felt only compassion for his mother.
He was 22 at the time she killed his father – she hit Richard Challen over the head with a hammer more than 20 times while he ate the bacon and eggs he had made her go out in the rain to buy that morning.
She wrapped his body in a curtain and left a note on it saying: ‘I love you’ before washing the dishes and leaving the £1 million marital home in Claygate, Surrey.
The following day, Mrs Challen gave David a lift to work at a local restaurant and as he got out of the car, she leaned over towards the passenger side and said: ‘You know I love you, David, don’t you?’
The significance of those words became clear just hours later when police arrived at the restaurant to tell him that his father was dead and his mother had been found at the notorious East Sussex suicide spot Beachy Head.
It took a chaplain two hours to talk her out of jumping.
To the outside world it was a shocking case, not least because the Challens appeared to be the perfect middle-class couple. Richard Challen owned a car dealership, while his elegant blonde wife Sally worked as an office manager for the Police Federation.
Mrs Challen’s parents were born in India, and lived a typical expat lifestyle with servants. She was born in Walton-on-Thames in 1954, after her parents returned to England.
When she was five her father died of a heart attack and her mother did not consider it appropriate for her daughter to pursue a career. Sally was expected to learn secretarial skills, marry and devote herself to her husband.
She was a 15-year-old schoolgirl when she met 22-year-old Richard Challen and was immediately besotted with a man described by those that knew him as charming and charismatic. In the early years of their relationship, she used to call in at Richard’s flat after school to clean and cook – it was a pattern of subservient behaviour that continued once they were married.
As David puts it: ‘Mum never had a chance to experience any other relationship or form any adult identity of her own. My dad, and the way he behaved, was all she knew.’
Mrs Challen’s sons claimed their father subjected her to decades of abuse, including rape.
Mrs Challen accused her husband of cheating and even said she once caught him in a brothel, despite his claims she was ‘mad’.
Although she left him several times, shortly before his death she asked him to take her back.
He is said to have agreed on condition she signed a bizarre postnuptial agreement with clauses that stripped her of financial assets, banned her from smoking and prevented her from ‘interrupting him’.
Her sons claim it was such controlling behaviour that drove their mother to kill him. At her original five- day trial at Guildford Crown Court, Mrs Challen’s defence team relied on a defence of diminished responsibility, hoping she’d be found guilty of the lesser charge of
‘We’ve had a lifetime of living with this’ ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’
manslaughter. Her husband’s alleged behaviour was deemed to be irrelevant and Mrs Challen’s lawyers believed it would look bad for them to ‘speak ill of the dead’.
David says it was ‘excruciating’ watching the trial unfold in the public gallery and he was in ‘deep shock’ when his mother was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. ‘The verdict was the wrong one. She deserves justice,’ he said when he spoke to the Mail last year.
‘People need to understand that she killed my father not because she is a bad person but because he drove her to the edge.’ Speaking of the complex emotions behind his mother’s case, David said of his father ‘in a weird way, we still love him’ but added that ‘nothing will ever be solved in society unless we look at the root cause. Right now this conviction serves absolutely no-one in society and that’s one of the most frustrating things.’
Mrs Challen’s own testimony illustrates the same complexities and, incredibly, the same love. Speaking after her arrest in 2010, she told police: ‘I felt without Richard I was worthless, I couldn’t go on, I couldn’t cope. I loved him and he was part of my life, part of me. My whole identity was built up as a part of a couple. I just couldn’t exist separately. I still think about Richard all the time, every night.’ When she was sentenced to life imprisonment, Judge Christopher Critchlow told her: ‘You are somebody who killed the only man you loved and you will have to live with knowing what you did.’
Yesterday’s glimmer of hope for Mrs Challen, however, has come largely thanks to the love of the two sons who have stood by her as she makes legal history.