NO ONE SHOULD SUFFER LIKE ME
After nine years behind bars for killing her abusive husband, SALLY CHALLEN finally walked back into the arms of her family. But remarkably, far from leaving prison behind, she’s going back — to help other victims like her
PAINTED as a vengeful, jealous wife in court, Sally Challen spent nine years in prison for murdering her husband Richard after she bludgeoned him to death with a hammer. But in 2015, a change in the law meant coercive control finally became an offence. And in a landmark case which gripped Britain, Sally’s legal team argued that she was incapable of making a cold-blooded, premeditated decision to kill Richard, as all reasoning had been destroyed by the years of psychological abuse and controlling behaviour she’d suffered. Finally, earlier this year, her charge was reduced to manslaughter and Sally was released from prison. Today, in the last of our compelling interviews, she describes how she has been rebuilding her life and why she’ll be campaigning to help other abused women.
WHILE Sally Challen has blanked out much of her early time behind bars, the day she walked free is one that neither she nor her sons will ever forget.
When she was granted bail on April 5 this year, two months after her original conviction for the murder of her husband Richard was quashed, David and James came straight to Bronzefield Prison in Surrey to pick her up.
‘It was like a scene from a film, with the released prisoner walking down a long corridor,’ remembers David, 32. ‘Mum said she heard afterwards that all the prisoners had their faces pressed to the windows to see.’
The family drove to 36-year-old James and his partner Jen’s house, where Sally would stay — a free woman for the first time in nearly a decade. On the long drive, Sally rang everyone she could think of to say: ‘Guess where I am? I’m on the M25!’
Once there, Sally found her new freedom hard to get used to after so many years and months of captivity. ‘It was weird that I could walk out of their door into the garden; that I didn’t have to wait for a door to be unlocked. I could open a door, I could leave my door open at night if I wanted to. I could open a window.’
That night, Sally enjoyed her first meal at liberty: an Indian takeaway, something she had hankered after. ‘My sons remember me saying “mmmm” with every mouthful,’ she laughs.
Before bed, Sally stepped into a luxurious, roomy shower in a proper tiled bathroom, filled with luxurious toiletries.
Buzzing from the extraordinary day, it was late before everyone went to bed. After so long crammed into a tiny, narrow single bed, now she had an enormous king-size all to herself. ‘It was colossal. It was absolute luxury. It was soft and I had loads of pillows and they were so soft. And, oh, the feel of sheets!’
In the first two instalments of her astonishing story, Sally told the Mail how she was raped, abused, insulted, humiliated and psychologically tortured for more than 30 years by Richard, the car dealer whom she still calls ‘the love of my life’.
She finally snapped in August 2010 and bludgeoned him to death with a hammer at the family home in Claygate, Surrey.
It took a change in the law in 2015, when coercive control was made a crime in the UK, for her to find a basis on which she could launch an appeal against her murder conviction.
While Sally was able to leave jail in April, it wasn’t until June 7 that she was officially a free woman. This was when the prosecution accepted her plea to the lesser charge of manslaughter, and sentenced her to 14 years. Due to the nine years she had already served — and her guilty plea — Sally would never have to go back to prison.
That night, she says, she slept soundly. She didn’t dream about Richard. And she didn’t wake up wishing he’d come home.
Two weeks later, she took off her wedding ring.
What is perhaps most surprising is that just seven days after leaving jail, Sally did go back to prison. In fact, she asked to. She wanted to visit some of the women she had left behind. Sally, a model prisoner throughout the years she served, had been an active, and founding, member of Bronzefield’s Women’s Institute after it was set up in 2010, part of the WI’s ‘care not custody’ campaign — the first prison in the country to do so.
There were speakers a few times a year, and members would knit hats, scarves and toys and also make greetings cards for sale at the three annual events when members of outside WIs would be invited to attend.
An Easter event was being planned and Sally didn’t want to miss it. Plus, she felt she had a duty to go back — to see the women still inside; to make sure they could see, for themselves, that it’s OK to hope.
It wasn’t difficult, she says, walking those familiar corridors, the scene of so much misery for so many years. ‘I just felt grateful to be out,’ she says, ‘and that now I was in a position to help women still inside — and outside, in prisons of their own.’
In November, Sally will be returning to the Court of Appeal, but this time to support EmmaJayne Magson in her attempt to overturn her murder conviction.
In 2016, Emma-Jayne stabbed her violent partner during a row in which he had attacked her and was
sentenced to 17 years in prison. Emma-Jayne, who was only 23 at the time of the offence and from a working-class, dysfunctional background, could not be more different from Sally, but both women killed as a response to abuse from the man they loved.
SALLy — a 63-year-old, middle-class mother of two who had been to finishing school, lived in a beautiful £1 million house in Surrey and educated her sons privately — has suddenly found herself an unlikely role model and cause
celebre for abused women everywhere. She is determined that no other woman should suffer in silence as she did.
Shortly after the final hearing at the Old Bailey in June, Sally’s solicitor Harriet Wistrich, co-founder of the Justice for Women group, who had defended her in court, organised a press conference but made it clear that Sally was not expected to speak if she didn’t want to.
Sally realised she wanted to say her piece. Having been locked up for nine years, unable to find her voice — and for decades before that when she was terrified to speak her mind in case she annoyed her husband — she now wished to find it. Sally now sees it as her duty to educate other women, and men, about the reality of coercive control. ‘It is just as damaging to women as a physically abusive relationship, if not more so,’ she says, ‘because these are invisible scars, and they are often harder to heal.’
Her younger son David laughs about how his mother — once a meek and subservient wife — will now talk to ‘anyone and everyone about coercive control and ask them if they have ever heard of it’.
‘Nine out of ten of them say “no”,’ says Sally. ‘These are young people, middle-aged people — everyone. I even asked the people in a solicitor’s office once if they knew what coercive control was, after I noticed a poster about domestic abuse on their window. They didn’t have a clue.
‘I told them: “When I’ve left, please Google me. I want you to learn about it, tell your friends, look out for it.” And they probably thought, as I went: “That woman is off her head.” But some of them might have looked me up.
‘I do it in estate agents. I do it to anyone who will listen. I want them to be aware of what coercive control is. That it doesn’t have to be physical violence, that it is mental torture. I want them to understand that it can happen to anybody, from any walk of life, any age, and it can happen to men and women.’
Sally says she is rarely recognised but has experienced a lot of goodwill from those who do know who she is: ‘The local vicar says I’m amazing.’
Last week she sent a statement to a conference in Wales about domestic violence, and in November she will join Kiranjit Ahluwalia — a woman who killed her violent husband in the 1980s and was freed after years of campaigning — at another event.
‘I’m not used to speaking in public,’ says Sally, ‘but I feel I should, because I’ve been lucky enough to have sons who support me. I have a duty to give back to society, to try to get my experience across to people, to make people understand it, to try and encourage them to discuss it among themselves and their friends. The bigger the audience I can get to, the better.
‘I don’t think people outside understand...they understand domestic violence that is physical, because you can see the physical side. They don’t understand or want to know about the mental torture side.
‘Coercive control is like the cancer inside you that nobody has diagnosed. When people do take notice, it’s all too late.
‘But I hope my campaign has shifted that along. However, I feel there are certain areas of society who feel that women should not complain. That we should just get on with it and learn to live in misery.’
While Sally is looking forward to exploring life as a free woman and spending time with her loved ones, she is aware of how difficult it is for the women in prison who have no one to support them.
‘I feel that I have to speak out because I was lucky enough to have a particular family member, Dalla [her nephew’s wife and a solicitor] in the very beginning, who found Harriet [Wistrich]. I’ve had the support of my sons, their partners, especially Jen and her parents, and my brothers.
‘My sons have lived this sentence with me. They have been punished as much as I have been punished in a way — they were deprived of their mother in their 20s.’
Looking back, if somebody had come to Sally and said they were concerned about the way Richard treated her and offered to help, what would she have done?
‘Towards the end, I definitely think that would have helped me. I would have felt that at last somebody saw it other than myself. I’d become almost conditioned to it and I didn’t dare speak out. If Richard had got a merest whiff of it, he would have been so angry with me, which is something I couldn’t cope with.’
‘He would have turned around and said what he always said to me: that there was nothing wrong with him, that it was all me.’
Richard often accused Sally of being ‘mad’ when she confronted him about his behaviour, even when she caught him, red-handed, visiting a brothel.
‘But with someone else on my side who understood, I could have been totally lifted out of the situation and placed somewhere else, with support around me from my family.’
The ‘somewhere else’ Sally refers to is a refuge — places where women can get to quickly before they have any time to talk themselves out of it.
‘Had I needed to pick up the phone and say “help me”, I wouldn’t have known who to ring. I wouldn’t have had a clue.’
Now, there is much for her to look forward to.
As we speak, Sally is excitedly expecting her first grandchild. She occasionally glances at her phone, looking nervously for a message that Jen, James’s partner, may have gone into labour.
A few days ago, Sally’s grandson was born. ‘He is gorgeous,’ she says. ‘We are so thrilled.’
In the future she will be buying a property near James — the first time she will ever have lived on her own.
THANKfuLLy, she never suffers flashbacks — and as for the prospect of a future relationship, well, who knows? But Sally knows that for her, it is not an option to give up the cause to which she has become so committed, perhaps in particular because she does not want any grandchild of hers to be born into a world that does not care about the victims.
There are plenty of cases like Sally’s, such as that of farieissia Martin, jailed for life aged 22 for the murder of her abusive boyfriend in 2015. Justice for Women is campaigning for her release. farieissia’s appeal is due to be heard later in the year.
Justice for Women is currently dealing with nine other cases of women sentenced to life after killing their abuser, and since Sally’s case began to attract widespread media attention, the group is expecting more women in prison for such offences to come forward.
‘It feels like I’ve got some sort of power now that I didn’t have before. And because I’ve got this power, I think people will listen to me. They want to hear what I’ve got to say. They’re interested.’
That’s more than her husband ever afforded her.
Sally Challen: from abused housewife to killer and now, it would seem, to campaigning icon.