Prison reform chief jailed after beating husband for 20 years
A PRISON reform chief who abused her husband daily for 20 years while he cowered on the floor in the foetal position has been jailed for four years.
Sheree Spencer, 45, left her husband Richard with mental scars “that will last a lifetime”. On one occasion, she beat him with a wine bottle so hard it permanently disfigured his ear. In drinkfuelled tirades she would call him “a p----” and “dumb-dumb”, and caused bruises and scratches that he would cover with make-up before taking their children to school and nursery.
For years, Mr Spencer secretly recorded video and audio of his wife’s attacks on him. When police were called to the family home in 2021 by a concerned welfare worker, he handed over more than 43 images of his bruised face taken on different dates.
He would email the pictures and videos to himself and delete them from his phone so his wife did not realise he was recording her violent assaults.
Hull Crown Court heard that Spencer was a mother of three young children and that many of the attacks on her husband had occurred in the family home.
It was described as “a great irony” that Spencer had done so much work aimed at investigating the effect of custodial sentences on the family in her work at a high level within HM Prison and Probation Service.
Spencer, of Bubwith, East Yorks, was a project manager in the department’s directorate of strategy and performance, and had boasted to friends that she was “two down” from Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, in that area, and spoke as if he were a friend.
Within months of becoming a couple in 2000, Mr Spencer began enduring his wife’s violent rages, which happened whether she was drunk or sober.
Mr Spencer told the court that he became almost immune to the physical abuse, despite Spencer causing intense pain by sinking her teeth into him, but that the mental scars left by the attacks would leave the most lasting effect.
Spencer was arrested in June 2021 on suspicion of assaulting her husband .
Mr Spencer told the court last week: “Little by little, I lost my independence and willpower and just accepted that was how my life was going to be. I complied with Sheree’s demands, and she controlled most aspects of my everyday life, including things like what activities I could participate in and when, which room I could sleep in, and even which toilet I could use.
“I’m bigger and stronger than Sheree so I could restrain her if the pain became unbearable; however, I could only hold her for so long, and when the time came to let go, she would be even angrier and the injuries she would inflict afterwards were always worse.”
Spencer admitted coercive and controlling behaviour and three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
The charges could only cover a fiveyear period dating from the time the law on controlling and coercive behaviour was passed in late 2015.
But Judge Rayfield said she took account of her persistent behaviour towards her husband because it cast light on his vulnerability as her victim.
‘I’m bigger and stronger than Sheree, so I could restrain her if the pain became unbearable. But when I would let go she’d be even angrier’