Mum saved up to buy us a gift… but every year it broke my heart
David Challen – whose mother, Sally, went to jail for killing his controlling father – tells Cara McGoogan why he is finally looking forward to a family Christmas
For the first time in a decade, David Challen is looking forward to Christmas. He hasn’t spent the festive season with his family since his mum, Sally, murdered his dad, Richard, with a hammer in 2010. She was taken away and sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in prison; overnight, David and his brother, James, went from having two parents to none.
“Christmas was the most horrific time,” says David, 32, who for almost a decade the run-up to every December 25 travelling for hours with James and his partner, Jen, to visit his mother in prison. The family, who had by then grown used to visits, always cried at Christmas. “She would buy a little gift package to give me on the way out, often with a soft toy in it. It broke me into a million pieces.”
This year, Sally’s murder conviction was quashed in a landmark appeal that recognised the 40 years of coercive and controlling behaviour that Richard subjected her to. In June, the Crown Prosecution Service announced it wouldn’t seek a retrial, instead accepting Sally’s guilty plea to manslaughter and sentencing her to time served (nine years and four months).
Her case is explored in punishing detail for the first time in a BBC Two documentary tomorrow night. When I meet David at the north London flat he shares with his partner, John, he confirms that family life over the last six months could not be more different. He smiles as he shows me recent pictures with Sally, now 65. They pull funny faces from the top of the Shard on their first day out together in May, and she beams while cradling her dark-eyed grandson, born to Jen and James, with whom she lives, in September.
“We’re all going to spend Christmas at my brother’s,” says David, who sees his mother and nephew every couple of weeks. Jen’s parents will cook Sally’s first proper turkey lunch in a decade – no comparison to the prison version she has been eating in the years since she last served one up – but David hopes she might also make her tray-bake Yorkshire pudding. “We’ll get the baby a few Christmas outfits. How lovely is that? I haven’t had a happy Christmas since 2008.”
Sally was barely 16 when she met Richard, then 22, and fell head over heels in love. She defied her family, who had in the early days tried to separate them, and spent the next 40 years with him. They married, had two children, and moved into a £1million home in Claygate, Surrey. To the outside world, the Challens were happy – but behind closed doors, Richard, a used-car dealer, emotionally abused Sally. He cut her off from friends, controlled the finances, and gaslighted her by telling her “You’re going crazy” after she caught him cheating.
She and David eventually left the family home in 2009, with financial help from her older brothers, but she couldn’t escape Richard. They reunited in secret and Richard continued his abuse. He made Sally sign a postnup agreement with strict rules that controlled how she behaved and limited to £200,000 how much she would get in a divorce settlement. After finding what she thought was evidence that he was still cheating on her, she snapped and bludgeoned him to death with a hammer.
Coercive and controlling behaviour was criminalised in 2015. Sally, who had written to lawyer Harriet Wistrich, founder of Justice for Women, three years earlier, finally had a way to understand the abuse Richard inflicted upon her.
Having lived through every moment both at home and in the courtroom, David was shocked to discover more grim details from The
Case of Sally Challen. In the featurelength film, Sally describes how Richard routinely raped her and used sex to assert his control.
“I didn’t know she was raped as much as she was,” says David, who knew of one such incident that took place on holiday in Los Angeles. “If that came out in her original trial it would have been the focus.”
David became his mother’s greatest advocate during the appeal, but he never “shied away from the violence she committed”. “I chose to identify [my father’s] body,” he says in the documentary. “I had to see everything she did and feel everything he felt.”
Sally’s release from prison on bail in March was a pinnacle for the family. But, David admits, he was concerned about how Sally would adapt to life outside. “The biggest fear I had was her coming out and, not knowing how to live in a world without my father, ending her life,” he says. “As dark as it sounds, it was realistic to look out for.”
But Sally soon dispelled those fears and removed her wedding ring.
It is the small things that she cherishes: a takeaway, a real bed. The day after her release she was at Freeport shopping outlet. She told David: “It feels surreal, but normal.” Within weeks of getting her first smartphone, Sally mastered the use of emoji and gifs; now, she is taking line-dancing classes with Jen’s mum and is a regular at the local church. “She would never have gone dancing when she was with my father,” says David. “It would be his rules. She likes little chats, the coffee morning vibe. My father always used to shut her down, like trying to cage a bird.”
Having thought she would die in prison, Sally has now returned numerous times to see friends and help with the Women’s Institute, of which she was a founding member.
There are still difficult times, and Sally declined an invitation to join our interview because “she’s feeling quite down at the moment”, says David. “I think it’s her medication – she still has mental health issues. It’s a slow journey to find her own identity.”
On Tuesday, Sally and David will be at the Royal Courts of Justice to support the appeal hearing of Emma-Jayne Magson, who was convicted of murdering her violent boyfriend, James Knight, in 2016.
The Centre for Women’s Justice, which campaigned for Sally, is behind Emma’s case, as well that of Farieissia Martin, convicted of stabbing her ex-partner to death, who was granted an appeal last week. “Our cases are helping turn the dial,” says David. “I won’t accomplish anything as significant as I feel we have done in the last two years. Whatever comes after this, I’ve done something I’m really proud of.”
David has been puzzling over what to get Sally for Christmas. “What do you get someone who has come out of prison after nearly a decade?” he laughs. “She always wanted us to be happy – now we’ve got a chance to keep her happy.”
There is little to remind David of his father at home, save for a box of newspaper clippings. His father won’t be mentioned on Christmas Day, but his family won’t forget him.
“It’s amazing to have Christmas together, but our father’s not there and we still wish this wasn’t the scenario,” says David. But, he adds, Sally being home is more than he could have dreamed of two years ago. “I’m excited to do anything with my mother – I’d love to go on holiday, just us. Even the moments that I’m angry with her, I can do it to her face. We’re a family. It’s going to take a lot of rebuilding to feel perfectly fine, but we’ll do what we can.”
‘Our father won’t be there – and we still wish this wasn’t the scenario’