The women who took their own lives after domestic abuse

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:10Today, the chilling number of suicides being reinvestigated as manslaughter.

0:20Just a quick warning before we start, there is discussion and description of domestic abuse and suicide.

0:28Hannah Al-Othman:She had a big group of friends, she enjoyed going on nights out She had two sisters who she was very close to She loved spending time with her family

0:42In photos, Georgia Barter looks happy and relaxed A mass of blonde curls bobbed at the chin, framing a wide smile

0:50Hannah Al-Othman:And when she was little, she had all this curly hair and they used to call her Shirley Temple. But she was very, very shy, painfully shy, her mum described her as. But then she started dancing. She just loved it and she was very, very good at it. At one point it looked like she might have a career as a professional dancer and she really gained in confidence from that. Georgia won competitions and medals. She even performed at London theatres. But after one night out, she was sexually assaulted. The case went to court. Her attacker was jailed. She was deeply affected by it and she was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety and depression.

1:37Hannah Al-Othman:And she sort of stopped going out. She stopped dancing. And soon after, she was introduced to Thomas Bignall by a friend. And quickly got into this very intense relationship. And her family said they just noticed this change in Georgia and that she just wasn't the same person anymore. Georgia lived in London and worked in recruitment. But for the next decade, she seemed trapped by Thomas Bignall. There was evidence of physical violence, sexual violence, emotional abuse, financial abuse. Bignall was controlling her financially. They would go and live in different places. she'd be forced to quit jobs.

2:26Hannah Al-Othman:Her family wouldn't always know where she was and he would be depriving her of necessities like food and hot water and electricity. So she was completely under his control. The relationship cost Georgia her life. Georgia died in April 2020 in a hospital. She had at home taken what turned out to be a fatal overdose of painkillers. after enduring years of domestic abuse. Basically, how her mum described it was she just wanted the pain of the abuse to stop.

3:10She was dead at just 32 years old. But this wasn't a suicide in the way that we might normally understand it. An inquest into Georgia's death led the coroner to rule that it was an unlawful killing. she died as a result of domestic abuse. It's only the second ever finding of its kind, but it could be just the beginning.

3:36While many of us are familiar with the harrowing fact that more than two women are killed every week in the UK by men they've been in relationships with, the real death toll for male violence is far higher. A landmark report has revealed that the number of women in the UK who have suffered domestic abuse and are being driven to suicide is higher than those physically murdered by the men in their lives. And now there are calls for these deaths, like Georgia's, to be investigated as manslaughter. From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, the fight to recognize domestic abuse-related suicides.

4:23Hannah L. Othman, you're The Guardian's North of England correspondent, and with senior reporter Geraldine McKelvey, you've both been reporting on these awful stories of domestic abuse suicides. The life and death of Georgia Barter is one that you covered in detail. Can you tell me about her case and what was heard at the inquest investigating how and why she died?

4:46Hannah Al-Othman:The evidence that her mother gave the inquest was really harrowing. She said on one occasion, Georgia looked like she'd been in a road traffic accident. In April 2020, she was taken to hospital. She told a paramedic that he'd kicked her and stamped on her face. And the paramedic said the injuries that she presented with were consistent with that. She'd also just before that been to hospital in Kent bleeding. She told ambulance staff that Bignall had sexually assaulted her. She left hospital apparently with Bignall with a cannula still in her arm. The hospital staff rang her and told her to come back, but she didn't.

5:27Hannah Al-Othman:But no one told the police. A safeguarding referral was made, but not until several weeks later. Was there any action from that when a domestic abuse charity got in touch? There were many, many incidents. There was an incident in 2012 where Surrey police were called to reports that Bignall had hit and kicked Georgia when they were staying in a hotel. And Thomas Bignall was arrested and taken into custody, but he was never charged. So clearly Georgia had endured years of his abuse and it had been recorded by the police, but he got away with it and he carried on. The Met and Essex police had received multiple reports about Thomas Bignall's abuse of Georgia, including one from a member of the public who told Essex police that he had made threats to kill her.

6:17Hannah Al-Othman:And he was arrested several times, but he was never charged with any violent defences against Georgia. We know Bignall had at least one conviction related to violence against another woman. No disclosures were made to Georgia under Clare's law, which is the domestic violence disclosure scheme, whereby police can provide information to someone who may be at risk from a current partner based on information that's held on police computers. I think there were four different police forces that had interactions with Thomas in relation to the abuse on Georgia, but he'd never been charged with anything.

6:52Hannah Al-Othman:And it was only five years after her death that this inquest was held. and it was the first time a coroner sitting without a jury had ruled that in a case of suicide after domestic abuse that the person who died had been unlawfully killed. The Crown Prosecution Service has said there was insufficient evidence to bring charges in relation to George's death. You, in your reporting, spoke to some academics who claim that, or have stated that victims of domestic abuse are now more likely to die by suicide than they are to be killed by a partner or a former partner. Can you tell me a bit more about what you learnt there?

7:30Hannah Al-Othman:So we knew that already from the National Police Chiefs Council. So they produced an annual report on domestic homicides. And the latest version of that report showed for the third year running that more people died from suicide in an abusive relationship than they did in what people may traditionally think is a domestic homicide. So being murdered by a partner. but when I spoke to the academic at Kent what he said is actually the definition that the police use to compile these figures is pretty narrow in terms of what domestic abuse they include and the period that they include it from and so he just looked at Kent and he found I think it was 10 or 15 times actually that number of people were dying and you know if you extrapolate that nationally it's not sort of tens of people who are dying every year from this it's hundreds or even thousands wow and then there's this report by the domestic homicide project which was published last week and identified the first case of a teenage girl being driven to suicide after suffering domestic abuse and it just goes to show how endemic this problem is hannah how have you approached your reporting on it?

8:49Hannah Al-Othman:Often when you read about a court case or you read about a death or you read about an inquest it is so focused on the woman's death and you know the crime that ended their life but actually what we've really wanted to do is tell the stories of who these women were as people and not just how they died but you know how they lived and who they were before they got into this relationship and what they meant to their families to their friends to their loved ones.

9:24Geraldine McKelvey, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Now, you're senior correspondent for The Guardian. One of the cases that you followed is that of Kimberley Milne. She was in her late 20s when she tragically ended her life by jumping from a bridge in July 2023. Last month, her husband Lee Milne was found guilty of culpable homicide, where a jury found that he had caused her death. Geraldine first off can you just tell me a bit more about Kimberley who was she before she met Leigh Milne? So Kimberley grew up in a close-knit family in Dundee which is a city in the north east of Scotland and she lived all of her life in Dundee she was one of four sisters and in their victim impact statements to the court her family described her as a much-loved sister daughter they said she was one in a million but throughout her life she'd struggled with mental health problems.

10:15Her mum talked about her history of mental health issues before she met Lee Milne. She'd had a suicide attempt. She had spent quite a lot of time receiving inpatient psychiatric care. So she was a very vulnerable person before she met Lee Milne. And what do we know about how and when she met Lee Milne and what kind of man he appeared to be at first? So I think her family said in evidence that she thought she'd met her Prince Charming. She was looking for her happy ever after she hadn't had a very easy life because of the mental health difficulties that she'd suffered so I think when Lee Milne came along and was very charming they met online in late 2021 I think she thought this was the happy ending that she'd been looking for and they quite quickly got married they got married in October 2022 so it was a bit of a whirlwind romance that that they had and I think that to the outside world to people looking on it might have seemed like she was happy and she'd finally met somebody and she wanted to spend her life with him.

11:24So when did the cracks in that relationship first begin to show I guess particularly to the people who were close around her? Well one of the things that the jury decided in Kimberly's case when they were convicting Lee Millen of engaging in a course of abusive conduct that he had tried to isolate her from her family and her younger sister Nikki said in evidence that he filled her head with absolute gobbledygook Nikki felt that Kimberly hadn't particularly wanted to get married but Lee Millen had sort of persuaded her to get married very early in the relationship I think they'd only been together about a year at the point that they did get married and before the wedding there had been several instances of quite horrific violence like Lee Milne had choked Kimberly he'd spat in her mouth he'd attacked her but alongside that that really horrific physical violence leading up to their wedding he had also been trying to isolate her from her family control her finances the abuse was sort of psychological and emotional as well as physical I think her family started to become really concerned in the immediate aftermath of the wedding her older sister Lindsay said in evidence that the morning after the wedding Kimberly phoned her and she was very upset she was hyperventilating and she was really stressed because they'd had a fight and she wanted to come home to the family home so Lindsay got her a taxi to her grandmother's house but ultimately she went back to Lee Milne and the relationship resumed but I think the family from quite early on in the relationship were concerned about it and didn't think it was particularly a healthy relationship for Kimberly to be in.

12:57And were there any other services that she accessed was there any other help outside of her family that she made contact with so she had quite a lot of contact with psychiatric services and nhs mental health services and actually she made some disclosures about the abuse to staff and i think then the staff suggested that she might want to have some contact with the police over this and that is how her original police complaint in may 2023 came about and lee milne appeared in court in may 2023 accused of a litany of domestic abuse offences against Kimberly. So one of the incidents that Kimberly told the police about was an attack she suffered.

13:34She had tried to barricade the door to stop Lee Milne from attacking her further and he managed to force Angie into the room that she was in and began punching her again and that evening I think she decided to sleep with a knife under her pillow because she was so scared of him but she was also really scared to leave because she didn't know if that would antagonise him even further. God. So at the point when Kimberly died in July 2023, his bail conditions prohibited him from contacting her or being in touch with her in any way. So even the fact that he was with her on the night of her death was a violation of his bail.

14:10So Lee Mill didn't stick to his bail conditions and he continued to terrorise Kimberly. What happened next? So on the night Kimberly died, they were seen by quite a few witnesses together in a retail park in Dundee and later on in a supermarket and the witnesses described kimberly as being distraught in lee meln's company they described him as acting aggressively towards her there was cctv footage of him driving very erratically with her in the car right remonstrating with her in the supermarket very shortly before she took her own life and less than an hour later kimberly walked onto a road bridge above the a90 which is a main road in Scotland at Lynx Dundee with Edinburgh and Aberdeen and she jumped to her death and what was quite crucial in this case was that at that point Lee Milne was following her, he was pursuing her onto the bridge.

15:01He claimed to the police when he was later interviewed by the police that he was trying to run after her to stop her from jumping from the bridge but ultimately she did jump from the bridge and very sadly lost her life that night.

15:26Can you tell me about the aftermath of Kimberley's death? I mean, how was the decision then made to charge Lee Milne? It wasn't made immediately. The police interviewed him almost immediately after the event, but I think it was several weeks before they made the decision to charge him with culpable homicide, and it's worth saying here that that had never happened in Scotland before. The Crown Office and Procurator Frisco Service, which is a sort of Scottish equivalent of the CPS, had never charged anyone with culpable homicide in relation to a domestic abuse-related suicide. So it was quite a landmark decision.

16:02And what does culpable homicide exactly mean? How does it differ from our regular understanding of homicide? So it's important at this point to mention that Scotland has a different legal system from England and Wales. So the offence of culpable homicide in Scottish law is equivalent to what we would think of as manslaughter in England and Wales. And that is where you are responsible for somebody's death, but you haven't intended to kill them. So it's less severe in the eyes of the law than murder, but it does mean that you do have the responsibility for causing somebody's death. So the case made literal history.

16:34Yes, yeah, and it's the first time, it's worth saying that it's the first time anywhere in Britain that a jury has convicted somebody of killing their current or former partner in a domestic abuse suicide situation, even when they've not physically caused that person's death. Lee Milne didn't strike the fatal blow, if you like, but the jury was satisfied that he was responsible for Kimberley's death because she felt like she had nowhere to go. The domestic abuse was so bad that she felt like she had no way out other than to take her own life.

17:10Geraldine, you did speak to the prosecutor for this case. What did they have to say about what happened to Kimberley and how the culpable homicide conviction came about? The prosecutor Alex Prentice Casey he's one of the most eminent criminal lawyers in Scotland and he said that initially there were mixed views on whether they could charge Lee Milne with culpable homicide because it was very complex, it had never been tried before but he looked at the history of domestic abuse and what had happened not just on the night of Kimberley's death but in the months and weeks before that and he thought that there was a possibility that a jury might accept that there was a causal connection between those two things.

17:48So he asked the police to do some more work on the case and eventually they got to the point where they felt that they were able to charge Lee Milne with culpable homicide. In this case, we had a catalogue of abusive behaviour of varying degrees, extending to choking, to physically assaulting her, to shouting and swearing at her, chasing her, throwing things at her and spitting on her and a number of really horrible things. And the point about the course of conduct is that it's persistent, that this is every day. How did Prentice explain the legal precedent that's now been set and what other prosecutors may look at or police forces when it comes to trying to build a case like this?

18:34So he was very clear that they're very difficult cases to navigate. It's not like the floodgates are going to open and we're going to suddenly have loads of these cases coming before the court because they are so difficult to evidence and so difficult to prosecute. But he said what it does, it sends like a message that this can be done and it will be done again if we have the evidence. Geraldine, you've looked at a lot of cases like Kimberly's, but hers was unusual because the majority of them don't end up being investigated. They don't go to court and they certainly don't get the culpable homicide or manslaughter conviction.

19:08in the majority of the cases that we have looked at in the context of domestic abuse related suicides that hasn't happened and one very sad case that I looked at was the case of Katie Madden and Katie lived in Lowesoft in Suffolk and she very sadly lost her life also in 2023. Katie's case I guess was similar to Kimberly's in the respect that her former partner Jonathan Russell was on bail and banned from contacting her at the point where she took her own life and Jonathan Russell had been accused of attacking Katie in the weeks before her death and he wasn't supposed to have any contact with her just like Lee Milne was not supposed to have any contact with Kimberly.

19:49But shortly before Katie died there was some contact between Katie and Jonathan and they did speak on the phone. And Jonathan was later asked by the coroner at Katie's inquest what the general contents of that call were and he said it was very unattic at the start. She was crying. She was just panicky. I tried to reassure her then it escalated into an argument and I ended up saying bad stuff the coroner then specifically asked Jonathan if he had told Katie that she should hang herself and he said I didn't say hang herself there was a couple of references where I said go kill yourself instantly I went back on myself and said no don't be silly, don't do that so he literally messaged her telling her to kill herself that is my understanding but unlike Kimberly's case the assault investigation was dropped very shortly after Katie's death.

20:36And I've tried really hard to get answers from Suffolk Police about this. But to the best of my knowledge, they have not pursued an investigation into Jonathan Russell for any offences after Katie's death. And it's worth saying as well that Jonathan Russell, they had a previous conviction for attacking another partner. And Katie had received a clear law disclosure outlining Jonathan Russell's history and the fact he had a previous conviction.

21:05Coming up, would a change in the law help these women get justice?

21:23One thing that many of the cases that you've reported on have in common is the fact that domestic abuse charges are being dropped after the women's deaths. Hannah, why was that happening?

21:34Hannah Al-Othman:I spoke to Louisa Rolfe, the National Police Youth Council lead, about this. And it is a feature of our current criminal justice system that police forces are very overstretched. I think in some cases it is lack of prioritisation or officers not taking them as seriously as they should. but she said sometimes it will come down to the fact as awful as it sounds that they have cases with living victims who are in serious danger and they're having to make that decision over which ones they prioritize and it's about potentially saving the life of a victim who's currently in a relationship rather than investigating it after someone has died but one thing I would say particularly that we've identified from our reporting is it's not just about protecting one woman because we've seen that in these cases often the abusers will then go on to you know get into a relationship with someone else or we've heard court cases at inquest that they have a history of domestic abuse against other women so it is not just about protecting one woman who is currently in a relationship with that person but about the wider public.

22:46I mean nonetheless your reporting and the general momentum behind the cases like this It raised a lot of public awareness. And I wonder how much that's changed the temperature in terms of what campaigners are asking for or whether there's any suggestions. There may be a change to a law or a change to the resources that police have to investigate these cases.

23:08Hannah Al-Othman:I think one of the issues with this is often we're seeing cases not come to court until five, six, seven years later or even inquests not being held until five, six, seven years later. the quality of evidence is lost people's memories deteriorate and particularly in a criminal trial where people will be cross-examined that's harder to to get that conviction if that time has passed and the evidence isn't as good and one thing that campaigners have said is that the issue is a lot of these cases don't even start being investigated as a potential homicide until many years down the line. So in that case, the evidence hasn't even been collected in the first place.

23:49Hannah Al-Othman:So what they're saying is where there's any history of domestic abuse. So, you know, if the police know they've been out to that house five times over the past year, then they should immediately start to treat that as a homicide. And it could be that it wasn't a homicide, that it was a suicide. But the campaigners say, you know, if every case was looked at as a potential homicide, then you have the best chance of securing those convictions. In March this year, the Liberal Democrats tabled an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, which would legally mandate police to investigate all suicides preceded by a history of domestic abuse as potential homicides.

24:26So exactly what you're talking about. Can you tell me about the reaction to that amendment? Is there support for it? And how would it change the lives of women experiencing domestic abuse?