Dad wasn’t a monster, but I don’t blame my mother for killing him
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For David Challen, reading last year about the decades-long abuse of Gisèle Pelicot by her husband and dozens of other men brought back a flurry of emotions. “It highlighted the normality of these men in our society,” Challen says. “My dad was not a monster. He was deeply complex. If society labels them monsters, it’s washing its hands of how they are created.”
Challen, 38, knows better than most that behind every sensational headline is a web of complexity. In August 2010, his mother, Sally, a 56-year-old housewife, killed her 61-year-old husband of 31 years, Richard, at their home in Claygate, Surrey, by bludgeoning him to death with a hammer. Convicted of murder, she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
But all was not as it seemed. While his mother was in prison, Challen unearthed chilling details chronicling the decades of domestic abuse she had suffered and kept from everyone, including him and his brother, James. She had been dragged down stairs, attempted suicide at 21 and been raped by Richard on a family holiday to Los Angeles. She was coercively controlled — a pattern of abuse where someone is made to feel dependent, isolated or scared — and forced to hand over her salary. After years of ardent campaigning and an appeal, her conviction was reduced to manslaughter. After nine years in prison, Sally Challen walked free from HMP Send in 2019.
It was a landmark case: the murder conviction was quashed due to new psychiatric evidence, and the final sentence acknowledged the psychological impact of years of controlling abuse. Three thousand murder convictions are being reassessed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission to factor in instances of coercive control, and at least five cases have been reopened.
Now Challen has written a book — The Unthinkable: A Story of Control, Violence and My Mother — about his struggle coming to terms with his father’s abuse and how, subconsciously, what he witnessed as a child continues to affect him. “If you don’t tell your stories, they swallow you whole,” Challen says. “Mine almost swallowed me whole.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/dad-wasnt-a-monster-but-i-dont-blame-my-mother-for-killing-him-bmq3cxzg3.
