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‘Yes, I battered my husband to death. But I still love him’: Sally Challen – who killed her husband then had her murder conviction quashed by proving his psychological torture drove her to it – tells her story to save others from her fate
The figure walking across the dark car park was one Sally Challen recognised immediately. Of course she did.
After 30 years of marriage she would have known that gait, that profile, anywhere. It was her husband Richard, locking his car and jauntily trotting across the road — straight through the doors of a well-known local brothel.
Sally's heart was pounding as conflicting emotions ripped through her. Fury, that he was betraying her, his loyal wife. Disgust that he was paying prostitutes — women who were likely damaged and exploited — for sex. And triumph, that she'd 'got' him at last.
He couldn't wriggle his way out of this one. Finally, he'd have to own up to his appalling behaviour.
An hour passed, and there he was again, returning to his car. 'He saw me and legged it,' she says.
A farcical scene ensued as they raced their cars through the Christmas-lit streets of suburban Surbiton, with Sally screeching to a halt outside the family home three miles away in Claygate, Surrey. But Richard had got there first.
'I ran into the kitchen and found him calmly making a cup of tea,' says Sally. 'I shouted that I'd just seen him coming out of a brothel and he looked me straight in the eye and said, 'what are you talking about, Sally? I've just been out selling someone a car. Honestly, I don't know where you get these ideas. You're bloody going mad.'
She'd caught him red-handed, but his indignant, flat denials were so convincing it left her thinking that perhaps she was going mad. In the face of such certainty and insouciance, who wouldn't have been left doubting themselves?
If one incident sums up the devastating mind games that Sally Challen was subjected to during her marriage to Richard, it is surely this one.
But the 'brothel incident', as Sally calls it, was just one in a huge, painful dossier of horrifically cruel and controlling behaviour she endured throughout her entire adult life at the hands of the man she still, to this day, describes as 'the love of my life'.
Outwardly, this middle-class mother-of-two had an enviable life. A successful car salesman for a husband, she lived in a double-fronted, four-bedroom, £1million house and their two sons went to expensive, private schools.
She had a good job as an office manager for the Police Federation. Yet what nobody knew was that for more than three decades she was also psychologically tortured, and subjected to vile sexual abuse at the hands of her own husband.
The torment Sally suffered left no bruises. No one had a clue what was truly going on until the day, in August 2010, when she finally snapped and killed Richard in a brutal hammer attack.
Driven to breaking point, she inflicted at least 18 blows as he sat eating a meal, before covering his body with blankets, changing out of her blood-spattered clothes and driving away with a plan to commit suicide.
Painted as a vengeful, jealous wife in court, Sally spent nine years in prison for murder.
But a change in the law in 2015, when coercive control finally became an offence, enabled Sally to appeal her conviction, which ultimately led to her charge being reduced to manslaughter.
Her legal team were able to argue that she was incapable of making a cold-blooded, premeditated decision to kill Richard, as all rational reasoning had been destroyed by the years of abuse she'd suffered.
Having been released from prison earlier this year, her case is now cited as one of the most shocking examples of coercive control the UK has seen. It has set people thinking about what goes on behind closed doors.
