‘Why was my daughter’s murder treated less seriously? Because it happened in the home’

Fifteen years ago, public outrage over the number of young men dying due to the ‘epidemic’ of knife crime required tough and decisive action.

The Ben Kinsella Trust launched a powerful and successful campaign, calling on politicians to change the law.

As a result, the starting point in sentences for murders involving a knife – or any other weapon – taken to the scene with intent was increased by 10 years from 15 to 25.

But while the change was widely celebrated, it created a gulf in punishments between murders committed on the street and those taking place behind closed doors using weapons – often knives – already there.

It’s one that many campaigners today believe is contributing to another deadly ‘epidemic’ – that of violence against women and girls.

On average, a woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK.

It has been called a ‘national emergency’.

But men murdering women in the home with weapons found there are still being given life sentences with minimum terms of as little as 15 years and under.

This disparity has left the bereaved relatives of those women feeling as though domestic killings – and the lives of their loved ones – are just not worth the same level of concern.

‘We are diminishing victims by treating women differently’

Megan Newborough was murdered by a man she was in the early stages of exploring a potential relationship with in August 2021.

The 23-year-old had everything going for her – a loving family, a great group of friends, a job she was excelling in and was just days away from collecting the keys for her first home.

‘She was a lovely daughter that any parent would be proud of,’ her dad Anthony says.

‘She was the go-to person for friends, family, everybody. She was the one that everybody went to. Help, assistance, advice – you name it. It’s all cliché, isn’t it? But she was.’

Megan was strangled to death at the home of the man’s parents, where she had gone to see him on the evening of August 6.

Her parents Anthony and Elaine were disappointed by the judge taking a starting point of 15 years when the killer was sentenced.

In the end, his minimum term was fixed at 23 years.

‘After he strangled Megan, he walked around the room for 10 minutes, then went to the kitchen and got a knife and took the knife to Megan,’ Anthony says.

‘He said he wanted to make sure she was dead.

‘If a knife crime like that had happened outside the home, the starting point
would have been 25 years – because it’s the intent in taking the knife with you.

‘My argument is, surely if you go to another room after 10 minutes to get a knife and use it to make sure someone’s dead – isn’t that intent?’

Elaine says while ministers have promised to review the murder sentencing framework, ‘there are things they can do now to make a difference’.

She argues that politicians just need the ‘appetite to engage in it’, but she believes neither the past nor present government have had it. She doesn’t know why.

‘They’re kind of treating murder by strangers as having more severity. Murder is murder, and the punishment should fit the crime. Unfortunately, in this country we don’t have that.’

She adds: ‘Every year you’re averaging around 100 women that are killed by men. If it takes 10 years to change the sentencing – that’s over 1,000 women. How is that acceptable? It isn’t.

‘We are diminishing victims and victims’ families by treating women differently, and in some ways they are facilitating the continued murder of women within the home.

‘We don’t understand, why haven’t they changed it?’

‘There are many reasons for the lack of outrage’

Criminology expert Professor Jane Monckton Smith tells Metro there are many reasons for the lack of outrage at the number of women dying due to domestic abuse.

‘We are treating domestic homicide almost as if it’s not really a homicide – it’s a fight between two people that went wrong. And that’s our biggest problem at the moment,’ she says.

Her research at the University of Gloucester, where she is a professor of public protection, has found that most killers follow the same pattern of coercive control.

She charts the escalation along eight stages she calls the Homicide Timeline.

It blows a hole in the traditional ‘crime of passion’ and ‘red mist’ myths they have rehearsed for as long as anyone cares to remember.

Instead, it clearly sets out the mindset of these killers, including the coercive control they subject partners to, the escalation in their behaviour when that control is challenged, and the planning that goes into the eventual homicide when control is lost.

‘When are we going to accept that domestic homicides are part of a very consistent behavioural pattern, mainly of men – but not exclusively – where they decide “I am going to kill my partner”?’ Professor Monckton Smith says.

‘Now, that is not a “crime of passion”. I would define a crime of passion as being pretty spontaneous. It’s the opposite.’

‘We have a life sentence, and this man is walking free’

Julie Butcher was murdered by her ex-husband in 2005.

She had left him around two weeks before she died, but her sister Emma King tells Metro there was still ‘a lot of coercion and control’ in her final days.

Her sister’s murderer ‘lured’ her to the council home they shared under the guise of giving the keys back, she says.

In the week before, he went around telling friends it was ‘Judgement Day’.

Later, Emma got a call from him saying: ‘Your sister needs you. Go and be with your sister.’

Emma recalls: ‘He didn’t use the words that he killed her. I went running up there because I knew what he was like, and I found her. He blamed me for Julie leaving, I think.

‘He wanted me to suffer and that was the best way – to make me live with that for the rest of my life.’

He pleaded guilty to murder and was jailed for at least 13 years. He was released in 2020.

Emma said she ‘isolated for six years after Julie died’, rarely leaving the house because of the crippling anxiety.

That trauma reignited when he was up for release, and she found herself plunged into a fight to secure an exclusion zone to stop him returning to the same area she lives in.

‘A few days before he was released, the police came around and asked if I wanted to see a more recent photo of him,’ Emma says.

‘I said yes, and they said to me “I’m so, so sorry – I just want you to be aware that he is laughing”, and he was smirking.

‘So, he’s had the last laugh out of everything. He’s been released and the last thing you see is him smirking. It just sums the whole system up really, how devastating that is to families.

‘Why should Julie’s life be worth less than someone who is killed on the street?’

Freed to kill again

Professor Monckton Smith emphasises that not everyone on the Homicide Timeline will go on to reach stage eight. But she believes that her research proves that once they’re on it, they never off.

In the most extreme cases, they may go through all eight stages more than once.

Chiyvonne Shennan’s sister Cherylee was murdered by her partner in 2014.

He is now serving a whole life sentence. But that is only because Cherylee was not the first ex-partner he murdered. Having served just 14 years, he was freed to do it again.

Cherylee ‘was the kind of person who brought warmth, love and laughter wherever she went’, Chiyvonne says.

‘She found joy in her family, her cooking, and the simple moments that made life special. She was the rock of our family.

‘Cherylee was so much to so many: a loving mum, daughter, aunt, niece, cousin, and friend. She held a special place in each of our hearts, and she was deeply cherished by everyone who knew her.’

Cherylee hired the man who would kill her as a volunteer at her antique furniture shop in August 2013.

By November he had ‘manipulated and isolated’ her, Chiyvonne says. Cherylee, her sister adds, ‘did not know the full picture’ of his background.

‘A far as I know, he said something to her like he was in a fight with a guy,’ Chiyvonne says.

‘That’s what it was it was portrayed as, a fight with a guy that went wrong – not that he had murdered his ex-partner.’

It was only after her sister’s death that Chiyvonne found out about the terror he subjected her to.

‘He was an absolute monster,’ she says. ‘I’ve found out since that he had her held by knifepoint whenever she made a phone call to his probation.

‘At one point he was hidden in the cupboard when two police officers went around. He had her held hostage for three days apparently, all weekend at the flat that he had.’

To make the family’s ordeal worse, Cherylee’s family would also hear of the missed opportunities to save her before she was murdered.

Her killer should have been recalled on his life licence for assaulting Cherylee. But when police were first called, the officers failed to pass their report on to probation in time.

She called them the following day and they later visited, unaware he was hiding inside listening to everything being discussed.

He should have got a whole life sentence when he destroyed the first family. Instead, he was able to destroy two

When police were called again, following a tip-off from probation that Cherylee had contacted them to confirm her reports of abuse, two officers with no protection and basic equipment were sent to her home.

The killer, who had been hiding in the garden, burst in armed with a hammer and ambushed the two officers before targeting Cherylee.

After bludgeoning her, he tried to strangle her before grabbing a knife from the kitchen and chasing her into the street where she was repeatedly stabbed.

Chiyvonne believes Cherylee would still be here if he had been ordered to serve a longer sentence for the first murder in 1998.

‘She’d still be alive,’ she adds. ‘I take comfort in the whole life sentence, but not really. He should have got that when he destroyed the first family. Instead, he was able to destroy two.’

How can sentences for domestic murders be toughened up?

Wendy Joseph KC sat as a judge at the Old Bailey for a decade, predominantly overseeing murder trials.

She says: ‘Of course we should be utterly outraged [by the number of women being killed as a result of domestic abuse], and the sentencing should reflect that.

‘But having stuck a period of years onto our outrage, you have to ask why? At the moment, our prison cells are overflowing. The sentences have gone up and up and up across the board.’

Judge Joseph points out that when she came to the Bar in 1975, the average sentence that was served by a murderer was 14 years and 10 months. Now, it’s only just short of 25 years.

‘All of that’s happened because of Schedule 21 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which brought in the 25-year starting point,’ she says.

The change was brought in to try and deter young people from going out with a knife tucked into their pocket.

‘If you ask anyone who knows anything about this, has it worked – the answer is no,’ Wendy says.

‘The idea that kids were going to say, you know what 25 years is a long time, I think I’ll stay home and watch Strictly is just bizarre. It was never going to work, and it hasn’t.’

Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, has asked the Law Commission to review the law on homicide and the sentencing framework for murder.

A review commissioned by the previous Conservative government and conducted by Clare Wade KC concluded with a recommendation not to raise the 15-year minimum term.

In December, the government announced the implementation of two recommendations from the Wade Review – the introduction of two new aggravating features: murders involving strangulation or when it is connected to the end of a relationship.

Another suggested aggravated feature from Ms Wade KC’s review is the presence of overkill – gratuitous violence far beyond that required to cause death.

Every life lost requires that absolute assessment of what happened to that victim over the years as well as within the moment

‘Sometimes the violence involved surpasses even what you see in a serial killing,’ according to Professor Monckton Smith, who has studied hundreds of cases.

‘Sometimes I wonder if even that would cause the outrage that we need [to change the way we think about intimate partner killings].’

Judge Joseph agrees the best way to ensure tougher sentences for domestic murders is through aggravating features, saying the 25-year tariff has been ‘a blunt weapon’.

‘I think that’s wiser,’ she says, ‘because it allows a very careful assessment of each of the features of each case, and every life lost is completely individual.

‘Every life lost requires that absolute assessment of what happened to that victim over the years as well as within the moment.’

Jess Phillips, Minister for Safeguarding & Violence Against Women and Girls, said: ‘Every death related to domestic abuse is a tragedy, and my thoughts are with the families in these cases and others like them.

‘We recognise that disparities exist in the sentencing for domestic homicide and have worked with families campaigning on this, which is why the government has asked the Law Commission to review the sentencing framework for murder and the law of homicide.

‘We are taking action to prevent further tragic losses as part of the government’s mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, including creating dedicated domestic abuse teams in every force.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].

For more stories like this, check our news page.