The Observer.

Hello, it's Alexi, and you're listening to the Slow Newscast Extra, a new show every Thursday about a story we just can't stop thinking about.

And this week, I'm thinking about something that didn't happen, a trial that didn't give

a grieving mother the answers she was looking for. And what the verdict, even though it was reached

properly, could mean for other cases where allegedly abusive men drive their partners to suicide.

I'm joined by Claudia Williams, who will be a very familiar voice to listeners of the show.

She's here to talk to me about a woman called Terran Baird.

Hello. It's so funny being on this side of the mic.

Claudia, let's start at the beginning. How did you first come across this story?

So I first started working on the story back in 2020 because I was working on a podcast series

called Hidden Homicides, which I think we actually published on the slow newscast

when it came out in 2021.

And the point of that series, it was looking at domestic abuse deaths that go uninvestigated and

therefore unreported. So specifically women who were dying in sudden or unexplained circumstances

when there was a known history of domestic abuse, maybe the police knew about allegations against a partner

or something like that, but then never

went on to investigate how they died. And the final episode of that series looked at what was then

this kind of new frontier of research, which was suicide. And actually, the kind of academic

researchers and campaigners and also lawyers were

realizing that if you took into account suicides after domestic abuse, our data was even more

wildly inaccurate. And there was a sense at the time that this was kind of, I say a frontier

in terms of research, but also in terms of the law, because there was a sense at the time that this was kind of, I say a frontier in terms of research,

...