Episode 98 - Sally Challen: A Case of Coercive Control
RedHanded
Wondery | RedHanded
4.5 • 18.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2019
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One Saturday morning in November 2010 Sally Challen walked into the kitchen and hit her husband Richard in the head with a hammer. She hit him over 20 times. In the trial that followed Sally was painted as a possessive, jealous woman who murdered her husband in cold-blood. This year, in 2019, Sally won a land mark appeal to have her conviction overturned as a fresh defence was shaped around her mental state owing to the years of emotional and psychological abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Prime members, you can listen to Redhanded early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. |
| 0:24.0 | I'm Saruuti, I'm Hannah, and welcome to Redhanded. |
| 0:27.0 | One Saturday morning, in November 2010, 56-year-old Sally Challenn walked into the kitchen of her husband, Richard Challenn's home, and hit him over the head with a hammer. |
| 0:37.0 | She hit him again and again over 20 times, as Richard sat at the kitchen table, eating bacon and eggs. |
| 0:45.0 | And just in case Richard was still alive after the attack, Sally stuffed a tea towel into his mouth, and then wrapped his body up in some old curtains. |
| 0:54.0 | She then wrote a note that said, I love you, Sally, and placed it on Richard's body. |
| 1:00.0 | Then she washed up the breakfast dishes, and drove back to Claygate and Sari, to the home she was sharing with her and Richard's 23-year-old son David, since the pair had separated a few months ago. |
| 1:10.0 | The next day, Sally drove her son David to work, and then drove herself to beachy head. When she arrived, she called her cousin to confess what she'd done. |
| 1:20.0 | Then she walked out onto the cliffs. Reports flooded into Sussex Police of a woman on the edge of the 500-foot cliffs. |
| 1:27.0 | For people who aren't British, beachy head is probably the most famous spot in the UK, where people kill themselves by jumping off cliffs. |
| 1:34.0 | I'm going to beachy head next weekend, actually. |
| 1:36.0 | Are you? |
| 1:37.0 | Well, this weekend. This weekend, yeah. |
| 1:39.0 | I'm going to stay in Hastings, and then I'm going to go do beachy head to the Seven Sisters Country Park. |
| 1:45.0 | Oh, nice. I'm excited. |
| 1:46.0 | Someone, I can't remember who told me it might have been one of my housemates. They said that I don't know if they were there, or anyone, a group of their friends were at a restaurant in Tower Bridge celebrating a birthday and someone jumped as they were having this birthday lunch, and they all sort of had to pretend that it didn't happen. |
| 2:04.0 | Oh, my God. Recently. |
| 2:06.0 | Like, literally last week, yeah. |
| 2:08.0 | Jesus. I didn't even hear about that. |
| 2:10.0 | You never hear about people jumping off the bridges in London, really? |
| 2:12.0 | No, I've never heard that. |
| 2:13.0 | You hear about the Humber Bridge, but the London bridges just aren't that high, like the ones on the river. |
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