Hello and welcome to another episode of Till Death Do Us Part, Just Melissa.

Now this is one of those cases that forces you to sit with uncomfortable questions.

Not just what happened, but what responsibility

means when a crime doesn't end at the scene. In September of 2015, a 29-year-old engineer named

Mark Van Dongen was asleep in a Bristol flat when someone he once loved walked into the room and changed the course

of his life forever. Sixteen months later, Mark would be dead, not in the UK, not by his

attacker's hand directly, but in a Belgian hospital through a legal assisted death.

And the woman who attacked him, she would be convicted, but not for his death.

This is a story of Mark Van Dongen and Berlina Wallace, a relationship defined by obsession, control, and violence, and a case that still unsettles legal experts today. Now, Mark Van Dongen was a Dutch national born and raised in the Netherlands.

Friends and family described him as gentle, intelligent, and deeply empathetic, the kind of person who

avoided conflict whenever possible. He moved to the UK to study civil engineering and eventually

settled in Bristol, where he built a quiet but full life. He had friends, a career, plans. By all accounts, he was not a reckless man,

and he was not someone who sought drama, which makes what happened next even harder to understand.

Mark met Berlina Wallace around 2010. Berlina was older than Mark, she was in her 40s, and studying

fashion in Bristol. What began as a romantic relationship eventually became cohabitation,

and the two lived together for several years. From the outside, this looked like a long-term

partnership. But behind closed doors, the relationship was volatile. In statements later played to a

jury, Mark described Berlina as extremely controlling, emotionally volatile, and prone to intense jealousy. He told police she once

hid his passport to prevent him from leaving the country. He said she poured boiling water on him

during an argument, and he described incidents where she injured herself and then accused him of causing the injuries.

Something he said made him afraid to leave her. Mark told friends and police that he was scared

of her temper, but felt trapped by guilt and fear. Now, Berlina told a very different story. She claimed that Mark was emotionally and

...