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The not guilty verdict in the trial of a man accused of driving a young mother to suicide will not deter future manslaughter charges, with more such prosecutions already in the pipeline, a senior prosecutor has said.
Ryan Wellings, 30, was acquitted of the manslaughter of 23-year-old Kiena Dawes, who had left a note on her phone saying Wellings “killed me”. While he was jailed for six and a half years for assault and coercive and controlling behaviour, Dawes’s mother said: “Justice has not been done in the way we all hoped.”
It was only the second time a man has stood trial for causing his partner’s suicide (the first in 2006 also resulted in an acquittal). The charge has been successfully brought only once: in 2017, when Nicholas Allen pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Justene Reece.
Amid concern about the lack of prosecutions and convictions, Kate Brown, the national Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) domestic abuse lead, was defiant.
“We’re not deterred by the lack of success in this case,” she said. “We didn’t persuade the jury but we are going again. There are a number of cases where we’re actively considering this offence, some that are imminent. We are committed to using the law to prosecute and hopefully successfully prosecute cases of this nature.”
She said the anticipated increase in cases was a result of increased knowledge among police and others, and expressed hope that the Wellings trial would further raise awareness of the issue, which “absolutely is a priority”.
Nevertheless, his acquittal on manslaughter charges was seen by many as symptomatic of longstanding failings.
Margaret Hunter and Dr Tony Bennett, the parents of Roisin Hunter Bennett, whose 2022 suicide was found at an inquest to have been due to emotional abuse by her ex-boyfriend, said they stood in solidarity with Angela Dawes’s quest to have her daughter’s voice “fully” heard.
“Without a concerted societal change in attitudes towards domestic abuse and suicides, attempts to extend the liability for manslaughter to perpetrators of domestic abuse will continue to be unsuccessful, as Kiena’s case this week has so sadly highlighted,” they said.
Helen Boniface, a lawyer at Hogan Lovells who represented Hunter Bennett’s parents pro bono, said lack of adequate investigations or appropriate criminal consequences were “a significant bar to preventing such deaths in future”.
A groundbreaking report last year by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme and College of Policing found there were 242 domestic abuse-related deaths recorded between April 2022 and March 2023, including 93 suspected suicides after domestic abuse – more than one every four days – and 80 murders.
Harriet Wistrich, the director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, said the number of suicides was “almost certainly a significant underestimate. The true figure is likely to be three to five times that figure.”
She called for better training for juries, and for judges to allow experts on coercive control to put evidence before them, so they can “understand how women in these situations don’t have the agency they need to escape”.
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Domestic homicide reviews, commissioned after deaths following domestic abuse, were last year renamed domestic abuse-related death reviews so suicides would be explicitly included, but Boniface said inconsistency in commissioning them had led to a postcode lottery.
Their importance has been highlighted in cases such as that of 30-year-old mother Kellie Sutton, who a coroner found in May last year had been unlawfully killed, overturning a earlier verdict of death by suicide. Her partner, Steven Gane, was previously jailed for physically and mentally abusing Sutton.
Suicide after domestic abuse is a “silent killer”, according to Frank Mullane, who set up Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse (AAFDA) after the murder of his sister Julia and nephew Will by her ex-husband. “There is an eerie silence to many suicides, it’s horrible,” he said. “In domestic abuse suicides, it’s like the perpetrator has hired the victim as a hitman to carry our their dirty work. It’s horrific.”
Too often, police investigations into suicide were “inadequate, superficial or non-existent”, he added. Some campaigners and family members have called for a change in the law. In 2020, France introduced a law that implements a sentence of up to 10 years and a fine of €150,000 (£126,000) if domestic abuse is a prominent factor. “The law needs examining as it is not fit to deliver justice for these victims and their families,” said Mullane. “I suspect we may need a specific law to cover suicides and unexplained deaths.”
The NPCC lead for domestic abuse, the assistant commissioner Louisa Rolfe, said in recent years officers had been given training, required to explore domestic abuse in the case of unexpected deaths and issued with guidance on management of potential abusers and evidence gathering. She said the NPCC continued to work with the CPS and AAFDA to make improvements.
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In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
