That day, 20 November 2014, the argument was about a hundred things, but mostly it was about cigarettes and milk. Farieissia Martin and Kyle Farrell were always arguing about something. They’d been like that ever since they first got together, aged 16. On again, then off again. Now 21, Kyle and Fri, as everyone called her, had two young daughters, but they still fought constantly. They loved each other too much, their friends said.

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Fri and Kyle didn’t live together, at least not officially. Kyle still lived with his parents in Toxteth in Liverpool, but he was always over at Fri’s, a few streets away. Fri lived with the girls in a small red terraced house on Charlecote Street, a pretty road that slopes steeply down towards the River Mersey. There are hanging baskets outside the houses, flowerbeds filled with lavender and primroses. From the top of the street you can see across the grey water to hills in the distance.

Kyle had agreed to come over to watch the kids in the late afternoon while Fri went to the shops with her friend Katrina and her daughter. They took a taxi into the centre of town, and Fri bought some makeup and browsed in a shoe shop. A crowd was gathering and someone told them the Christmas lights were about to be turned on, so they hung around. Katrina videoed the three of them walking towards the Christmas tree, all happy.

At 6.30pm, while they were still shopping, Kyle started texting:

“think am a dik ed”

“What have ya done,” replied Fri.

“take me for a prick”

“What have ya done?” she texted again.

Kyle’s messages came in a rush, every 15 seconds or so. In the space of 10 minutes, he sent nearly 30, and Fri replied to many of them. This always happened when she went out without him. He’d want to know where she was, who she was with, when she’d be back. Even if she was just round the corner with a friend, he’d barrage her with messages, then show up at their door to take her home.

Fri showed some of Kyle’s texts to Katrina, who was shocked to see how he wrote to her. Kyle was starting to make demands: he wanted to go out, wanted to leave the kids with Fri’s mum, wanted Fri to come back, wanted her to bring him cigarettes and milk. Katrina noticed that Fri seemed more fatigued and disbelieving than particularly upset by it.

“How the fuck can we be together if u don’t even let me have a drink or a break. I’m fuckin drained”, she texted Kyle.

“I would of if u would of come in like supposed wid shopping that ye supposed to get”, he replied.

Fri told Katrina she was sure Kyle had broken something at her house. He was always threatening to damage her things – smash the telly, break the bed.

“What have ya done!!!” she texted him again, at 6.37pm.

“broke it!!!!!!!” he replied, referring to her bed.

“Omg! I was going Iceland then comin ome!” she wrote. “Your just a big chid an won’t let me have a life!”

“won’t let you have a life hahahahahhahaha”, he replied.

“lil slag stay out get shagged or raped”, he wrote a few minutes later.

Fri texted a friend and told her what was going on:

“Tellin ya chick, hate him, just loves to make life hard for me”, she wrote.

“Ignore him”, her friend replied.

But then Kyle told Fri he was going to go out and leave the kids by themselves and she started to worry that he actually might. Fri’s phone battery ran out, so she used Katrina’s to call Kyle just after 7pm to say they were coming home. Katrina noticed Fri was on edge now, anxious. She told Fri to call her mum or her brothers, to tell them what Kyle was saying, but Fri wouldn’t. She never did. She didn’t want them going round and confronting Kyle, getting into trouble on her behalf.

On the way back, Katrina told Fri to pick up the kids and come stay at her house. Fri agreed, but when she got back to Charlecote Street, at 8pm, things seemed a little calmer. The kids were fine, Kyle was still there and he hadn’t broken the bed, just some crystal decorations on the frame. They talked, Fri cried, and she told Kyle it felt like she couldn’t do anything without his permission. They made up, and Kyle asked if she still wanted to go out for a drink. He said he didn’t mind looking after the kids. So Fri, feeling better, went back to Katrina’s. When she got there, at 9.10pm, she sent him a message, apologising. He replied: “Me 2 xx”.

Over the next few hours, Fri and Katrina sat in the kitchen, chatting and drinking brandy and Pepsi. Fri was relaxed, happy to be out.

In the early hours of the morning, Kyle started texting again. “What time u comin in”, he wrote at 1.35am. “don’t take the piss bbe xxx”, he added.

Fri had said she’d be home by midnight, so she knew she’d be in trouble. Kyle still wanted the cigarettes and the milk. “I know babe I got it xxx”, she assured him. But it was late now, too late.

Kyle kept texting:

“Nah am vexed”

“Cunt”

“dirty little piss ed”

“causing arguments again u stupid twat”

Finally, just before 4.30am, Fri got in a cab. “On me way xxx”, she texted Kyle. It was only a short journey from Katrina’s: past St Cleopas Church, past the paddocks and allotments, past the Team Oasis “Happy Days” Activity Centre and the Bleak House pub. The area, still associated with the Toxteth riots that happened nearly 40 years ago, was quiet. The police are still held in profound suspicion, I was often told, but it’s different here now to how it was. It was unrecognisable, it was better.

The cab turned right at the kebab shop on the corner, down Charlecote Street.

“Ere now”, Fri texted as the taxi pulled up.

Kyle replied: “bout fukin time”.

Farieissia was the baby. That’s what her family called her, and still call her – the baby. She had an older sister, Natasha, and three older brothers, Ishmael, Samuel and Marcus. They spoiled Fri, couldn’t help it; she was always so tiny and cute. Even fully grown she was only five foot three, and slight as a child. “Like this,” her uncle, Steve Cassidy, told me, holding up his little finger.

Fri was the outgoing one, her friends would say – funny, bubbly, happy-go-lucky. As she grew up, she became obsessed with dancing. She was a backing dancer for Ishmael’s rap collective, attended a performing arts college for a while and imagined teaching dance one day. She loved to dress up, make herself immaculate. She’d wear bright tops, red lipstick, and pose with her head thrown back so her long, dark hair fell like satin down her back. She even wore her school uniform with pride, her teachers remembered.

When Fri was 10, her mother and father split up. Her mum, Lyly, got together with a new partner and life at home became a little more chaotic: parties at night, arguments among the family. Fri started hanging around with a big group of friends that included Kyle. They’d known each other since they were five, at primary school at St Silas’s on Pengwern Street and then at Shorefields secondary school. Kyle was popular, but quietly so. He liked to play football and computer games. Everyone said how little he spoke. When they were out with friends, he was often too shy to talk to Fri. Instead, he’d send her messages afterwards. In 2010, Fri and Kyle finally got together. Marcus, Fri’s brother, was a little concerned. He knew Kyle from playing Sunday football, had spent time at his house. He remembered Kyle hanging around on the corner with older guys in the neighbourhood and had seen him be a bit of a bully at times. But he could tell his sister was happy.

Farieissia Martin, known as Fri. Photograph: Justice For Women

Fri was more than happy: she was hooked. She thought Kyle was gorgeous and would write notes to her friends saying how she loved him. But even in the first year of their relationship Fri and Kyle squabbled. They’d call each other names, then make up. Fri noticed early on that Kyle was jealous, obsessed with who she’d been with before him, convinced she was sleeping with his friends. He wanted to know who she was friends with on Facebook, who she was messaging. He would come to pick her up from college so she wouldn’t walk past any men on the way back. When they argued, he’d call her a slut or a slag. To Fri, it became normal. “Change the record,” she’d say.

In 2010, aged 16, Fri went to a pub with her mum and Marcus. A family sitting at the bar called them the N-word and threw a banana at them from a fruit bowl. Lyly went for them, got hit, Marcus punched the guy who did it, broke his jaw, and then Fri piled in, too. Marcus went to prison briefly. Fri got a supervision order, which she breached, and, in 2011, she had to spend two months and 20 days in a youth offending unit. When she came out, she felt isolated. Friends had drifted away: she could count them on one hand, she said. Everyone was doing their own thing, she felt, and so it was just her and Kyle, hanging out at his parents’ house or her mum’s. Neither was working – Kyle was in and out of college, doing a construction course and qualifying for a security badge, but he never had a full-time job. Both lived on benefits, and they spent all their time together.

The first time Fri remembers Kyle hitting her was an evening in December 2011. She’d gone out with some friends and come back to Kyle’s house later than she said she would, so he slapped her across the face and dragged her out of the house by her hair. They worked it out, moved on. But then it happened again, and again. It became almost normal. He’d lash out and she’d fight back, scratching him or trying to push him off her. According to Fri, Kyle’s mother sometimes had to intervene. Kyle’s cousin, Cody Rowson, speaking on behalf of Kyle’s family, says she never witnessed an aggressive side to him. “Kyle was brought up around a working-class family and knew his morals, and loved nothing more than being a dad and playing football,” she told me. The following accounts are based on Fri’s later statements and those of her family and friends. Kyle’s family have always said they never saw him being violent.

In January 2012, aged 18, Fri became pregnant with their first baby. When she was about five months along, they had a row on her mum’s doorstep because Fri wouldn’t let Kyle in, and he kicked her in the stomach. He said he hadn’t meant to hurt her, he had been trying to kick the door. The next day, Fri went to hospital with a friend to get the baby checked. She told the midwife she’d been hurt accidentally while trying to stop a fight at a party. Fri became good at excuses. When she had a black eye and bruising on her face, she told her family she’d hit herself on the oven door. Another time, she told them the baby had thrown a toy at her head. Her brother Ishmael thought it sounded weird at the time. But then again, he thought, kids throw stuff.

After Fri had their baby, things improved. Ishmael remembers Fri coming over to his house, showing off her daughter, delighted. Kyle was still quiet and withdrawn, but Fri seemed so happy. But then, when the baby was only three months old, Fri found out she was pregnant again. When he heard the news, Kyle punched her in the arm and told her she should get an abortion. They kept the baby, but the pregnancy seemed to trigger some new animosity in Kyle. Fri felt he didn’t want to be with her any more. When they argued now, he’d call her fat and ugly, and say no one would want her now she had kids.

On 5 July 2013, a couple of weeks before she gave birth to their second baby, Fri moved into her new house on Charlecote Street. It was a chance, she thought, for her and Kyle to start afresh. They agreed he’d stay with her four times a week and otherwise be at his mum’s. Their second daughter arrived on 25 July, and things seemed all right at first. But it wasn’t long before arguments started again. Kyle would try to dictate where she could go, who with, what time she had to be in. If she was late, he’d get angry, break her things, punch holes in the wall, throw her to the ground, kick her. Friends began to witness the violence. Once, when Fri was round at Katrina’s house, Kyle was texting as usual, wanting to know who she was with. Katrina told Fri to tell him to come over and see for himself – it was just the two of them there, having a dance in the living room. Kyle came, he and Fri argued and he threw Fri across the room so she landed hard on the sofa. Katrina couldn’t believe what she’d seen – the whole thing had escalated from 0 to 100 in seconds.

When they argued, Fri often felt she provoked Kyle. He’d call her a slag, and she’d say: “Yeah I know I am”, and it would drive him crazy. It was the same when he was violent – Fri felt she allowed it to happen, that it was somehow her fault. He’d sit on top of her, hold down her wrists and laugh, and she’d try to wriggle out from under him but would get too hot and give up or cry. He’d say he was just messing around. After arguments, Kyle would sometimes ask if she wanted to have sex, and if she said no, he’d accuse her of not liking it, or him, any more. Several times, he forced her, raped her. He’d pin her down, spit on her and mock her body. She felt too embarrassed to tell anyone, and too scared. “I knew it wasn’t right,” Fri later wrote in a statement, “but I stayed with him and forgave him because I love him and just wanted to be a happy family.” She imagined them getting married one day, had picked out her wedding dress: shorter at the front, longer at the back.

Over the course of 2014, everything seemed to collapse. Fri found out that Kyle had got another girl pregnant while she’d been pregnant with their first child. She couldn’t believe it – the betrayal when she was newly pregnant, the year of lies that must have followed. After she found out, their arguments always came back to it – his cheating and lying. According to Cody Rowson, Fri once had a conversation with Kyle’s mother, who asked why she didn’t leave him. “I can’t,” replied Fri. “I love him too much.”

By now, Fri was hardly seeing anyone else. Everyone in her family has a story of inviting her to something – a Sunday lunch, a party – and Fri making an excuse and not turning up. On the occasions they did manage to see her, her family and friends noticed that she looked exhausted, drawn, like she’d lost some vitalising spirit. Fri never wore makeup any more, never got dressed up.

That summer, Fri’s mum was so worried that she took Fri and the kids to the Lake District for a holiday. She told Fri to turn off her phone, and Fri seemed to relax without the constant stream of texts from Kyle. They ended up staying an extra couple of days because Fri didn’t want to go home. After the time away, she felt emboldened enough to break up with Kyle and briefly, in the early autumn, started seeing someone else. (Everyone said he looked exactly like Kyle.)

It didn’t last. Soon enough, as usual, she and Kyle were back together. In the days leading up to 21 November 2014, Kyle and Fri endlessly messaged each other, going round and round the same loops. They were vicious to each other, then calm again, Kyle either pleading to get back together or accusing her of infidelity. Fri told him to leave her alone. On 18 November, she wrote: “I don’t want a relationship where r kids see us boxin an arguin constantly its only a matter of time it will happen again ill end up with a black eye and the kids will be tellin people”.

But on 19 November, they made up. Kyle came over to Fri’s house and they watched movies together. He asked to see her phone, wanted to know who she was messaging. They argued and Fri told him they had to trust each other if they were going to make it work. Kyle agreed, and, for the 100th time, the 1,000th time, they were together again. “The night was nice,” remembered Fri, afterwards. “We were both happy.”

By the time Fri arrived home from Katrina’s house shortly after 4.30am on 21 November 2014, Kyle was furious. She hadn’t brought the cigarettes and milk. He shouted at her, pulled the TV off the wall and smashed her phone. They kept arguing in the kitchen, and then Kyle grabbed her by the neck and pushed her back against the kitchen counter. He pressed his thumb into her throat. Her eyes started to stream. Fri tried to push him off her but he was too strong. She reached for a knife from a block on the counter.

Fri has never been able to explain what happened next. Kyle kept goading her, and then she heard him say: “Fucking hell, Fri, you’ve stabbed me.” She’s always said she never felt it happen. She didn’t even believe him until she saw the blood. Kyle was still walking around, so she thought it couldn’t have been that bad, that maybe the end of the knife had just caught him somehow. Kyle told Fri to get rid of the knife, so she picked up what she thought was the knife she’d used and ran out the back door to put it in the bin in the alleyway behind the house. When she got back, Kyle was worse, stumbling, the wound pouring.

By the time Fri called an ambulance, at 4.50am, she was hysterical. The call lasted for just over eight minutes, and for most of it, as the operator asked her questions, Fri kept desperately talking to Kyle: “Baby, look at me, look at me … Look at me baby, stay awake … ” By now, Kyle was lying on the floor, blood all over his chest. Fri was kneeling beside him, cradling his head in her arms, weeping. “I promise I’m gonna never ever let you go,” she told him.

Fri called out for help and a neighbour, Claire Jones, came over. Jones had been up late with friends and heard Fri and Kyle arguing. That was nothing new – she heard them fighting all the time. Now, walking into Fri’s living room, Jones saw blood all over the floor and Kyle lying in Fri’s arms. “I’ve just come in and found him like that,” Fri explained. Her first lie.

The paramedics arrived at 5.05am and started treating Kyle in the house, before taking him out to the ambulance to administer CPR. When the first policeman arrived, shortly afterwards, he asked Fri what had happened. “I’ve just come home and found my boyfriend on the floor,” she said. “Someone burst in and stabbed him.” The officer went inside and saw the blood everywhere, the TV half pulled off the wall and a bloody knife under the table. Fri had taken the wrong knife to the bin.

Three more police officers, two male and one female, arrived and Fri explained again what had happened: “Some lads have burst in and done this,” she said. The male officers both reported that she seemed suspiciously calm, but the female officer had a different impression. Fri kept going in and out of the house, and at one point the female officer found her inside, agitated and crying, asking repeatedly if Kyle was going to be OK. She helped Fri take the kids next door to Jones’s house with some nappies and milk.

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Outside, the police questioned Jones and her friends. They said they’d heard Fri and Kyle fighting and Fri shout: “I’ll stab you!” This was enough: Fri was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

Shortly afterwards, at about 5.35am, the police were radioed the news that Kyle had died from his injuries at the Royal Liverpool hospital. Fri was handcuffed and told she was now being arrested on suspicion of murder. According to the police, Fri began to cry and kept saying, “My babies, my babies.”

Fri was taken to Wavertree Road police station. On the way, police recorded her saying, “I’m not even arsed, I just want my babies” – words that would later come back to haunt her. At the station, she had her picture taken. The photos show her looking exhausted and scared, hair tied up in a messy bun, eyes expressionless. There are multiple photos of her neck, where Kyle had been gripping her. In the medical notes, a nurse wrote “marks to neck”.

Over the next 36 hours, she was interviewed four times. They went over the background of her relationship with Kyle, and asked if he had ever been violent. Fri repeatedly said he hadn’t: “He’d get in my face sometimes,” she said. “But he never hit me or anything like that.”

By then, they’d taken a witness statement from Katrina, who told them what she’d seen Kyle do to Fri, and what Fri had said about Kyle hurting her. But Fri kept defending him: “I might have had the odd few bruises on my arms where he’s been holding me or things like that, but he’s never actually like, smacked me in my face or anything like that.” Later, one of the police said to Fri she seemed to think she hadn’t been assaulted unless she’d been punched. Fri agreed, and the officer explained that being pushed, thrown and bruised did in fact count as assault. “So he has been violent towards you, hasn’t he?” asked the officer. “Yeah,” said Fri.

As they moved on to what had happened the previous night, Fri kept telling the same story, insisting that Kyle had been stabbed by intruders. The police went over the details, asking her to retell her version again and again. Towards the end of the third interview, one of the police read out a line from Fri’s 999 call: “Baby, baby, look at me, look at me, I didn’t mean it, look at me.” They told Fri it was time to tell the truth.

Fri asked for a break. When she returned for the fourth interview, it was like something giving way. She’d been trying to protect an image of her and Kyle, the story of their life that she wanted to be true. In her version, he’d never been violent and she hadn’t stabbed him. It was the story that meant neither of them would get in trouble. Fri apologised for lying and told the police that they’d been arguing, he’d smashed her phone, hurt her, she’d been terrified. She hadn’t known what she was doing.

The police told her that according to the postmortem report they’d received, Kyle had died from a single stab wound to the chest that must have been inflicted with enough force for it to pass under his ribs and up to the heart. It wasn’t something that could have happened by accident, they said.

“Have you stabbed Kyle on purpose?” asked one of the officers.

“No,” said Fri.

“Intending to kill him.”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, I’m 100% sure, I wouldn’t even think about it,” she said. “My kids, I’ve got two kids. I wouldn’t dare think about it.”

Fri’s trial date was set for May 2015. Her legal team had just six months to prepare. In a domestic homicide case, there are some key questions around which a defence case can revolve: has the accused acted in self-defence? Has she been provoked and lost control? If there is a clear history of domestic abuse, a defence team could seek to have their client psychiatrically assessed. In Fri’s case, if they could show she had been suffering from a mental health condition, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), caused by prolonged abuse, they might be able to use a defence of diminished responsibility.

Fri’s lawyers did not commission a psychiatric assessment, because Fri had told them she “gave as good as she got” and she had never displayed obvious signs of mental illness when they visited her in prison. They concentrated their defence on the grounds that Fri had acted in self-defence and been provoked to a loss of control.

Fri’s solicitor was Richard Whitehead, from a firm of Toxteth solicitors called KWP. (Whitehead did not respond to a request for an interview. Fri’s barristers declined to be interviewed.) Fri’s uncle, Steve Cassidy, wasn’t sure the firm had enough experience of murder trials. He tried to hire a different lawyer, Helen Dugdale, who visited Fri in Styal women’s prison in Cheshire and managed to get Fri to open up about Kyle’s abuse. By the time Cassidy heard that the court had refused the transfer of legal aid to Dugdale, there were only three months left until the trial.

To help Fri’s case, her solicitors asked her to write a statement describing the domestic violence she had experienced. Family and friends also wrote statements giving details of incidents of abuse they’d witnessed. Reports were gathered from friends and former teachers testifying to Fri’s character – how courteous she’d always been at school, how popular she was with her friends, how devoted she was to her kids – and how she’d changed since being with Kyle, becoming reclusive and depressed. (Character statements were also provided for Kyle: his aunt said she had “never known Kyle to be violent towards Farieissia” and a friend described Kyle as a “relaxed, calm and gentle person. I never saw Kyle being violent towards anyone.”) But in court those supporting statements would be less important than what Fri said. To receive a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder, Fri herself would have to use her time on the stand to prove to the jury the severity of the abuse she’d suffered.

All trials require performance. A jury needs a story they can believe, and a narrator they can trust. But how do you perform the story of your own abuse? Even in the most private of settings, survivors can find it hard to talk about what they have endured. There can be feelings of shame and denial. Sometimes the abused seeks to protect the abuser. Often, like Fri, they feel they are partly to blame. Social workers, helpline managers and psychotherapists all told me the same thing: stories emerge in bits and pieces, if at all. They might take months to come out, even years. There are things survivors can never say out loud. And if they do manage to tell their story, the process can be harrowing. Fri had told her closest friends about a fraction of Kyle’s abuse. She hadn’t told her family at all. It was unlikely she would be able to give a convincing account of it to a courtroom.

When the trial started at Liverpool crown court in May 2015, it was the first time her family had seen Fri since before her arrest six months earlier. Ishmael thought she looked blank. Her friend Katrina thought she looked smaller than ever, as though she were 12 years old. When she took the stand, her uncle Steve said he tried to signal to her with his eyes: “Go on, go on” – as in, say what you need to say, say what needs to be heard. But Fri wasn’t in any state to perform: she looked terrified, sobbed as she tried to talk. Cassidy recalled them playing the 999 call again and again in court, the sight of Fri having to listen to herself weeping and imploring Kyle to wake up. “Baby, baby, look at me.”

The trial lasted two weeks. By the end, Fri’s family were hopeful that she’d get off on self-defence, or at worst, be convicted of manslaughter. Kyle’s family wanted the verdict to be murder. “No family out there who have suffered the same thing would want the perpetrator to get a verdict of manslaughter,” Cody Rowson told me. They couldn’t get over how Fri had repeatedly lied about what she had done. “She should have owned up to it on the day it happened,” said Rowson.

On 28 May 2015, the judge, Mr Justice Dove, gave his summing up of the case. After going over the facts, he gave the jury a series of questions to answer, which would lead them to a verdict of either murder or manslaughter. He also referred to the background of domestic violence, including Kyle kicking Fri in the stomach when she was pregnant. There were no previous convictions related to the assaults, Dove noted, but the jury could still take them into account when considering the argument that Fri acted in self-defence, and was provoked to a loss of control.

The jury deliberated for an hour-and-a-half. When they returned and delivered their unanimous verdict, it appeared they had decided against attaching any significant weight to the history of abuse. Fri was found guilty of murder.

In his sentencing, Mr Justice Dove admonished Fri for initially lying to the police, but he also went over what he called “considerable elements of mitigation”. He could never be sure Fri had intended to kill Kyle. He believed, too, that what happened was not a premeditated attack but a heated argument that spiralled out of control. “There is no doubt that the violent relationship you had with Kyle Farrell played some part in fuelling what happened on that occasion,” he said. “Even though it could never be justification, it is some mitigation for how you have ended up in this position.” Dove gave her a lower-than-average life sentence: a minimum term of 13 years.

In the aftermath of the trial, Fri’s family said they were told that the chances of an appeal weren’t high. Steve Cassidy wasn’t persuaded. Cassidy drives a car breakdown truck and is the kind of person who sees problems as things to be taken away and mended. His niece was no different: he would rescue her. Cassidy heard from a friend about Justice for Women, an organisation that represents women who have been convicted of the murder of an abusive partner (they are currently working on 10 such cases). Shortly after the trial, he got in touch and passed on the details of Fri’s case. One of Justice for Women’s founders, the campaigning lawyer Harriet Wistrich, decided to take it on.

Wistrich, who is short, with a crop of grey hair and an air of brisk pragmatism, is based at Birnberg Pierce, a solicitors’ firm renowned for representing Guantánamo prisoners and terrorism suspects. Most of the time she’s not in their cramped Camden office, which is sandwiched between a pan-Asian cocktail bar and a Brazilian restaurant, but out meeting clients and juggling an overwhelming caseload. After Wistrich took on Fri’s case, she commissioned both a psychiatrist and a psychologist to visit her in prison. Only after repeated visits and the encouragement of a support worker in prison was Fri able to talk openly about the abuse she’d experienced. Often she was too upset to speak. There were words she didn’t want to say, events she didn’t want to remember. There is much that she still does not want shared with her family.

In August 2018, Wistrich and the barrister Claire Wade QC submitted their application for permission to appeal Fri’s conviction. They argued that having received the psychiatric assessments, there was now fresh evidence to show that at the time of the offence, Fri was suffering from both PTSD and mild depressive disorder. These conditions would have impaired her self-control and contributed to a dissociative state, also known as “traumatic amnesia”, which explained why Fri was not able to explain or remember the moment of the stabbing itself, or to know which knife she had used immediately afterwards. After years of abuse, they argued, Kyle’s aggression and the action of putting his hands around her neck would have acted as a trigger to the loss of control. As a consequence, the partial defences of diminished responsibility and loss of control could now be deployed.

In February this year, the court of appeal responded. Mr Justice William Davis refused permission to appeal. In nine short paragraphs, he explained his reasoning. He sympathised with the original legal team who had not sought medical evidence because “nothing was said by the applicant which suggested that the partial defence of diminished responsibility might be available”. Wistrich’s new arguments for the defence of diminished responsibility were dismissed because “the applicant did not raise the relevant factual matters before or at the time of the trial”. Similarly, he noted that Wistrich was only able to offer a loss of control defence now because of new evidence that Fri hadn’t previously disclosed. He concluded: “The onus was on her to be full and frank in her instructions at that time.”

The onus was on her. Fri, it seemed, had not told the right story to the right people at the right time; she had not performed as she should have done. The note of disbelief is hard to avoid in the judge’s remarks: why hadn’t she told anyone before, when it mattered? Why should anyone trust her now?

One of Wistrich’s earlier cases was that of Sally Challen. In 2010, Challen was convicted of the murder of her abusive husband, Richard. Wistrich went on to win Challen’s appeal on the grounds of diminished responsibility – and, in a momentous victory, a judge announced in June 2019 that Challen would not have to face a retrial. Her conviction had been downgraded to manslaughter, the nine years she’d already served in prison were deemed sufficient punishment and she was able to walk free.

Challen’s case heightened public awareness of a form of domestic abuse now known as coercive control. Although Richard was violent towards Sally early on in their relationship, his abuse mostly manifested itself in the obsessive control he took over almost every aspect of her existence – money, social life, self-perception. In 2015, the Serious Crime Act made coercive control an offence in its own right. England and Wales were the first countries in the world to introduce such a law, and only Ireland and Scotland have so far followed suit. (Tasmania and France have laws related to psychological abuse.) Coercive control is defined as a pattern of acts, including assault, threats, monitoring and intimidation designed to frighten and punish the victim and isolate them from family and friends. Since 2015, it has become more widely recognised – the subject of storylines on The Archers and Coronation Street. In early October, during a debate in parliament on the new domestic abuse bill, Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s account of her own experience of coercive control moved many MPs to tears.

According to Evan Stark, a professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Jersey who invented the term, coercive control should be seen as a form of “intimate terrorism”, analogous to being held hostage or kidnapped. Instead of measuring the suffering of women in broken bones, he believes the experience of coercive control is better understood as like living under a tyrannical regime. Often, as in Fri’s case, violence is used to enforce the system of control. “It is just one of the many bits of the toolkit the abuser can use,” Marianne Hester, a professor in gender violence at Bristol University, told me.

Framed in this way, the crime of domestic abuse could be defined as one of long-term liberty deprivation, rather than a series of individual violent episodes. In cases where a woman has killed their abuser, Stark believes that lawyers should be able to use a “liberty defence” rather than a psychiatric one. “If a hostage kills their captor, that’s considered self-defence,” Stark told me. “No one’s going to charge them with homicide.”

For now, being a victim of domestic abuse does not in itself constitute a defence in court. The Prison Reform Trust is currently calling for a new statutory defence to be added to the domestic abuse bill for those whose offending was driven by their experience of domestic abuse. But in the meantime, in Challen’s case, the lawyers won her appeal on the grounds that she was not in her right mind when she repeatedly battered Richard with a hammer. “My crime was a result of 40 years of coercive control which was not recognised in my original trial,” Challen told me. “The limitations in the criminal justice system’s understanding of coercive control meant my mental health [was the] primary route to appeal.”

Challen’s victory was significant – the judge at least recognised the impact of abuse on her mental state. But it was not enough that Richard had deprived her of her freedom for decades; to secure justice, Challen had to be seen as mentally ill. Wistrich will make the same argument on behalf of Fri and hope that a judge is similarly understanding. But we are still a long way from recognising the retaliation of an abused woman as a desperate bid to escape, rather than an act of murderous insanity.

There is much that marks Sally Challen and Fri Martin apart: age, race, class, geography. Challen lived in a £1m house in Claygate, Surrey; Richard owned a car dealership and drove a Ferrari. Fri lived in a council house in Liverpool, Kyle was unemployed. But there are similarities. Kyle, like Richard, tried to control his partner’s life; he hurt and humiliated her over many years. Both women were trapped, physically and mentally. Both took their partners’ lives. Both were found guilty of murder. One of them is now free.

Fri’s family knows that she has to be punished for what she did. A life was taken. Time is being served, as it must be. But they do not accept that she is a murderer. There was no plotting or intent, they say. There was fear and panic. At present, they are waiting for the date of a hearing in which Wistrich and Wade will again argue for Fri’s permission to appeal, this time to a panel of three judges. If they win, and go on to win an appeal, the family hopes that a retrial might find Fri guilty of manslaughter and that a new sentence would reflect the time she has already spent in prison. Perhaps she, too, could be free.

A verdict can be rewritten, but Fri’s life can’t be. Nor can Kyle’s, or the lives of their children, their families. As Cody Rowson told me: “We were all losing someone.” Steve Cassidy once described the effect of it all – the killing, the case, Fri’s imprisonment – as being like a waterfall: “It just keeps on going.” Fri’s family struggle with the guilt of not knowing about the abuse she suffered until the trial. They can’t help going over and over what they now realise were clues. All those excuses, the bruises, the evasiveness. It’s so obvious, in retrospect. Ishmael didn’t get to see Fri as much as he’d like – he worked hard, had two young children of his own. One time, he drove past her house and thought he’d see if she was in. When he knocked on the door, he thought he saw a curtain move upstairs. He couldn’t be sure, thought he must have imagined it, and drove away again. He can’t stop thinking about that curtain.

Recently, Fri was moved from Styal to a prison near Durham. If the traffic is bad, it can take four hours to get there from Liverpool. It’s harder for her family to visit now. When Cassidy goes, they talk about the children, never about what happened. The kids visit, too; they think their mum lives in a castle like a princess. When Ishmael goes, he tries to keep the tone light. As the oldest brother, he feels a responsibility to keep everyone on track, positive. He tries to keep Fri focused on the future. When she’s out, he’s going to set her up to work with him. But he knows that when she does come out, she won’t be the same. Already, she’s not the same.

When Ishmael told me about leaving his sister in prison, the sadness seemed to wind him. He couldn’t speak, bumped his fist against his chest as if to dislodge something. He exhaled loudly through puffed cheeks, jerked his head from side to side, cleared his throat. It was like he was trying to get rid of it, the sadness, as though it were a sickness he was trying to shake off. Ishmael’s a big guy, works in security. He doesn’t often cry.

Back in the spring of 2015, just before he delivered the precise terms of her life sentence, Mr Justice Dove said he didn’t think Fri was a wicked or violent person. “You were a loving (and still will remain, I have no doubt, a loving) and conscientious mother,” he told her. “And you are going to have to live with the consequences of having killed the person who was your childhood sweetheart, the father of your children and someone who, I have no doubt, you still loved at the time when you took his life.”

Fri still loves Kyle now. It’s hard for her family to understand. “Love is a strange thing,” said Ishmael, shaking his head. Many people struggle to comprehend when a victim of abuse still professes to love their abuser. How can you love someone who’s hurting you? Why don’t you leave? It’s like a hostage falling for their captor, Prof Hester told me: “In the end, you become so bound up with the person who is defining everything about your being, that you end up not having a being outside of them.”

My mother, Sally Challen, was branded a cold-blooded killer. At last, she has justice Read more

Evan Stark pointed out that there is no incompatibility between hate and love: the two coexist in relationships all the time. So do violence and love, as strange and awful as it may seem. In such cases, the definition of love is stretched beyond any conventional understanding. But relationships like Fri’s don’t tend to start abusively: “You don’t go out with someone who punches you in the face on the first date,” said Fiona Dwyer, chief executive of Solace Women’s Aid. Women sometimes don’t recognise they are in an abusive relationship until they are too enmeshed in it to escape. By then, the consequences of leaving can feel too dangerous, and they are trapped.

Steve Cassidy has a plastic bag full of documents related to Fri’s case. Sitting in her brother Marcus’s flat one afternoon, he pulled out a letter Fri had written to Kyle from prison. He passed it to Fri’s father, Leroy, who tried to read it but couldn’t get to the end. Leroy passed it on to me. The letter was written in Fri’s neat, round handwriting on a sheet of lined paper. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” it began, “it just all happened so fast. I tried to protect myself and this is how it’s ended up.” Fri went on to say how sorry she was for what had happened and told Kyle she’d always love him. “Until we meet again,” she wrote. “Rest in paradise, my man, my true love, my Kyle John Farrell.” At the end, she’d drawn a small heart and coloured it in with black biro.

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