# I Murdered My Predator Father: You Won’t Believe How She Hid His Body
At a police station near Manchester, a woman made a bizarre admission. She simply walked into the enquiry counter and told the clerk that she had killed her father and buried his body in the garden. The officer on duty was stunned.
It was the kind of confession that police officers hear perhaps once in a career, and they are trained to treat every such claim with a mixture of skepticism and diligence. People walk into police stations and confess to crimes they never committed for all sorts of reasons, sometimes out of mental illness, sometimes out of a desire for attention, and sometimes because they are telling the truth. The woman standing before the counter, however, was calm, composed, and utterly certain of what she was saying.
She went on to reveal a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 story. This woman had lived in hell from the age of five until she was an adult woman. She had hidden her father’s death by lie after lie after lie, constructing an elaborate web of deception that lasted more than a decade.
The confession was the moment of reckoning for Barbara Kums, a time to confront the killer within. She was either a victim of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 or she was a cold-blooded killer, and the police would have to determine which one was true.
On the 7th of January 2018, 66-year-old Barbara Kums walked into a police station in suburban Manchester to make an astonishing admission. The officer who took her initial account recalled the moment with clarity. She sat down and told him that approximately 10 to 12 years earlier, she had murdered her father.
During that initial account, she disclosed that she had hit her father with a spade and killed him, and that she had buried his body in the garden of the family home. The officer listened carefully, taking notes, trying to process the enormity of what he was hearing. He asked her for details, and she provided them without hesitation, describing the location in the garden where the body could be found.
The police would need to verify her story, of course, but something about her manner suggested that she was telling the truth.
The victim, Kenneth Kums, was 87 years old at the time of his death. While making her confession, Barbara showed little emotion. This was something that she had psyched herself up for.
She realized she needed to do it and had accepted that she needed to do it, and therefore she did so in a calm and unemotional way, very detached from the gravity of what she was revealing. The officer noted how remarkably composed she seemed under the circumstances. She admitted that her heart rate was beginning to rise and that she was trying to keep herself calm, but outwardly she appeared almost serene.
It was as if she had been carrying this secret for so long that finally speaking it aloud brought a kind of relief rather than distress.
Initially, the officer tried to get as much information out of her as he could, just to try to corroborate the account and make sure that there was an element of truth there. Police officers have heard people come off the street and claim to have committed murder before, and sometimes those people are telling the truth while others are not. The officer explained that they get a mixture of both, so they have to make sure.
He pressed Barbara for details about the killing, about her father, about the house, and about the garden where she claimed to have buried the body. She answered his questions directly, providing specific information that would later prove crucial to the investigation.
Having made her confession, Barbara said no more during that interview. She provided a prepared statement through her solicitor, which was read out in full, and for the rest of the interview she went no comment. This is a legal right that every suspect has, but it frustrated the officers who were trying to understand what had happened.
They had a woman who had walked into the station and confessed to murder, but who was now refusing to elaborate on the details. The prepared statement gave them the basic facts, but it left many questions unanswered. Police officers were initially perplexed as to why this very normal woman would suddenly admit to a murder that had remained hidden for over a decade.
They needed to investigate the family home. Barbara and her father had lived in the same house, a semi-detached property in a nice residential area of Reddish, a suburb of Manchester. It was rented accommodation, and they had lived there right up until the time of the fatal incident.
The house was unremarkable, the kind of home that blends into any suburban street, with a small front garden and a larger back garden where Barbara claimed to have buried her father. Neighbors would later describe the family as quiet and unremarkable, the kind of people who kept to themselves and did not cause any trouble.
Barbara Kums was born in 1954. Her father Kenneth was a World War II veteran, a man who had served his country and who presented a respectable face to the outside world. Neighbors remembered him as a kind and courteous man, always polite when they passed him in the street, always willing to exchange pleasantries about the weather or the state of the gardens.
He seemed like a typical elderly gentleman, the kind of person you would never suspect of anything sinister. But Barbara told a different story, one that painted a far darker picture of the man behind the respectable facade.
She recalled being hit, slapped over the head, and struck often throughout her childhood. She witnessed violent and aggressive exchanges between her mother and her father, moments of domestic terror that left her cowering and afraid. She also reported emotional and psychological 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 from her father, a constant undermining of her sense of self-worth that was perhaps even more damaging than the physical violence.
It seems from her accounts that he had wanted another boy and she was a girl, and he often told her very rejectingly that he didn’t want her. These words stayed with her for her entire life, a constant reminder that she was unwanted, unworthy, and unloved.
What Barbara ultimately tells us is that she was very protective of her mother. When she saw her father being abusive towards her mother, she would step in and try to intervene. However, on those occasions, she then got told that it was nothing to do with her and to leave it alone.
Much further down the line, she then tells us that on those occasions, he was also abusive towards her and would get a belt and use the belt on her. The violence was not limited to her mother; it extended to Barbara as well, and she bore the marks of that violence both physically and psychologically. She described how her father would come into her defense when her mother spoke, and she would step in first, trying to shield her mother from the worst of his rage.
While still a teenager, Barbara’s parents divorced. There was no word in this young girl’s life that she had any safety. The divorce might have been an opportunity for escape, a chance to break free from the cycle of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 that had defined her childhood.
Her mother left her father, and Barbara went to live with her mother. At that point, she maybe thought that life could get a little bit better. The prospect of a new beginning, free from her father’s tyranny, must have seemed like a lifeline.
But it was not to last.
In 1973, when Barbara was aged 19 years old, her mother passed away. That would have been a huge shock for Barbara, a devastating loss for her. Her mother had been her protector, the one person who stood between her and her father’s cruelty, however imperfectly.
With her mother gone, Barbara was left alone in the world, and she returned to live with her father. It is almost in this case that she had to return to her abuser. She didn’t want to, but he had a power over her because he knew that he was the only one that could almost rescue her from these situations.
She had no other family to turn to, no other place to go, and so she went back to the man who had made her life a misery.
Every time she saw him, she didn’t have her mother there as one of the two parental figures to protect her. Even though her mother had not been able to successfully defend and protect her in the past, it was the psychological awareness that now her mother was really not there and she was really alone with her father. The 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 continued and perhaps even intensified.
He hit her. He kicked her. He put her down.
He was so strict that she couldn’t watch TV. If he was watching TV, he would make her leave the room. He controlled everything about her life, dictating what she could do, where she could go, and who she could see.
She described the experience as horrendous, just so awful, all those years.
She looked after him. She did everything he asked her to do. She cooked.
She cleaned. She went shopping. She did everything that was asked of her, and still he treated her with contempt.
He had a list of jobs that she had to complete each day, and she was almost his slave generally. Whatever he said happened, she had to do. She was almost his housemaid, and she didn’t know what to do about the continuing 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮.
She had no coping mechanism. This was all that she knew, and she almost just had to go along with it. The 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 had been normalized over so many years that she no longer recognized it as 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮; it was simply the way her life was.
It was only in her early 30s that Barbara got a second chance to break away. Barbara married when she was 33 in 1987, and she had her daughter in 1988. She found somebody that she thought was able to take care of her and take her out of this world that she had been living in.
It was a sense of freedom and also stability for her, a chance to finally live a normal life with a family of her own. However, it didn’t last. The relationship ended with her husband in approximately 1991 or 1992.
It was a very short-lived relationship, but during the relationship, Barbara claims that she was the victim of domestic 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮.
It is not uncommon for many people, even when they are trying to escape something terrible and they want the opposite for themselves, to actually get drawn to that exact same type of situation. Typically, because it is what they are used to, and even though they are not looking for it, it feels comfortable, and in this way, it is normal. Barbara had grown up with 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 as the only model of relationships she knew, and so she unconsciously sought out a partner who would replicate that dynamic.
Her husband abused her just as her father had, and she found herself trapped in the same cycle of violence and control.
Following her divorce, Barbara again moved back to the family home on Matlock Road, this time with her daughter, who was then just a toddler. She says that she had a real fear of being homeless, and she wanted a secure location for herself and her child. It is difficult for people to understand why victims of domestic violence go back to the people that were committing it against them.
Certainly, she was capable of leaving because she had left her husband for the exact same reason. However, her husband was related by marriage, and that was a chosen partner, whereas her father was related by blood. Despite all that they had been through, and even the fact that he had allegedly abused her for her entire life and was now doing it again, she probably gave him just a little bit more of the benefit of the doubt because he was her father.
Life continued in the home as before for another 14 years. Barbara was living with her father in 2006 when everything really hit a turning point. On that fateful morning, she was at home and had been doing some work in the garden.
Her father told her to go and work on a garden patch that she was supposed to be working on. She came back into the kitchen, and she still had the spade that she had been using in the garden. As she entered the house, she noticed a couple of boxes that she hadn’t seen before.
They were in the dining room, which was not used as a dining room anymore. She asked her father where the boxes had come from, and he told her they contained old photographs.
At that point, she became really angry. She went upstairs, thinking about what she had seen. Barbara describes seeing a black cloud and at that moment going to confront her father.
She took the spade that she was using, and she struck him on the head with it. He said to her, “What are you doing?” At that point, she says that she was really, really frightened and thought that he might actually 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her.
So she thrust the tip of the spade up under his jaw and cut his throat with the tip of the spade. He then collapsed to the ground and bled out in effect. The attack was sudden, violent, and final.
After decades of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, Barbara had finally snapped.
Police needed to know what it was about those photographs that had triggered Barbara’s lethal attack. Detectives felt she was holding back something big. If Barbara was not telling them about the photographs, then something more may have happened to cause her to hit him and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him.
Something more sinister. In the spring of 2018, Greater Manchester Police were investigating the claim by Barbara Kums that she had murdered her 87-year-old father, Kenneth, after finding a box of old photographs. They had to try and establish what had happened to cause her to hit him and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him, and what was in those photographs that had provoked such a violent reaction.
The photographs were of her daughter. Baby pictures mainly, but the question was why would she be taking baby pictures of her granddaughter. The trigger was very much the images of her daughter.
Barbara had a daughter who was the one bright spot in an otherwise miserable existence. This was a woman that was so unhappy. She had had an awfully, awfully unhappy life.
She hadn’t succeeded in any area, friends, relationships, jobs, but she had given birth to this precious daughter. When she was confronted with the potential that her daughter had also been hurt, she would have felt so much guilt that she had brought her daughter into that house. That is what led to that flip in that moment.
That absolute fear, guilt, revenge, anger, all meshed into one that made her 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her dad.
Barbara claimed that after killing her father, she decided to bury his body in the back garden of their home in Reddish. When it happened, her daughter was out at college, but she knew that she would be coming back later on that day. So she wrapped him up in a carpet, dragged him outside, and left him there overnight.
The following day, she then buried the body in the back garden. It was a really shallow grave, and she was concerned that animals or anything might discover him. So she ended up ordering a ton of topsoil and had that delivered, and then she put that topsoil on top of the body.
The grave was concealed beneath a fresh layer of earth, and the garden looked as if nothing had ever happened.
The day after Barbara’s surprise confession, Greater Manchester Police dispatched a CSI team to dig up the spot in the garden. They managed to get an archaeologist and an anthropologist in, and they excavated the area that Barbara identified as being the place where she buried her father. Quite quickly, they discovered skeletal remains of a male in the garden.
It seemed Barbara had been telling the truth. The police now had a murder inquiry on their hands. The postmortem of Kenneth’s remains identified that he did have a fracture to the back of his skull, which was consistent with being hit with something over the back of the head.
He also had a small chunk of bone missing on the underside of his jaw, which again was consistent with this account that she had given of driving a spade up into his throat. The actual mechanics as she describes doing what she did were borne out in the pathology.
Barbara had concealed what she had done for 12 years, and having confessed, she was refusing to say anything more. It is frustrating, but it is a person’s right to go no comment if they want to. Barbara was reluctant to talk even to her own legal defense team.
The real difficulty that she had in fully explaining how or why it had occurred stemmed from her own unwillingness to reveal everything that had happened in her background. Because maybe she felt, as often abused victims do, that she wouldn’t be believed. Maybe she was embarrassed and didn’t want to go into detail.
The defense team knew there was more to the story, but they couldn’t force her to reveal it.
Then a spot of old-fashioned detective work gave the team a lead. Part of the investigation was to try and identify anybody who might have any information about Kenneth. They contacted work colleagues, and one person came forward and told them that on one occasion Kenneth had brought some photographs into work.
There were photographs of a 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 child, and Kenneth told him that they were photographs of his either his daughter or his granddaughter. Detectives believed these may have been the same pictures that triggered the attack. This was the first piece of evidence that suggested something deeply disturbing about Kenneth Kums, something that contradicted the respectable facade he had presented to the world.
Barbara’s lawyers arranged to see her. The first revelation came as a result of a slightly more challenging approach to the case, in the sense of challenging her account, asking her about this evidence and whether there was more to the story of the relationship between father and daughter. Under questioning, Barbara revealed something truly 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔, something which explained the sudden intensity of the rage against her father.
She had been seriously sexually abused by her father over a long period of time, and the 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 itself was degrading and vile. Sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 in its worst form. She reported that when she was approximately five or six years old, her father began to sexually assault her.
She talked about her father taking her to a place where she was made to stand naked in front of other men. She talked about the way in which her father helped himself to her, the sexual assaults becoming more aggressive and culminating in rape. She claimed that the 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 went on until the day he died.
This case is unusual. When we see familial sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, it often finishes usually in teens, whereas in this case, it goes on until she is in her 50s, which is really unusual. He was still grabbing at her breast, she described, when she was 50 years old.
A parent, a father, is supposed to be a protector and is supposed to be looking after and supporting their child. In this instance, Barbara wouldn’t have understood what her father was doing. Maybe this is what parents do.
This is how a father shows love. And it became normal for her in a very abnormal way. A child who is still making sense of the world but who is then being abused in so many different ways and being shown affection extremely differently doesn’t know what is right.
It doesn’t know what is supposed to be safe and what isn’t safe.
At the age of 19, Barbara was admitted to hospital. She had tried to commit suicide. She now revealed why.
In 1974, Barbara was pregnant, and she alleged to the police that it was her father who had impregnated her. When she went to the hospital, it was for this event that eventually became a miscarriage, and the baby died. The pregnancy was the result of years of sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, and the miscarriage was both a tragedy and a relief.
She had been carrying her father’s child, and the loss of that child was another layer of trauma added to an already unbearable existence.
Reports of such extreme sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 were a game-changer for the investigation. They instructed a psychiatrist and eventually a psychologist, and in this case, it was quite clear from the psychiatric evidence that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. For victims of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 like this, there can be love towards their parent because ultimately he was her dad as well.
What can happen is that they hate them but also they love them, and that can be really difficult for a victim to make sense of. Barbara was caught in this emotional tangle, unable to fully hate the man who had destroyed her life because he was also her father, the only family she had left.
What happened next looked less like the actions of a confused and abused woman and more premeditated. After killing her father, Barbara continued on her life almost as if nothing had happened. She told people who were asking that he had just died and that there was really nothing else to know.
Detectives interviewed her daughter, who revealed the story her mother had told her. She had come home from college, and her mom had told her that granddad had had an accident, had been taken away in an ambulance, had sadly died and been cremated, and there wasn’t going to be a funeral. For Barbara, this moment was truly a watershed moment where she realized this is something that she is going to be okay with or she is not.
It really made this entire thing look much more nefarious.
Once she started lying, Barbara could not stop. During the course of 2006, Kenneth missed a number of appointments with the dentist and doctor, and contact was made from the surgery directly to Barbara. On one occasion, she told the receptionist who phoned up that she was his wife and that he didn’t want any further treatment.
She followed that up with a letter to the surgery saying that he didn’t need any further treatment and wouldn’t be coming to the doctors again, and she wrote a very similar letter to the dentist as well. Barbara’s web of deceit eventually extended to include the Department for Work and Pensions and the local housing authority. Barbara just continued not only living her life but also accepting the social security money and pension that he was receiving from the government, and she started profiting from her father’s death, which really took it into a different path.
In 2006, Barbara Kums had killed her 87-year-old father and for 12 years lied to her family to cover up the true cause of his death. She told her daughter and brother similar stories. She went and left a note at her brother Michael’s address, posting it through the letterbox, basically saying that Kenneth had died, that he had been taken to hospital, that he had already been cremated, and that no funeral was going to take place.
Her brother was shocked and couldn’t believe it, but he accepted what she told him. Whatever she said to others about Kenneth’s death, Barbara told the government he was still alive.
It gets even more serious now because this is going to give fraud as well. Barbara received income as a carer, and she also received his state pension. The state pension was paid into her bank account, and she had access to his bank account.
So she claimed on two sides really. The amount she defrauded from the state was significant. In total, it was around £190,000 that she had amassed over that 12-year period.
This is a woman who has never worked. She had mental health problems. She was damaged from a lifetime of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮.
So this was her only source of income. All of this was really life-changing for her, taking her from this very terrible, abusive life to freedom and money and having this big weight off her shoulders. Although she did have to keep up this lie about how it happened.
Barbara went to great lengths to conceal the source of her income from those around her. There was some information that she had been working at Marks and Spencer. All the inquiries were made with Marks and Spencer, but they couldn’t find any employment records for her.
So she was telling people she was going to work every day when in fact she was not. Some of the lies that she told were just off the scale. The ongoing fraud, while lucrative, made her paranoid.
Every knock at the door and every letter which she had to intercept from anyone else seeing it. She lived a terrible double life in terms of what she was about in terms of her relationship with her family and including her daughter. She not only lied to them, but she had to maintain those lies over a long period of time.
As the years went by, Barbara’s daughter became more curious about Kenneth’s death. She did say that at one stage she started looking online for a death certificate in relation to her granddad and couldn’t find one. She spoke to her mom about that, and she said that her mom got quite upset, and as a result of that, she didn’t ask any more questions.
Barbara was desperate to keep her daughter from discovering the truth. She wanted her to go away from the situation without sort of saying what the situation was. For Barbara, it was clear that this couldn’t go on for long because it went on for 12 years, which was long enough, but there were lots of questions about the whereabouts of her father, what happened, the details of what happened.
At one point, her brother or another family member had asked her if anything had happened, even if it was by accident, to let them know. She denied it at that point.
Barbara tried to keep going forward, one foot in front of the other, but the weight of her secret was crushing her. She described the struggle to keep going, to not go back to those images, to not go back to knowing what she did. She told herself to just keep going, one foot in front of the other, but it was getting harder and harder.
Things were coming to a head at that point when she decided that she couldn’t live this life for much longer. She would have to come clean.
In November 2017, the knock at the door Barbara had feared finally came. The people who ultimately started looking for Kenneth in reality were the housing association. The housing officer had been on a couple of occasions, and she had left letters saying that she really needed to see Kenneth because by that time he should have been 99.
He was coming up to his 100th birthday, and she said she really needed to speak to him or else they would have to stop the benefits that were being paid. The housing officer was persistent. She actually sent a letter to the home saying that she was next going to visit on the 8th of January, which obviously is the day after she presented herself at the police station.
Barbara realized that she couldn’t go on with living the lie that she had created. The housing officer had visited multiple times, and each time Barbara had managed to put her off, but the net was closing in. She thought that the visit would be the same as the original ones, but she knew that eventually she would be found out.
After 12 years, she was in real terms happy that the net was closing in because she was able to at last unburden herself from the terrible secret that she had kept from everyone. Happy or not, Barbara’s fraud had revealed a different side to her character. There is a universe where Barbara was very premeditated and completely thought through all of this down to the story that she was going to tell if she ever got caught.
It is very plausible that she could have lied and made it all up. She was really either a victim of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 or she was a cold-blooded killer.
Six months after confessing to killing her father and covering it up for 12 years, Barbara Kums’ account of why she had done it was still in doubt. She had used his death to her advantage, but also it seems that she was able to start living her own life with the financial means that she was able to benefit from while lying to her family about the cause of his death. She had continued to collect his pension and other state benefits.
Barbara did gain over £192,000 throughout the course of this fraud, and people will 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 over a lot less. It was a significant feature of the case that she had taken so much money, and the prosecution really portrayed her as a very calculating individual in that regard who was motivated by financial concerns.
But maybe something else was behind Barbara’s deception. There was some fear and anxiety initially, particularly in relation to her daughter. That was probably the reason why she didn’t confess sooner, because of her daughter and being there for her daughter.
She was afraid that she was going to end up going to prison or worse and leaving her daughter because of this crime that happened, even though in her mind it really was in self-defense. She was thinking both of herself and of her daughter’s future.
Barbara’s claim that she was driven to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her father after 40 years of sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 continued to come under scrutiny. There was no corroborating evidence available to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it happened. This put Barbara in a very vulnerable state because she is telling police that this is the reason that she committed murder, but she had absolutely nothing really to prove it.
When it came to evidence, even the suggestive photographs of her daughter that Barbara said had pushed her over the edge were gone. She had destroyed them. She destroyed everything.
She absolutely reacted to events. She killed him, and in that moment, she wanted those photographs gone. They were the trigger that had reminded her of everything that had happened.
She wanted it all just gone.
Significantly, Barbara’s daughter denied her grandfather had abused her in any way. The only evidence that they found that alluded to some form of sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 was that on her 16th birthday, Kenneth had offered to buy her a vibrator, which was again a really strange thing for a 16-year-old granddaughter’s present. The one thing that is very clear in this case is that she is consistent in what she said.
Her timelines are consistent, the information is consistent, but also there are lots of superfluous pieces of information, which is something that we really see in genuine accounts of sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮. It is those little bits of detail that show the difference between a lie and a truth. This was a woman that was telling the truth.
As the trial date approached, the outcome of the case hung in the balance. The defense had made overtures to the prosecution from a very early stage. The plea to diminished responsibility was appropriate.
That overture was rejected and rejected, and it seemed that they were going to nail their colors to the mast of murder. In the absence of physical evidence, Barbara’s state of mind became the key factor on which the case turned. This was a woman who didn’t experience any normal relationship.
She lived with such awful 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 that how could she find normal happiness because she didn’t know what she was looking for. She was so psychologically damaged. This is a woman who never received any help.
She didn’t speak about what happened to her. She didn’t get psychological help. This woman lived in hell from when she was 5 years old until she was an adult woman.
At the 11th hour, the prosecution had a change of heart. It was with some surprise that they eventually accepted what she was saying and accepted the plea to diminished responsibility, which is a dramatic change and in terms of sentence has a dramatic impact. On the 7th of July 2018, Barbara pleaded guilty not to murder but to a lesser charge of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.
The judge listened very attentively to what both the prosecution and the defense had to say. At the end of the day, this was obviously an unlawful killing and a serious killing in which she had disposed of the body and vital evidence, and she had kept it a secret by her lies and had of course benefited from his death, albeit that wasn’t the reason for the killing.
Barbara was sentenced to 9 years in prison. It is a very sad story with Barbara. She experienced 40 years of traumatization of physical, sexual, psychological 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 which she managed within herself.
But when it came to fearing that her daughter may have also been victim to that same 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, she was unable to cope with that thought. There are some situations where people have to ask themselves what they would have done if they were in the same shoes as that person. This is one of them where she probably didn’t even think twice about hitting her father over the head with that shovel.
But it does seem like she didn’t necessarily have a killer within her. Her story is true. She just really was at her breaking point and snapped.
She had lived a life without the normal constructs that we all have. She had little by way of comfort in her life. She had little by way of the human interactions which all of us to a greater or lesser extent want to have.
She was to a large extent alone. There is a part of me that still thinks that she was responsible for murder rather than manslaughter. I am not entirely convinced about everything that she said to the psychiatrist being the truth, if I am being brutally honest.
For her to keep all the sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 side of it right undercover, there is part of me that wonders the reason for that.
The judge said something interesting in this case. He said that many people will think that the sentence is too harsh and many people will think that the sentence is too lenient, and that will be absolutely the consensus on this. It will split opinion.
But from a psychologist’s point of view, understanding complex trauma, understanding the devastating impact of sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 where it is so horrific over such a long period of time, I can’t help but feel absolute empathy for this woman who took the life of her abuser.
