Are you glad your father is dead?

A long pause follows, as David Challen’s eyes flicker up to the sky, scanning back and forth in search of the answer. “It’s a great question,” he says, eventually settling on “No”, before adding, “There was a time when I would have answered that differently.”

Are you relieved he’s dead?

“Yes.”

David’s father, Richard, was bludgeoned to death by his mother. Sally Challen delivered more than 20 blows with a hammer after decades of sexual violence, grooming, domestic abuse, and coercive control. It was 14 August 2010. David was 23.

As Richard lay dead in his kitchen in suburban Surrey, blood splattered across the room, Sally covered the body, left a note saying “I love you. Sally”, washed his dishes one last time, and left.

Sally had been controlled, manipulated, and demeaned by her husband for 40 years. This, for David – now 38 – is the key. “Everyone thinks about the act and never thinks about what comes before,” he says.

We’re sitting on a park bench in Cricklewood, north London, near the home he shares with his partner John, on the eve of his new memoir being published. The Unthinkable conjures in gutting, elegiac detail a family destroyed by an abuser and their painstaking battle to escape the aftermath.

In 2011, Sally was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 22 years in prison. The Challen story became one of the most famous cases of domestic abuse in British history: first because media coverage feasted on the spectacle of a woman killing her husband for what appeared initially to be rage over his infidelities and visits to a brothel. But then because of where the story led.

David and lawyers from the Centre for Women’s Justice campaigned to overturn his mother’s murder conviction because of the abuse she suffered. He led the campaign and public discussion about coercive control. After years of legal battles and media appearances, they succeeded. She was released in 2019 after nine years in prison.

Sally Challen served nine years of her 22-year sentence (Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire)

People call this a landmark case – the first to use coercive control as mitigation against murder. (This behaviour was criminalised in 2015.) But the reality is more complex.

“New evidence of mental health diagnoses quashed the conviction,” he says. Sally was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and other conditions, making the original conviction unsafe. “She never got a retrial because they didn’t find enough evidence to re-prosecute.

“But I think it’s a landmark case for raising awareness of coercive control and its insidious forms.”

David found it difficult writing the book because he had to capture the unobvious – it wasn’t the physical violence that usually signifies abuse.

Instead, the memoir paints a subtle portrait of dread and terror under the reign of coercive control in their middle-class home in Claygate. The silence that was demanded. The lies Richard told. The denials he issued when challenged over his affairs – manipulating his wife into thinking she was insane; forever telling her she was “mad”. The fear that seeped through every wall.

How Richard had groomed Sally aged 15, when he was 21, to become as loyal as a cult member. How he controlled her finances, behaviour, and self-esteem, making her dependent, isolated, and compliant.

The smaller, more daily cruelties were apparent to David as a child – name-calling, making her do his car business’ accounts, keeping her from friends and family – but some of the more extreme incidents were hidden from view.

He knew, for example, that there was something wrong on a holiday to Los Angeles – a darkness that suddenly shrouded the trip that was inexplicably cut short. Only later, as his mother lay in prison, did he discover that his father had raped her on that trip, on David’s birthday.

Physical violence arose before David was even born. Shortly after their wedding, Sally confronted Richard about an affair, so he dragged her down the stairs, prompting her to take an overdose. After that, she often wrote suicide notes – something David also only discovered after she was arrested.

While in prison, she revealed more to David; even some of the mundane humiliations he wasn’t privy to. To prevent a friend coming round for dinner, Richard smashed the pavlova she’d made on the floor, and told her she’d have to cancel.

The book provides a vital public service for anyone wanting to comprehend this type of abuse. Remembering his own childhood, he says: “I had that pit in my stomach as a child at the age of four or five,” he says. “It’s an atmosphere, and it latches onto you.”

But only now does he see the full picture with all the facts pieced together over the last 15 years.

David says the atmosphere of the home latched onto him, leaving a pit in his stomach from age four (Photo: David Challen)

By adolescence, he did know it was making him ill. “I felt massive depression in my teens,” he says. He was also grappling with being gay. His mother would pay for a therapist out of extra money she earned on the side – until his father put a stop to the treatment.

In adulthood, before he had perspective on his parents’ relationship, “I was in an abusive relationship myself”, he says. “I normalised that relationship, which was coercive and controlling in retrospect. My mum said at the time, ‘You don’t want a relationship like mine’. And I looked at her and said, ‘It’s good enough for you’. And it went on.”

David describes how his boyfriend tried to manipulate him, before naming each technique: “‘Your friends aren’t your friends. They don’t care about you’ – isolation. Upending basic facts that you know to be true – gaslighting. You’re starting to question yourself like, ‘Is this normal? Is this happening?’ You feel stuck… it’s so insidious. Like someone putting their hands inside your brain and manipulating it into thinking something else.”

Exiting the relationship wasn’t easy. “It was cumulative – that overwhelming sense of claustrophobia and a sense of yourself getting smaller and smaller until you’re not existing anymore,” he says. Afterwards, he was left with a greater understanding of his parents’ dynamic, “and perhaps a better ability to describe, when I had the words, what was abuse”.

He realises now that this was the cycle of abuse playing out through normalisation – not only from witnessing his father’s behaviour. “I normalised being a victim, too.”

Sally Challen and son David in 2010 after she was told she would not face a retrial over the death of her husband (Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire)

“I’ve always wanted to take control at the start of a relationship, like I’m the one leading it. There was one person, and I would say something controversial just to get a reaction, to see if they would tolerate me – testing the boundary. I’d see if they would try to wrestle back control. And I stopped myself. I realised what I was doing was wrong, and I questioned why did I do that?”

After a childhood in which his father exerted total control, David can only conclude that he needed some sense of control back.

The book moves beyond his personal story to the broader problem that understanding of abusive behaviour is scarce among the general public. A sobering moment in the book features his mother in prison taking a course called The Freedom Programme, which teaches victims of abuse how to spot the patterns. When David goes to visit her, it’s as if floodlights have finally allowed her to see clearly. She begins listing the behaviours – isolating, stonewalling, financial control – and saying: “I didn’t know that was abuse. I thought it was normal.”

Now, he wants every school child in Britain to be taught classes like this, so they recognise it. “If you can be affected by domestic abuse, which many children are, you should be tooled with the ability to spot it. But also there should be tooling for people who might carry that out.”

Despite the government pledging to halve violence against women and girls in the next decade, he wants much more to be done: more funding for services, more education in schools, and more training for police.

“Coerce control training is specialist training, which is crazy. Why is the foundation of abuse treated as specialist training? There’s still a lot of problems with a lot of forces,” he says, explaining that time and resources are often the problem when dealing with coercive control, as it requires more careful investigation.

Overall, it means, “there’s a failure to criminalise it,” he says. Yet if the number of women killed by their partners even in the last few weeks were all killed in a terrorist incident the reaction would be completely different, he says. “There’d be COBRA meetings.”

But some things are improving. A growing awareness of control and manipulation in relationships is more common now, he says, with terms like “red flags” and “toxic behaviour”.

David’s mother is now in a new relationship with Dellon, who was a friend of Richard’s. She had to read the book in short bursts of 15 or 30 minutes. “It was very difficult for her,” he says. How does she feel about so much personal detail about her being included?

“She had to waive her anonymity to have some of that out there,” he says. To seek that permission was an ongoing process – to make sure. “Because she is still a compliant woman. It’s come down a lot but you’ve got to ask her two, three, four times, to check in. It’s been a collaboration. She’s always been proud to do more [for the cause of domestic abuse]. She always wanted to help other people.”

After reading the book she’s “immensely proud”, he says, but he thinks she will never read it again.

In recent years, the aftershocks of his childhood nearly wrecked David’s life in a different way: he developed a gambling addiction, and blew his inheritance on the financial markets. “It was the only sense of control I could have in my life,” he says, aware of the irony; that it was an illusion. He found help though – therapy from a gambling charity – and is better now.

What advice does he have for someone worried about a loved one in an abusive relationship? “Keep checking in with them, don’t lose contact, keep letting them know that certain things might not be normal. Ask them: How do they feel about that? Let them unfurl it themselves. Make sure there’s a support network around them.”

As we start to leave, I ask what he’s most proud of. “That I stood up and I spoke out when the moment counted, and I helped free my mother in a case that recognised and raised awareness of coercive control.” But then he pauses. “I’m proudest of surviving,” he says, his eyes scanning back over the London skyline.

The Unthinkable: A Story Of Control, Violence And My Mother by David Challen is published by Brazen