The complex question at heart of Ryan Wellings trial | UK News

“I was murdered.”

Those were the stark words Kiena Dawes typed into her mobile phone before she took her own life in July 2022.

In the same note, the 23-year-old mother-of-one from Fleetwood in Lancashire described her partner Ryan Wellings as a “monster” and a “bully” who had “killed me”.

Wellings was cleared of her manslaughter on Monday but found guilty of assaulting her, as well as controlling and coercive behaviour.

For those offences, the 30-year-old landscape gardener, from nearby Bispham, was jailed on Thursday for six years.

At the heart of the trial had been a complex legal question – can an abuser be held criminally responsible for the death of a victim who has taken their own life?

Warning: This article contains distressing images and content

Ms Dawes’ own words from “beyond the grave”, as lead prosecutor Paul Greaney KC put it in court, were the starting point for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) when it considered charging Wellings with manslaughter.

Detailed notes Ms Dawes wrote on her phone outlined two and a half years of physical and emotional abuse at his hands.

One described how he smashed up a small shrine she had created to her late father, while another detailed the time he threatened to scar her face with acid.

Wellings’ trial was also told of how, when she told him she wanted to end their relationship, he pressed the trigger on a drill and told her he would use it to “drill the teeth” out of her mouth.

In other evidence, the jury heard police had been called several times to the flat she and Wellings shared in Fleetwood and that in the months before her death, Ms Dawes told officers he had “absolutely leathered” her, strangled her, given her a black eye and tried to drown her in the bath.

On 4 January 2022, she called a confidential helpline run by the domestic abuse support charity Refuge.

Notes kept by the charity, which were read in court, detailed how Wellings had hit her, thrown objects at her and flung her into glass on the floor before pulling her along by her hair.

At the start of July 2022, Wellings was arrested but he denied deliberately harming Ms Dawes and was released on bail.

Two weeks later, she drove to her friend’s house, let herself in and placed her nine-month-old daughter in the living room, safely strapped into a car seat.

While her friend was in the shower, oblivious to their presence, she left her mobile phone next to her baby and drove away.

Ms Dawes took her own life shortly after.

In court, Wellings’ defence drew attention to Ms Dawes’s history of mental illness, which dated back to her childhood and included her making attempts to take her own life before she met him.

Characteristics of her diagnosed emotionally unstable personality disorder, including increased impulsivity, were also cited as a potential cause of her death.

In criminal proceedings, jurors are instructed that they must be satisfied “beyond reasonable doubt” that a person is guilty of a crime before they can convict them.

Jurors cannot be asked to explain why they have reached a decision, but the verdicts confirmed that in the case of Wellings, the jury accepted he had physically and psychologically abused Ms Dawes, but they did not find him to be criminally responsible for her death.

Speaking outside court after Wellings was convicted on Monday, Angela Dawes said she hoped “no other young lady or child” would have to go through what happened to her daughter.

She added that his convictions “clearly” demonstrated the “perpetrators of domestic abuse will be held to account”.

Speaking after the trial, a CPS spokeswoman said the case was “tragic” and prosecutors respected the jury’s decision.

Chief Crown Prosecutor Kate Brown, who leads on domestic abuse for the CPS, said the verdict of not guilty in respect to the manslaughter charge would not deter the service from considering similar charges in the future.

“There is nothing that we have seen that will prevent us bringing other cases,” she said.

“We are actively looking at the cases that the police are bringing to us.”

Only one person, Nicholas Allen, has ever been jailed for manslaughter over the death of a partner who took their own life after prolonged domestic abuse.

In 2017, Allen admitted killing Justene Reece and was jailed for 10 years.

Sentencing him, Judge Michael Chambers KC said Allen had made Ms Reece’s life “a living nightmare” and had “clearly caused” her to kill herself.

Charities supporting the victims of domestic violence said the outcome of the case had not changed their view about the link between someone being abused and them taking their own life.

Refuge’s head of services Julia Dwyer said her charity remained “steadfast” in its position that there was “an undeniable link between domestic abuse and suicide”.

The charity estimated that three women experiencing domestic violence kill themselves each week.

It said 24% of its service users had contemplated taking their own life on at least one occasion.

Harriet Wistrich, director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, told Radio 4 her charity was aware of a number of similar cases currently under consideration by the CPS.

She said she believed the jury in the case “must have struggled with is the fact that Kiena had a pre-existing vulnerability, that she’d attempted suicide previously”.

She said that meant it may have difficult for jurors to be “sure” the domestic abuse “was the causal factor”.

However, she said Ms Dawes being vulnerable and prone to self-harm could have made Wellings more culpable for “pushing her over the edge”.

“We’d like to see the criminal courts bring in expert evidence, not just psychiatric evidence, but evidence which explains how coercive control operates,” she said.

She said that could allow the court to understand “how women become totally trapped in these relationships by the web that is created by the abuser and they see no other way out”.