Her mother, Lyly Maughan, is sitting next to her best friend, Heather Savage, who is the foster mother to her daughters. The girls were aged one and two when Fri killed their father with a single stab wound. Fri’s three brothers and other family members are sitting together looking nervous in the public gallery. Their hope is that Fri will walk free today and be reunited with her children. She has not seen them since March 2020, when Covid prevented prison visits.

Fri was convicted of murder six and a half years ago and jailed for life. But she is back in court because that ruling was quashed after new evidence came to light, and a retrial ordered. Her lawyers are convinced that Fri has served her time and doesn’t pose a danger to anyone.

Her case is the perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with the criminal justice system when it comes to domestic violence: a misunderstanding of coercive relationships, a misreading of abuse, victim blaming, excusing the perpetrator. And as recent research shows, failures by criminal justice agencies to provide protection to women almost always precedes domestic homicide, with women overwhelmingly the victims. So, this case comes back to trial at the perfect time to assess whether the domestic abuse bill has made a blind bit of difference to what happens in the courts and in women’s homes.

In a separate part of the public gallery sit the cousins and family members of the deceased, throwing hostile glances at Fri and her family. The police are also there, in case of any trouble between the two families from Toxteth.

Fri killed her partner, Kyle Farrell, during a violent row in which he had attempted to strangle her. She had been out visiting a friend and when she got back Kyle complained that she was later than he expected. A neighbour heard Fri screaming for help and, when they entered the house, saw “a lot of blood” and Kyle on the floor. In a panic, Fri told the neighbour a stranger must have come in and attacked him

The young couple, both 21 at the time, had known each other since school and had been in a relationship for five years. This fateful night was the climax of those five years of abuse. Kyle raped and attacked Fri on numerous occasions during their years together. Lyly often heard arguments between the couple, including one that ended with Kyle shouting that Fri should “go and get raped”.

Fri’s two daughters were born just ten months apart, the first when she was 19, the second 20. She had terminated several other pregnancies, telling Heather that they were a result of force and “not made of love”.  I knew something was going on,” says Lyly. “One time, she came over and her face was a terrible state, it was covered in bruises, but she gave excuse after excuse, saying one of the kids threw a bottle at her.”

However, she didn’t tell anyone in authority about the violence, in keeping with a largely unwritten code in the black community of Liverpool that you don’t “grass”.

She maintained that pretence when the police arrested her, assuming that Kyle would survive, and her children be removed if she made allegations of domestic abuse — something she had seen happen to many young women in her working-class community. It was only when she was told that Kyle had died, and the police said they believed she was a victim of domestic violence, that Fri eventually provided an accurate account of events.

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Despite that evidence, in May 2015, a jury in that same Liverpool court, and before that same judge, convicted Fri of Kyle’s murder. Her family was deeply unhappy. They felt the legal representation had failed to show the impact of the abuse Fri had suffered. So shortly after the conviction, Fri’s uncle contacted Justice for Women, which arranged a new legal team to explore grounds of appeal. Harriet Wistrich, the solicitor who had represented Sally Challen, took up the case. She was shocked to see that Fri’s previous legal team had failed to obtain any evidence exploring the impact of the history of domestic abuse on her mental health.

It takes a long time for victims of abuse to feel safe enough to talk about it to a psychiatrist. In particular, Fri was terrified of disclosing that she had been raped when she was 15 by a family friend. It was only after spending many months working with a counsellor specialising in domestic violence that Fri was able to open up.

The resulting psychiatric and psychological report set out the extent and nature of the sexual, physical and psychological abuse that Fri had suffered, concluding that Fri was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which made her hypervigilant in the face of further violence and may have caused her to lose control when threated with violence. The experts also noted that PTSD can cause “dissociation”, which may have explained why Fri could not remember stabbing Kyle, only the blood and panic afterwards.

Fri’s new lawyers also instructed a pathologist to closely examine mug-shot photographs of Fri taken by police shortly after her arrest for murder. The pathologist concluded that the visible bruise marks to her neck were probably caused by strangulation, consistent with Fri’s account of having been throttled prior to her grabbing a knife and stabbing Kyle. Had this evidence been disclosed by the police at the time of her original trial, Fri may not have ever been convicted of murder.

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Fri’s lawyers were convinced they had a solid case to appeal. But an application for permission to appeal was dismissed in February 2018. The application was then renewed before three judges, who noted that this was a “paradigm case of coercive control” and ordered the appeal to go ahead. The Crown Prosecution Service commissioned its own psychiatric and psychological evidence which agreed with the diagnosis of PTSD. However, the Crown opposed the appeal. The case eventually went to a full Court of Appeal hearing in December 2020, at which point the court quashed her murder conviction and ordered a retrial.

Fri’s lawyers wrote immediately to the CPS, indicating that Fri was willing to plead guilty to manslaughter, a lesser offence than murder. This was despite evidence supporting self-defence which, if successful at trial, would lead to a full acquittal. But the CPS rejected repeated requests to drop the murder charge. Eventually, the case was prepared for a retrial on murder to begin on 17 May.

On 18 May, the CPS agreed to accept a change of plea from guilty to manslaughter without intent. Fri readily agreed, fearing a hostile jury could reconvict her of murder despite the additional evidence. The case was adjourned for sentencing until 21 May.

I was there last week in Liverpool Crown Court last week to witness Mr Justice Dove sentence Fri for manslaughter, following a six-year battle for justice. There was, also, a separate offence to consider. Last year, when prisoners had been confined to their cells for 23-and-a-half hours a day during lockdown, Fri illicitly obtained a mobile phone to keep in touch with her children. She also removed a blade from her Bic razor, which she used to make picture frames for her girls.

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When sentencing, the judge told Fri to stand and addressed her sternly, more so than in other cases I have observed where the female defendant has been cleared of murder. Looking over at the row of family members of the deceased I wondered if the judge’s harsh tone was for their benefit.

He gave her 10 years for manslaughter, with an additional nine months for the possession of the illicit items and ordered the security staff standing either side of Fri to ‘take her down’. Instead of walking free, Fri had to go back inside for another six months. The maths is insanely complicated. But the point is, he could — he should, in Wistrich’s opinion­ —have chosen to let her go back to her family then.

The legal team was distraught, and everyone visibly upset that Fri was to have to go back to prison. Lyly was shocked that daughter had been “painted as the monster some of the media wrongly made her out to be. The judge didn’t say she had been strangled or mention that’s why she picked up the knife,” says Lyly, “so it sounded like she did it out of badness.”

Fri’s best friend was devastated. “He didn’t mention the strangling when he sentenced her.  The judge praised Kyle as a brilliant father, but he kicked her in the stomach when she was pregnant. Why not let her come home to her kids?”

Fri, though, was grateful: “I’m no longer a murderer. It’s now accepted that I never intended to kill Kyle and that means the world to me.”

Wistrich was appalled by the harshness of the sentence. A just result, she says, would have been a sentence of six to eight years which would have better reflected the nature of the crime and would have meant immediate release from custody. Ten years is excessively punitive. Especially when you compare that with the lenient five-year sentence given to Anthony Williams who fatally strangled his wife in 2020 claiming depression. Fri was found guilty of an even lesser type of manslaughter. Sure, we’ve got a new Domestic Abuse bill, but “this result makes me feel like we have gone backwards for women victims”, says Wistrich.

While Fri sits alone in her prison cell for twenty-three and a half hours a day, having not seen or held her children for over a year, her legal team, her friends, and her family console themselves with the fact that she is not dead, and that she was able to defend herself against the violence inflicted upon her unlike so many others.

But no one should die — not women nor men — because of domestic abuse. It should be stopped before it gets anywhere near that stage, or, better still, stopped from ever happening in the first place. As Jane Monckton Smith outlines in her brilliant book In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder, domestic violence can be stopped in the early stages if police and prosecutors do their jobs effectively.

Every three days, a woman dies at the hands of her violent former or current partner. Those deaths are preventable. And had Fri been properly protected, Kyle Farrell would be alive today.

A woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every four days in the UK. And the myth persists that these murders are spontaneous — just the result of two people having a fight and one of them ending up dead. But, as renowned criminologist Professor Jane Monckton-Smith makes clear in her new book, In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder: “They are the most predictable homicides, which is why we can and should be preventing them.”

To prove her point, Monckton-Smith has developed a method for detecting and intervening in these relationships. According to her eight-stage time-line, the escalation of risk can be tracked and halted before it reaches a deadly conclusion.

She formulated the model during a research project based on 400 intimate partner homicides. Drilling down into each of these cases, she realised they all played out in the same way — even the four incidences of women killing men. When published, her research was naturally greeted with a frenzy of enthusiasm and attention so she decided to develop it into a book.

In Control is a devastating read. It opens with as powerful and heart-breaking an account of the complexity and deadliness of domestic violence as I can remember reading. It is a story from the author’s early days in the police service, an account of her attending the scene of a “domestic”. Monckton-Smith arrives to help a young woman who had been hit on the head with a lump hammer. “Her boyfriend – her assailant – had fled the scene before any of us arrived. The woman was simply gazing at the floor, quiet and very still. There was blood trickling down the back of her neck and onto the carpet.” Despite her serious injuries, the woman refused to go to hospital.

It left me in tears, keen to know what had pushed Monckton-Smith to submerge herself in the horrifying details of these hundreds of homicides. “Anger,” she tells me.

After joining and leaving the police service, and fronting a heavy metal band for a decade, she then went back to school. “That’s when I started studying criminology,” she tells me. “And that’s when I started getting angry.”

Focusing on male violence while studying for her PhD, Monckton-Smith read the work of feminist criminologists such as Sue Lees, whose work exposed the misogyny within the criminal justice system. But it was meeting Frank Mullane, the CEO of Advocacy After Fatal Abuse, whose sister and nephew Julia and William Pemberton were killed by her former husband in 2003, that led Monckton-Smith to focus on domestic homicide.

“Frank took me to meet a family where the mother had been decapitated in front of her children,” she says. “Every single one of the stories I heard when we visited these families had a ring of ‘I’ve heard this before’. Things that hardly ever came up in court, such as his controlling behaviour, such as how she wasn’t allowed to have the lights on, or how he always had to know where she was.”

From there, she went on to develop her now widely-taught forensic model for the identification of domestic abuse. But she isn’t your conventional academic. She prefers her work to be read by those outside of the elite institutions rather than churn out papers for academic journals. But even though this work isn’t gathering dust on university library shelves, there are certain of her colleagues who are dismissive.

“Am I looked down on by some academics? Oh yes!”, she says, describing one conference at which she was presenting a paper on violence against women. “Some male academics were sneering at me, saying that my work was ‘voyeuristic’ and that there wasn’t a proper academic angle. So I thought, ‘Right, fuck you, I am going to give this the forensic attention that it deserves’. It made me realise how dismissive some people are of women being killed.”

Her book is neither academic nor voyeuristic. It is one of the most important books on abuse you will read, detailing each of the eight stages from first inkling to murder. It starts with the best advice that you can give a woman at the beginning of a relationship: “Don’t ignore what his ex said just because he says that she’s lying.”

These men are a type, says Monckton-Smith. It is not a crime of passion and they do not “just snap”. We can often predict how things are going to go by looking at his history. So any allegations of abuse in previous relationships, or any criminal records should set alarm bells ringing. This is stage one of the eight.

Stage two, she says is the abuser pushing for a commitment from his victim, such as a baby or moving in together. “Once they’ve got that commitment, it’s written in blood as far as they’re concerned,” says Monckton-Smith. “When they say, ‘You’re mine’, it can sound romantic. But what he is saying is, ‘I own you and you can never leave me’.”

By stage three, the abuser begins in earnest to create a situation where the woman would find it almost impossible to leave. At this point, coercive control at different levels is happening in practically every case. At stage four, he feels his control slipping. This happens almost always when the victim leaves or attempts to leave the relationship. This morphs into stage five, during which he will escalate the abuse in order to regain control.

“If she has left him, this is where the stalking comes in,” says Monckton-Smith. “There may be more threats of suicide, more acts of coercive control.” Or the perpetrator may decide to go back to stage one and love-bomb her in an attempt to remind her of how things were, or he could circle back to stage three and reassert his control.

“Stages three, four and five can be revisited over and over again for years,” she says. “Alternatively, he moves on to stage six, which is where the real danger of homicide begins.”

Stage six is when the perpetrator will decide how he is going to resolve things, having decided he may not regain control unless he kills her. If this is his decision, stage seven is the planning stage. “Some plan for months, years even, others for a few hours, but the important lesson to learn is that they do plan,” says Monckton-Smith.

The homicide is the eighth and final stage: “It is rare they fail. Forget what you hear about how he ‘just snapped’, that’s bullshit.”

Despite its harrowing subject matter, In Control is very readable and extremely accessible. She brings the eight stages to life using real case histories — interviews, police files and court documents — to highlight the methods and motives of the killers.

‘Vincent’ is one such murderer. “Vincent is ordinary,” writes Monckton-Smith. “He has never sought to be otherwise. His three-bedroom semi-detached house on a pleasant urban street … is well maintained, as is his ageing four-door estate car – precious emblems of the life he considered any man could expect. He claimed his entitlements and nothing more.”

Vincent stabbed his wife, Donna, 38 times because she had planned to leave him. He wasn’t usually a physically violent man, but he did control the movements and behaviour of Donna and their children. According to Monckton-Smith, who visited him in prison, Vincent saw himself as the victim. “He is not unlike so many of the other men I looked at.”

Monckton-Smith brings Donna, and all the other dead women in this book back to life with respectful scrutiny as she tells their stories with the help of 999 calls and the recollections of family members. She pores over medical records, text messages, social media and letters written by the victims that describe their abuse. She allows their cries for help to be finally heard.

Monckon-Smith says wants this book to save lives. “I don’t want people saying, ‘Oh, he was really jealous’ or ‘He was depressed, isn’t it awful?’ I want them to be saying, ‘Why wasn’t it recognised before? Why didn’t somebody say something? Why wasn’t this stopped?’”

After a year of lockdown, during which calls to helplines have risen significantly and household tensions have been unescapable, this book is more important than ever. If people hear these dead women’s stories, if people learn from them, then maybe others will be spared a similar fate. For until these domestic deaths are seen as the cold-blooded murders they are, the morgues will continue to fill with the bodies of women who could — and should — have been saved.