Why we struggle to believe women like Julie Ann McIlwaine

In this guest article, novelist and editor Leodora Darlington explores why victims of coercive control can struggle to be believed when their stories fail to fit our expectations. Looking at the cases of Julie Ann McIlwaine and Penny Jackson, she asks whether the law can properly account for the complex realities of prolonged domestic abuse.

Every editor develops a shorthand for the moment a story asks the reader to suspend disbelief too far. Where action seems unjustifiable. In my ten years of editing crime fiction, I’ve often found myself annotating text with an ‘U’ for ‘unconvincing’, a reminder to flag in my editorial letter to the author that in some way, we can’t believe what our character is showing us. Nine times out of ten, it’s the right note.

Early in my career, fresh from finishing my postgraduate degree and throwing myself into work to distract from grieving my mother, I read a manuscript in which a woman kills her sleeping husband after eleven years of marriage. There were no black eyes or broken arms, but a quiet psychological abuse that had made her steadily smaller.

In the end, it was rejected for too unclear an inciting incident. To sell a story, it helps to have a propulsive moment that kicks things into action – something with a date on it, a moment a reader could point to and say there, that’s why she did it. I was applying a rule to fiction many of us mistakenly apply to real life. But what happens when we try to apply the law to stories like these?

The woman who did everything she was told to do

On 1st March 2022, Julie Ann McIlwaine stabbed James Joseph Crossley ten times as he slept at her home in Dunmurry, outside Belfast. Seven of the wounds were to his chest and abdomen, one in each arm, one in his leg, and he had taken a sedative before lying down. She was convicted of murder and, in May 2025, sentenced to life with a minimum term of twelve years. He was asleep. He posed her no danger in that moment, and a man is dead whose family are still living with it.

The two years behind that night were tumultuous. James had choked Julie Ann in a hotel room in Spain in 2020, seriously enough that Spanish police arrested him, and he later rammed her car off the road while drunk. He gave her an ultimatum – him or her family – which a psychiatrist at her trial called psychologically intolerable while describing the bond between them as traumatic. In 2021, Julie Ann took her children into a Women’s Aid refuge for six months and secured a restraining order. She did very nearly everything we tell women in her position to do. Despite this, on 1 March 2022, James was asleep in her house anyway.

Her defence was loss of self-control, which, if accepted, would have brought the conviction down from murder to manslaughter. The jury rejected it unanimously. I don’t believe for a second that they were cruel. I think they looked at Julie Ann much as I did the protagonist in that manuscript and decided that despite what she’d faced, her defence provoked a ‘U’ for ‘unconvincing’.

Coercive control is a climate, not an incident

The defences capable of reducing murder to manslaughter are built around a moment much like an inciting incident: something said or done, a loss of control, a response. Parliament tried to loosen that in 2009, writing into the England and Wales reform that the loss need not be sudden, precisely so slow-burn cases could qualify. It’s human for people to still want the ‘moment’, though. Historically, juries are often looking for an inciting incident and an immediate reaction, where coercive control refuses to supply one.

Coercive control accumulates across years in moments often too dull to dramatize. Its genius is that the woman living inside it gradually loses the ability to see it as unusual. If you ask her to name the worst thing he did, she will often land on something that sounds like nothing at all. He didn’t like that jumper, or went quiet in the car on the way home. What she cannot hand you is the calculation she did every morning before she opened her eyes, working out from the sound of him downstairs what kind of day she was going to be allowed.

There is an evidential trap folded into all of this. Coercive control is built to happen unobserved, often leaving no witnesses. I’m adapting my debut novel, The Exes, for the screen at the moment, which has turned all this into an obsession. You can see a punch – visualising a toxic climate is much harder.

Penny Jackson and the wrong kind of composure

If Julie Ann’s difficulty was that she could not produce a convincing plot, Penny Jackson’s was that she could not produce a convincing performance. Jackson killed her husband David at their Somerset home in February 2021, after nearly twenty-five years of a marriage in which, her supporters say, she had been held at knifepoint, headbutted, strangled and called ‘a thing’. She was convicted of murder, given a minimum of eighteen years, and refused a challenge by the Court of Appeal in 2023. Crime+Investigation made a documentary about her case the following year.

What the jury heard, and what anyone who followed the trial remembers, was her voice on the 999 call. She told the operator she had tried to kill her husband, who was in the kitchen bleeding to death 'with any luck'. She thought she would get his heart, but ‘he hasn’t got one’. It is hard to listen to. It is also, to anyone who has spent time with survivors’ accounts, thoroughly familiar. We expect the newly violent to come apart, and when they don’t, we read the steadiness as coldness rather than dissociation, or twenty-five years of practice at keeping your voice level in a house where raising it was dangerous. None of that establishes that Jackson was telling the truth, but it does mean the most damning thing about her was a habit she had been trained into.

The law believes her now, and convicts her anyway

A good deal has changed since that documentary aired. In February 2024, following Clare Wade KC’s review of domestic homicide, the statutory factors shaping murder sentencing in England and Wales were rewritten, and a history of coercive control by the deceased towards the offender became statutory mitigation for the first time. Charging has climbed steeply too, from 198 coercive control charges brought by the CPS in 2016 to 4,955 in 2024.

With these changes, a victim’s years of abuse are now allowed to shorten how many years they serve for murder before being allowed parole. They don’t change the label. A woman can therefore experience decades of coercive control, be believed, and be labelled the same as a sadistic serial killer. What could change the label is reform of the partial defences themselves, and that is precisely what the Law Commission is reviewing now, with few outside criminal law aware it is happening.

I’m hopeful the law will continue to evolve to recognise complex cases. Northern Ireland eventually criminalised coercive control in February 2022. James Crossley died on 1st March. For nearly the whole of their relationship, what he was doing to Julie Ann was not, where she lived, a crime at all.

On 2nd October 2026, an update in Julie Ann’s case surprised many – her murder conviction was overturned. Expert evidence suggests Julie Ann meets the criteria for loss of self-control, dismissed by the jury as readily as that character’s motivation was dismissed in that rejected novel. Prosecutors are now seeking a retrial.

What I would say to the objections

None of this argues that McIlwaine should have walked free. A successful partial defence acquits nobody; it produces a manslaughter conviction and a judge with room to reflect on what happened. The question was never whether she went to prison but whether the law had any category for her besides the one it reserves for contract killers. Nor does it argue that men are not abused. However, what is not symmetrical is the killing. The Femicide Census counts a woman killed by a man in the UK roughly every three days. Women who kill partners overwhelmingly kill men who were hurting them, while men who kill partners overwhelmingly kill women who were leaving.

Both of these abused women were white, middle-aged and, in Jackson’s case, comfortably off, which places them close to the template of the woman we find it easiest to empathise with. They still found themselves facing much harsher sentencing than Charles Graham, a retired paramedic who received a three-year sentence after killing his abusive wife. Having spent a career watching which authors get called relatable and which get called niche, I can tell you the empathy does not grow more generous the further out you travel from the template.

The note I would write now

I have thought about that rejected submission more than is probably reasonable. That story was fiction, but it reflects the very real way in which victims of coercive control struggle to have their stories understood. It’s why in The Exes, I’m intentional on showing the reader Natalie’s history – as heartbreaking as it is compelling – after you understand the violence she’s capable of. The endlessly sympathetic victim is a device invented to make our judgements comfortable, and real victims are frequently difficult and occasionally guilty of things while remaining owed an accurate account.

‘Unconvincing’ is a fair note to give an author; they can choose to go back and put the reason on the page. Julie Ann McIlwaine cannot. Those two years are already behind her, largely unwitnessed, and for almost all of them not even illegal where she stood. By the time a courtroom was willing to look at her history properly, they had been reclassified as mitigation rather than explanation, which is the law’s way of saying that it believes you and has nowhere to put you. We can write better stories than that, and we had better, because ours are being used as evidence.

We all wait with interest to see how Julie Ann McIlwaine’s story will end.

If you are affected by anything in this article, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, run by Refuge, is free and open 24 hours on 0808 2000 247. Women’s Aid runs a live chat service at womensaid.org.uk. In Northern Ireland, the Domestic and Sexual Abuse Helpline is 0808 802 1414.