When Susan Nicholson was found dead on her sofa in 2011, the police decided it was an accident, even though a previous partner of her boyfriend, Robert Trigg, had died in similar circumstances. Why did her parents have to fight such a long battle for justice?
E arly on the morning of 17 April 2011, Robert Trigg left the flat in Worthing that he shared with his girlfriend, Susan Nicholson, and walked to the newsagent for a pack of cigarettes. On his way home, he lit one. Then he called his brother Michael and told him that Susan was dead.
Michael urged him to call the police. Instead, he called a neighbour, Hannah Cooper, and told her the same thing. Cooper also said he should call the police. In the end, she stood with him and made the 999 call on his behalf. Much later, the police released the audio recording of the call. “He phoned me just now, saying: ‘I think Sue’s dead, ’” Cooper tells the dispatcher. “So I’ve come down and he says she is.” She then asks Trigg what happened. You can hear him in the background of the call. “I think … could be suffocation, ” he says. On the recording, his voice is flat and expressionless. He sounds like a man in shock, struggling for words.
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When the police arrived, Trigg told them a story. At the end of a night of heavy drinking, he and Susan had fallen asleep on the sofa, he said. He had woken up to find himself on top of her. Her face was purple. He thought she was dead, he told the police. But he panicked and so went to the shops.
There were no signs of a struggle, and panic makes people do strange things. Trigg’s story seemed to be consistent with Susan’s condition. Two days later, the pathologist, Simon Poole, conducted a postmortem and his findings confirmed it: the cause of death was likely to have been a mix of accidental smothering and the effects of intoxication. The police concluded that the death was not suspicious.
Six years later, sitting in the front room of their seaside home in Worthing, Susan’s parents, Peter and Elizabeth Skelton, remember the moment they learned of their daughter’s loss. It had fallen to their grandchildren – Joseph, now 30, and Marc, now 28, from Susan’s previous marriage – to give them the news. “The police had told them their mum had died in her sleep, ” Peter says. “We just had to believe it. We were devastated.”
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“You think: ‘That can’t be true, ’” Elizabeth says. “And you think back to when you saw her and she looked fine. Why would she be dead?”
Surrounded by pictures of their beloved grandchildren, the Skeltons speak quietly and thoughtfully, taking their time with each answer. They are 81 and 82 now and seem stoical in the face of loss. But, occasionally, their eyes glaze over. If they seem a little absent in these moments, it is easy to see why. The question of why their daughter died took far longer to answer than they could have expected – and came at a far greater cost.
Susan Nicholson’s life had not been easy in the years before she died. After a decade working at banks and a utility company in London and Sussex, she had moved to Worthing to be with her husband, with whom she would have Joseph and Marc. But the marriage broke down and she started to drink heavily. In 2010, she went to a rehabilitation clinic, where she met Trigg. By the end of the year, things seemed to be looking up. She bought a flat and her new boyfriend moved in. He even met her parents – only two or three times – but he seemed friendly, the Skeltons say.
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But after Susan’s death, something about Trigg bothered Peter and Elizabeth. He was 5ft 9in, with a large, imposing frame, and weighed 15st. And they had seen the sofa. It was small – far too small for the couple to sleep on together, they thought. It just didn’t make sense.
Elizabeth phoned DI Sarah Barrett, one of the officers who had attended the scene. “I said, ‘Have you seen the width of the sofa?’” she remembers. “There’s no way two people could sleep on that sofa.”
They pushed the detective, Elizabeth says, for an answer. But Barrett’s mind was made up. And the postmortem’s conclusions were clear enough. On 14 October, they buried their daughter. Even with an inquest still to come, the case of Susan’s death had been closed.
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And then, a couple of months later, just before the inquest, the Skeltons were told something that would change their lives. Police informed them that Trigg had been cautioned for assaulting Nicholson. But, more disturbingly, they were also told that years earlier Trigg had been in a relationship with a woman who had died suddenly in the bed they shared. And the police knew about it.
On the day she died in early 2006, Caroline Devlin, who had moved to Worthing from Scotland with her four children, had something to be excited about: she was about to start a job at the probation service. Her children – Jordan, 14, Codie, 10 and Brandyn, nine – wanted to do something for her. It was Mother’s Day and they were planning to make her breakfast.
The family shared a house with Trigg, who Devlin had been with for a couple of years. But when Jordan came out of his bedroom, he found Trigg sitting at the top of the stairs leading to their loft bedroom, fully dressed, clasping a cup of tea. Trigg casually told the boy: “There’s something wrong with your mum.”
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Trigg stayed where he was, drinking his tea, as Jordan went past him into the bedroom. He found his mother lying face down with her head at the bottom of the bed, naked. He tried to wake her up. But she was cold and her face was blue.
The police arrived soon after. They knew that Trigg had been cautioned for assaulting another former girlfriend, Susan Holland, whom he had dated in 2003. But they did not see Devlin’s death as suspicious. A postmortem at Worthing hospital by Barbara Borek, a forensic pathologist, concluded that the 35-year-old had died of an aneurysm. The death was put down to natural causes, and no inquest was held.
Trigg stayed on at the house for a short time and then disappeared from the lives of the children Devlin had left behind. It would be another four years until he met Susan Nicholson. When he did, he started abusing her within a matter of months. This was recorded, too. Hannah Cooper, the neighbour who called the police when Trigg told her that Nicholson had died, had made several calls to Sussex police reporting disturbances in Nicholson’s flat.
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At least one of those calls was serious enough to set alarm bells ringing. On 26 March 2011, Cooper told the police she could hear trouble from Nicholson’s flat. When officers arrived at about 11.30pm, they found Nicholson with visible injuries to her face – two black eyes and a swollen nose and mouth. She had bruising to the top of her chest and a cut on her right arm. The next day, Trigg was cautioned for battery. But no one made a connection to what had happened to Caroline Devlin.
Even at Nicholson’s inquest, no one questioned the manner of Devlin’s death. She was mentioned, and a single incident of violence against Nicholson was briefly discussed. But there was no reference to the attack that had been bad enough to put Holland into hospital for three weeks.
At the inquest, Elizabeth Skelton told the coroner, Michael Kendall, she could not accept the conclusion. The couple questioned the size of the sofa and challenged Trigg over his violent behaviour. “I just have to say we’re not at all happy, ” Elizabeth told the coroner. “I don’t think the truth has been told at all.”
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But Kendall was unmoved. He told the Skeltons: “I’m sorry the proceedings don’t dot every ‘I’ and cross every ‘T’ and that’s very unsatisfactory for both of you, but, as far as my jurisdiction is concerned, I feel that I’ve heard the evidence that I need to hear.” He recorded a verdict of accidental death.
The Skeltons say they felt as if their own daughter had been put on trial. References to Susan’s drinking and patchy employment history were made. “But she wasn’t there to defend herself, ” Elizabeth says. “We knew it was a sham. It really was.”
At the time of the inquest, the Skeltons had no idea their daughter was being regularly abused. They glaze over – particularly Peter – when they are asked about this period of their daughter’s life.
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They had first met Trigg at a charity shop that Nicholson was looking after for its owner. It was 11am. Peter says, “I wouldn’t say he could hardly walk, but he seemed very drunk. He had certainly been drinking. We
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