My daughter bravely advised police how she was horrendously abused by her boyfriend. Two weeks later, she was lifeless. This is what I want I’d recognized… each mom must learn my story

Two weeks before she died, Chloe Holland summoned the courage to walk into a police station and describe, in painstaking detail, the horrendous abuse she had suffered at the hands of her boyfriend.

It had taken her months to try to break free of Marc Masterton’s controlling grasp, but finally, over two hours, Chloe laid bare the threats, cruelty and fear that had come to define her life.

It was meant to signal her escape.

Instead, a fortnight later Chloe took her own life at the age of just 23, leaving behind a devastated family – but also vital testimony in the form of that police statement, which would later help convict the man she had accused.

For her grieving mother Sharon, hearing the recording of that statement played in court was almost unbearable: the voice of her daughter giving evidence from beyond the grave.

‘Aside from Chloe’s death, it is the most horrific thing I have gone through,’ she says now. ‘Not just the detail, but hearing how frightened she was of him.’

In October 2023, Masterton, now 28, was jailed for 41 months for his campaign of coercive and controlling behaviour against Chloe.

But for Sharon it is nowhere near enough. She is convinced Masterton’s appalling actions led to her daughter’s death. Indeed, at his trial the court was told that the physical and psychological impact of the abuse had significantly contributed to the deterioration of Chloe’s mental health.

Sharon is now campaigning to highlight the link between victims of coercive control and suicide. She wants the creation of a statutory offence of manslaughter by coercive control.

‘I think with a lot of victims of domestic violence, things get so bad that it is a case of kill yourself or be killed,’ she says.

Figures from the Home Office-funded Domestic Homicide Project show that more domestic abuse victims take their own lives than are killed by their partner.

Amongst the domestic abuse-related deaths in England and Wales between 2020 and 2024, 354 were suspected suicides, compared with 332 intimate partner homicides.

And yet, under the existing legal framework, there is still yet to be a successful manslaughter prosecution of a perpetrator whose victim took their own life.

‘Masterton will be out of prison in October, but I have lost my daughter for ever,’ Sharon says. ‘How can that really reflect the horror of what he did?’

Sharon certainly never saw herself as a campaigner, but the 53-year-old mother of three from Portsmouth is driven by the desire to make sure that her daughter’s death is not in vain.

She is also raising Chloe’s son, a bright and lovable six-year-old who does not yet know the horrific truth about his mother’s death.

‘He reminds me so much of his mum as a girl,’ says Sharon. ‘In some ways it’s like she’s jumped into him.’

A bubbly, outgoing child, Chloe was ‘always on the go’, her mum recalls. ‘She just really enjoyed life.’

While Chloe initially had ambitions to join the Army, falling pregnant at 18 ended those hopes, especially when her relationship broke down. Her mother temporarily took on the bulk of the care of her son so Chloe could put her life back together again.

But in early 2022 she began a relationship with Masterton, someone she had been at school with, who Chloe said had always been ‘obsessed’ with her. Initially, Chloe seemed thrilled by her new relationship.

What neither she nor Sharon knew was that Masterton had already been violent towards an ex-girlfriend – something that only came to light in the wake of Chloe’s death.

Over time, however, Sharon began to feel worried about the influence Masterton had over her previously independent daughter.

‘He controlled who she spoke to, what friends she had on Facebook, he controlled her phone,’ Sharon says. ‘I told her my misgivings more than once but, while we were close, Chloe was very private. I just let her know that if she needed to talk to me about anything, I was here for her.’

Only later did Sharon learn the truth – that Masterton had launched a sustained campaign of abuse against Chloe, belittling her, tracking her phone, assaulting her and telling her she was so worthless she might as well take her own life. On one occasion, detailed in her police statement, Chloe described how he held a knife to her throat before giving it to her and telling her to ‘do it to herself’.

Chloe tried to leave several times, only for Masterton to pull her back into his cycle of abuse. Sharon says: ‘She was terrified of him. In her statement she said that when he was going to attack her, his eyes went from blue to black. I think she believed she would never get away.’

Yet by that summer it seemed Chloe had managed to escape; in July 2022 she rang her mum to say she had moved out, and Sharon recalls that Chloe ‘seemed in a good place’.

However, by autumn the couple had reconciled – although Chloe did not confide this to her mother until January the following year, at which point she told Sharon she had ended the relationship.

‘I had my suspicions before that, that she was still seeing him but whenever I asked she would insist she wasn’t,’ Sharon says.

That same month – unknown to her mum – a terrifying incident unfolded. In the weeks before she died, Chloe had attempted to jump off a bridge – but was stopped by two passers-by.

Sharon will never know for sure, but she thinks this desperate episode is what prompted her daughter to finally go to the police and make a statement reporting Masterton for his abuse.

Yet if it was meant to mark a new chapter, it tragically failed: two weeks later, on February 1, 2023, Chloe’s unconscious body was found in woodland by police, who had been alerted by a friend.

Witnesses had heard her in the street, shouting into her phone and begging to be left alone – a phone call Sharon now knows was to Masterton.

Sharon first learnt something had happened via a phone call from a friend Chloe had been staying with, who had been contacted by the police and told Chloe had been taken to hospital. ‘At that point I didn’t have the remotest sense that it was serious.’

Only when she got to the Queen Alexandra Hospital did Sharon learn Chloe was on life support – and had only a five per cent chance of survival. ‘I was just in shock from the moment I arrived,’ she says. ‘When the consultant said there was such a small percentage I knew instinctively that she wasn’t coming back from that. I was absolutely devastated.’

In fact initially, 23-year-old Chloe was showing evidence of brain activity. But after three weeks of sitting at her daughter’s bedside, consultants told Sharon there was no hope of recovery – and it was time to move Chloe to palliative care. She died nine days later in early March.

In the bewildering weeks and months that followed, Sharon says it was hard to accept that her beautiful and loving daughter had really gone.

‘I don’t think it’s sunk in even now, after everything,’ she says.

She also had to process the news, delivered by a detective at her dying daughter’s bedside, that Chloe had made a detailed report about Masterton to police.

He was subsequently arrested and charged with coercive control and four counts of assault, all of the latter later dropped when he pleaded guilty to the former charge in August 2023.

‘I feel that I was badly let down,’ says Sharon. ‘I had been given the impression by police that the coercive control charge would also cover his violent assaults. I feel he got away far too lightly.’

Not least because Masterton’s 43-month sentence, handed down two months later, was discounted for his early guilty plea.

By then, Sharon was also in possession of another piece of horrifying information. When Chloe’s death was made public, Sharon was contacted by a young woman called Zoe Castle, who told her that Masterton had done the same thing to her in 2018 when she was just 18 years old.

After Zoe went to the police, in May 2024 Masterton was jailed for a further three years and seven months after pleading guilty to coercive control in that relationship too. Portsmouth Crown Court heard that he had inflicted a sustained campaign of abuse on Zoe, including hitting her over the head with a glass bottle and plunging her into a freezing-cold ice bath.

While Sharon welcomes his extended sentence, she wishes it had not come at the expense of another terrified young woman.

He will be released from prison in October. ‘It frightens me,’ says Sharon. ‘He knows I’ve campaigned for justice and I don’t think he will leave things alone.’

Nor does she believe that Masterton has been sufficiently punished for the devastating impact he had on her daughter.

It is why she is now determined to ensure that – at the very least – police work harder to prosecute for manslaughter in suicide cases where coercive control has been shown to have taken place.

While existing law allows for manslaughter prosecutions in such cases, in practice it has been legally difficult to prove a link between the abuse and death.

In 2024, 23-year-old Kiena Dawes from Lancashire took her own life, with her boyfriend Ryan Wellings charged with manslaughter in the wake of her death.

A jury at Preston Crown Court heard that Kiena had been subjected to repeated assaults, bullying and belittling by Wellings. In her suicide note she had written: ‘Ryan Wellings killed me.’

Though jailed for assault and coercive control, Wellings was cleared of manslaughter.

The fact no one has been convicted thus far of being responsible for another person’s suicide is why Sharon wants to have manslaughter by controlling or coercive behaviour recognised as a specific offence.

In the year of Chloe’s death, Sharon petitioned the government on the issue. This initial attempt failed, but at the end of last year she joined with other parents in a similar position to start the Suicide is Homicide campaign.

They are calling for a change in police policy so that any suicide in the context of evidence of domestic abuse is investigated as a potential homicide.

Of course, nothing will bring Chloe back – for Sharon or her grandson. ‘He’s just started to ask more about his mummy – why she isn’t here, can he go to heaven and see her?’ she says. ‘It’s so hard for him to understand.’

Eventually she will tell him the truth, but in the meantime she tries to stay positive for his sake.

‘I miss Chloe every day, but I tell myself that at least now she is safe, away from all that trauma,’ she says. ‘My dearest hope now is that no other families suffer as we have – and that I can raise her son to be proud of her memory.’

• Find out more at: domestic abuserelatedsuicide.org
• For help and support, call the Samaritans on 116 123 or go to samaritans.org