We remorse not hiring a hitman to assassinate our daughter’s boyfriend

Peter and Anne Hall are the most unlikely couple to contemplate murder. In their 70s, they are intelligent people with a strong moral compass who’ve never been in trouble with the police.

But when their privately-educated eldest daughter, a former Virgin Atlantic flight attendant, formed a relationship with an abusive, heavy-drinking drug addict and career criminal, it would prompt them to consider doing something unimaginable.

Unable to protect Michaela Hall from regular violent beatings from her boyfriend Lee Kendall, and feeling let down by police, probation officers and the courts, they discussed – in their despair – having him killed.

Their sense of hopelessness had increased after serial thug Kendall made two vile, expletive-ridden phone calls (recordings of which have been obtained by the Mail) in which he drunkenly threatened to murder them.

In the first of the calls, Kendall, slurring his words in his heavy West Country accent, told Michaela’s father Peter: ‘I am gonna burn your house down and I am gonna burn you down.’

In the second one, he said: ‘I know where you live, and I know where your cars are. I know where the f***ing lot are because your daughter took me there, so f*** you.’

Peter, 72, says: ‘All we wanted to see was this guy dead. Those discussions had taken place between us. What do we do with this guy? Do we dispose of him? In irrational moments, you think these things.’

Quietly spoken Anne, 74, a policeman’s daughter who often seems close to tears as she talks, adds: ‘We had somebody offer to do it, at a price.’

Ultimately, the Halls didn’t go ahead with the ‘disposal’ of their daughter’s monstrous partner. It’s a decision that to this day Anne regrets because Kendall would go on to murder Michaela in a shockingly violent attack.

Anne may have lost her liberty by taking the law into her own hands, but at least her daughter – a single mother of two – would be alive today.

‘She would still be here, wouldn’t she?’ Anne tells me when I ask her if she wished she’d done it. ‘I want her here and he’s nothing, he’s never contributed to life. He’s just a parasite.’

Kendall is now a convicted killer, serving a minimum of 21 years for strangling Michaela and stabbing her in the eye with a kitchen knife. Such are the dangers he poses to the public; he will probably never be freed.

It is more than three years since Michaela was murdered by Kendall, now 45, who she had taken pity on and tried to rehabilitate after meeting him through her work helping offenders released into the community.

But the fallout from her death at the age of 49, leaving two sons now aged 16 and 12 without a mother, continues.

Earlier this year, a coroner ruled that Michaela, from Mount Hawke, Cornwall, had been failed by agencies. The Halls have now launched legal action against a number of organisations including, the Mail understands, the Probation Service.

In the past few weeks, letters of claim have been submitted to those deemed responsible for the fatal blunders in Michaela’s case.

The couple are determined that lessons are learned and those who wronged her are held to account. So far, no one has faced misconduct proceedings let alone lost their job.

In a ruling which has effectively paved the way for the Halls’ legal action, Cornwall coroner Andrew Cox said ‘shortcomings and errors’ by probation services happened before her death.

She had been attacked by Kendall on multiple occasions. This led to him being recalled to prison and, after he was released in July 2020, he kept up the attacks, being arrested ten times.

In April 2021, Kendall admitted two assaults on Michaela and the following month (May), he was given a three-year community order. A few weeks later, she was dead.

Mr Cox told the inquest that probation services had ‘wrongly assessed as medium’ the risk of serious harm posed by Kendall, who had an extensive criminal record.

That meant management of him was by local probation services rather than the national Probation Service, which was ‘inappropriate’, he said.

On the night of her murder, despite an emergency call warning that she was being attacked, yet again police officers did not try to force entry to her home.

Radioing the Devon and Cornwall police control room just after 11.30pm on May 31, 2021, they speculated about what might be going on. ‘We have visions . . . like her lying there with him covering her mouth and stuff,’ the first officer told their colleague.

Police had been called to the property many times before for incidents of domestic abuse. On previous occasions when Michaela’s partner had attacked her, he would ‘drink and drink and drink’ until he passed out, the officer said. Maybe that’s what had happened this time, too.

Besides, they concluded, even if they could get inside, Michaela wouldn’t speak to them. ‘What can you do if she doesn’t help herself?’ the officer asked a colleague over the radio.

Michaela was found dead the following night. Her parents are convinced that had police forced entry, she might have been saved.

It was left to her father Peter, a former export manager and financial adviser, to make the heartbreaking discovery of his daughter’s body in a bedroom after she was murdered.

He and his wife had become alarmed after Michaela did not make a scheduled call to one of her two sons and frustrated by the attitude of the police, drove to their daughter’s home to investigate.

Peter rang the police, who said they had ‘no authority’ to enter the property. So, he collected a spare key from the landlady. ‘Then I opened the front door and went through the house.’

‘I went into her bedroom and there was nothing in there, but the door was closed for the bedroom next to it. So, I opened that door and that’s where I found Michaela. I realised that she was dead, I felt her pulse, she was lying on the floor. I went out. I had to tell Anne.’

Michaela had been fatally stabbed in the eye, but Kendall was nowhere to be seen. He was found by police the next day, wandering around Truro.

Anne closes her eyes as her husband relives that horrific day.

‘Well, that’s the first time I’ve repeated it without breaking down,’ Peter tells me.

We are sitting in their cottage near Redruth, Cornwall, discussing the events which led up to their precious daughter’s murder. They told me of her life, their journey of discovery about domestic violence and coercive behaviour, and why they have launched legal action against the authorities.

From the outside, it is difficult to understand what Michaela saw in Kendall. A confidential Probation Service report, seen by the Mail, lays bare his terrible criminal record.

First convicted of arson aged 17, he’d been repeatedly before the courts for a variety of offences including dishonesty, violence, driving offences, drug offences, acquisitive crime, threatening behaviour, possession of a knife, racially aggravated harassment, criminal damage and breaches of court orders.

Before killing Michaela, he had 53 convictions for 97 offences, while between 2019 and 2021 police recorded eight incidents linked to his relationship with her, such as ‘domestically abusive behaviour’ and use of intimidation.

Parents can’t choose who their children end up with, and the Halls have struggled to understand Michaela’s choice of boyfriend. She met him while working with offenders leaving jail. It was a post they say she was not properly trained for, making her especially vulnerable.

Michaela was bright, intelligent and had had a good education. Leafing through family photo albums, there are heart-warming pictures from her childhood and glowing images of her immaculately dressed in her air stewardess days, firstly with British Caledonian and later with Virgin Atlantic.

Rationalising his daughter’s choice of boyfriend, Peter says: ‘Michaela’s relationship with him, I guess, developed from the point of view her wanting to help him and not being aware of how corrosive that relationship would become and how coercive he was.

‘The one thing I can tell you is that drug users have developed an acute sense of how to manipulate people because that’s how they get hold of their drugs. That’s how they survive. So, it’s not difficult to see how he could realise he’s got someone caring here who he can manipulate. I think Michaela saw a man that was drowning, and she jumped into the water to save him.’

Michaela told her parents of her relationship with Kendall in 2019, and through their own research online they were quickly shocked to discover he was a habitual criminal.

Peter recalls: ‘So, we thought, crikey, this is a warning, so we got hold of Michaela and said: “Do you know who this guy is?”

At this point, we still didn’t know how serious an offender he was. We did not know he had been a drug addict since he was 14 and 40 per cent of his incidents were violent.’

After assaulting Michaela in a ‘psychotic’ outburst early in their relationship, Kendall was returned to prison but managed to continue manipulating her from jail, telling her to send him money because he didn’t like the food.

The violence continued after his release, putting a strain on Michaela’s relationship with her parents who were concerned that money they’d given their daughter was in fact feeding Kendall’s drug habit.

Peter said: ‘We had a phone call from Michaela one night, again in desperation as we probably appreciate it now, because they had run out of money.

‘It was quite an abusive conversation because we had stopped supporting them financially.

‘Towards the latter part of when she was with him, we would get 30 phone calls of an evening. She would say to me: “Dad, you don’t understand, you’re not helping”, the phone would slam down, 30 seconds later it would go again. That was when Peter got the threatening calls from Kendall.

‘I recorded it, just sent it straight to the police and they went instantly and arrested him,’ says Peter. ‘He had assaulted her. Michaela was going to make a statement but then she dropped the statement but, anyway, that (the threatening phone calls) got him locked up for a period.

‘When he was locked up, we saw what I call a massive change in her, she got a job with the RNLI as a fundraiser. She was beginning to come out of herself.

‘Anyway, we found out eventually that Kendall was being released from prison and I think just before he was freed, she had coffee with us, didn’t she?’

Anne looks reflective as she says: ‘Yes, it was the last time.’

‘She was laughing, she was joking, something we hadn’t seen for two years,’ Peter says.

Anne replies: ‘She was making plans for the future, which was new. It was her 50th birthday in the October and she talked about joining a cold-water swimming club.’ Such optimism was misplaced. Michaela would not make it to her 50th birthday.

In May 2021, just weeks after the Probation Service deemed him a medium risk of causing harm, he took her life.

Prior to her death, police had received 34 pieces of intelligence about his domestic abuse against her. Police, social services, charities and probation workers knew that he had tried to strangle Michaela, threatened her with weapons and beaten her up so badly she could not go to work, but he was free to kill.

Peter says her death was caused not only by human errors but ‘systematic failings’.

‘The probation service signed her death warrant, without question,’ he adds. ‘How many people are they letting out of prison that they shouldn’t let out?’

The problem looks set to get even worse under the new Government’s plan to release offenders after they serve just 40 per cent of their sentence in a bid to tackle prison overcrowding.

Such was the concern about her safety, Michaela was referred to a specialist multi-agency panel six times due to the very high risk she faced. This year’s inquest heard Kendall should have been classified as ‘high’ or ‘very high risk’ and that the assessment was done by an unqualified staff member.

A supervisor then co-signed the report, telling the inquest she did sometimes skim such documents owing to what she described as ‘horrendous work pressures’.

Had she read it diligently, she might have noticed it failed to include crucial facts including Kendall’s strangulation attempt – a red flag for future lethal violence, the inquest heard.

The flawed report resulted in a judge imposing a non-custodial sentence on Kendall for two assaults against Michaela and he was released from prison with minimal supervision.

Around two weeks after his release, after other failings, including a mandatory face-to-face probation appointment not taking place, he murdered Michaela.

Anne says: ‘It makes you so angry that Michaela, who always worked, had two beautiful children, contributed to life, looked after loads of people in her life and he was just a parasite and all the people that should have dealt with him didn’t do it.’

Now she and her husband hope that their decision to sue various agencies will help them get some accountability. The Ministry of Justice described Michaela’s murder as ‘a horrific crime’ but said it would be ‘inappropriate to comment on live legal proceedings’.

Explaining their course of action, Peter said: ‘I just think people should be held accountable. The only way you can get that is through legal redress. What else can we hope for?

‘We want Michaela’s boys to understand that we as grandparents have done as much as possible to bring people to account for the failings which resulted in the death of their mother.’

Anne’s voice is still raw with emotion, as she puts it more bluntly: ‘Putting Kendall in jail hasn’t given us justice.’