During the prosecution opening, the relationship between Christine and Ian Rawle was compared to The Twits – a spiteful couple from a Roald Dahl children’s book who play nasty practical jokes on each other.
But over a month-long trial at Exeter crown court, the 27-year marriage between the Rawles has felt anything but amusing or entertaining and the headline-grabbing Dahl comparison has, perhaps, ended up feeling a little tasteless.
The prosecution alleged that Christine Rawle, described in court as a hypnotherapist and “horse whisperer”, now 70, murdered the 72-year-old garage owner, labourer and rally driver Ian Rawle in temper after a row over money, stabbing him “full square” in the back and driving the knife up to the hilt.
It claimed that the attack, at the 20-acre north Devon farm they shared, came hours after Rawle had told her daughter: “I hope the cunt dies” and following the stabbing, rather than trying to save him, she put her dogs away and made arrangements for her horses to be looked after.
The prosecution also said that Rawle had stabbed her husband once before and claimed she played awful tricks on him over the years including adding Viagra to his tea, putting chilli powder in his underpants and wiping her bottom with his ties.
However, the defence claimed there was an explanation for all of it – that she had been subject to years of bullying, intimidation, coercion and physical and sexual attacks, a “constant burn of abuse” that left her trapped in “invisible handcuffs”.
The defence claimed her bad behaviour was “resistance” to his controlling tendencies and her final lashing out was self-defence or a “loss of control” following 40 years of depression and at a time she was suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Certainly, it is not the sort of subject matter for a children’s story.
The Rawles met in the early 1990s in north Devon when Christine bought a car from Ian. The prosecution claimed Christine, who had three children, was homeless at the time after a failed marriage and “stole” Ian from another woman.
Christine, however, claimed Ian “stalked” her, appearing outside her home at night and told her: “I cannot let you go.” She said he was “all over her like a rash” and she was “smitten” by the attention.
It was a bizarre courtship. Between May 1992 and November 1994 – before they were married – they made a total of five reports about each other to the police. Christine claimed Ian had sabotaged her car and thrown a statue through a window, while he claimed she had broken into his home and vandalised one of his vehicles by putting a hosepipe through the sunroof and filling it with water.
Despite all this, they married in 1995 and lived on an £800,000 20-acre farm, Kittywell Wood. Those who knew them said there was love in the marriage – but violence was never far away.
In 1996, according to Christine’s son, Thomas, who was then in primary school, Ian attacked him by hurling a hot ashtray at his leg, causing a severe burn. Christine intervened and stabbed Ian in the arm and chest. He needed hospital treatment and she was charged with causing grievous bodily harm. She appeared before magistrates but was acquitted after her husband refused to support the prosecution.
They carried on living together and in April 1998 Christine told police Ian had hit her in the face and in 2000 said he had urinated in a drawer where she kept medical supplies. In the same year she claimed he had hit her with a shovel and he reported that she struck him with a riding crop. He was bound over to keep the peace.
In 2017 she made a report to police that gates were being left open, which risked her horses wandering off, and her keys were going missing. At around this time she was researching narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths and took a screenshot of an article describing the tactics people with antisocial personalities used to silence victims.
Thomas Rawle said his stepfather would try to control his wife by hiding keys, bank cards and phones, or blocking her vehicle in so she could not escape. He said Ian would kick Christine, who was registered disabled, in her bad leg with his steel toe-capped boots and once hurled her through a window. He expressed concern that nobody had stepped in to intervene, saying in court: “I never really felt from a young age there was much help.”
At the time of Ian’s death there were arguments over money. Christine wanted to sell off land to pay for a private eye operation but her husband was resisting. She moved out of the main house into a barn.
After her arrest, Christine’s words were captured on police body-worn cameras. “He’s been so cruel,” she said. “He’s narcissistic … How can you love someone … You do everything for someone and they’re so calculatingly nasty to you.”
She continued: “He’ll come and get me. He’ll come and get me … He’ll kill me. Oh God, why couldn’t someone have stopped him keep doing this to me? I’ve tried that many times.” In an apparent reference to one of the 101 calls, she said: “I tried the other day to phone the police and it takes forever for them to pick up.”
Rawle was later to tell a clinical psychiatrist that her husband would call her “mentally unstable” and tell her: “You are dead.” She said he demanded anal sex followed by oral sex because “I spoke shit.” She said: “I thought I was going to die, he was going to kill me.”
Rawle herself accepted she had flaws. In 2015 she wrote to one of her children: “I am who I am. Grandad would hit me and I wouldn’t give in so he would hit me some more. We had a huge fight one day and I nearly killed him. My life was hard and unjust. I developed a nasty temper which you have seen lots of times. I now understand just why men were attracted to me. I look like a girl but was strong like a man. What they thought was appealing became a nightmare for them. I’ve made a lot of people, particularly a lot of men’s lives hell. I made them feel inadequate. The smart ones fucked off.”
The prosecution warned the jury that it had not heard from Ian – and claimed some witnesses had tried to “pour poison” into their ears about him, making him out to be a monster and said Christine had described the alleged sexual abuse only after he had died.
It said the fact that the knife remained in his back for some minutes as he staggered for 100 metres showed she did not care what she had done. The defence saw it differently, claiming his final words were a last attempt to control her: “Take this fucking knife out of my back.”
