ELIZABETH HUDSON: My abusive husband was jailed after threatening to kill me. Now he’s being released early

Clutching the letter in my hands, I felt my blood run cold. Here, in stark —black and white, was the unfathomable news that the man who had been jailed just 18 months earlier for savagely attacking me was now eligible for early release from prison.

That man was my ex-husband Martin Underwood. A man who, on the morning of April 3, 2021, assaulted me so violently that I was convinced he was going to kill me — not least because he struck me repeatedly across my head and stomach and held a knife to my throat, he repeatedly screamed that it was his intention.

I knew he meant it. It was only through sheer luck that I managed to escape.

Yet this was only the start of my ordeal. What followed was an exhausting two-year battle to bring Martin to justice, one that dragged on so long it gave him the opportunity to violently attack his new girlfriend. She too narrowly escaped with her life after he tried to suffocate her with a plastic bag.

When Martin was finally sentenced to six years and three months in prison in February last year, it was an enormous relief for both of us.

Yet now, this letter from the probation service in my shaking hand informed me he was eligible for early release in June next year under Labour’s early release scheme — introduced to tackle overcrowding in prisons — and possibly as soon as next month under the Home Detention Curfew scheme, or ‘tagging’, which allows certain prisoners to serve some of their sentence in the community. Sinking into a chair, I sobbed at the injustice of it.

It was terrible enough to have gone through what I did; now it felt like I was being assaulted again by a justice system that, having gone out of its way to reassure the public that domestic abusers would not be freed early, was now telling me my ex-husband might be released after serving less than 40 per cent of his sentence.

Is it any wonder that I, along with other victims of domestic assault, feel utterly betrayed?

Even with Martin still behind bars — for now — the toll this news is taking is immense.

The PTSD symptoms and flashbacks I have tried so hard to overcome have resurfaced, and I’m living in a state of anxiety as I think about what this means for me and my two children.

It’s one reason I have written to Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood asking her to automatically exclude from early release any prisoner serving a sentence for violent offences involving domestic abuse. It’s not enough to exclude a handful of certain offences.

Domestic abusers commit all sorts of crimes against their victims — from assaults to criminal damage - and they should all be excluded from early release. I’ve recently set up an online petition to campaign for this injustice to be overturned.

It’s the last thing I ever thought I’d find myself campaigning for. Now 42, I have a successful career in PR and my friends would describe me as strong and independent. On paper, I’m an unlikely victim of domestic violence. But as I can testify, it doesn’t discriminate.

It is now nearly 20 years since I first met Martin at a dinner with mutual friends. He was a 31-year-old Army sergeant and I was a 23-year-old master’s student, still living with my parents. Charming and confident, he seemed the epitome of grown-up maturity.

We started dating and our relationship quickly became intense. Martin bombarded me with telephone calls and thoughtful gifts, and I honestly thought I’d found my soulmate. It was my first serious relationship and I was incredibly naive.

With hindsight, the warning signs were there: the occasional cutting remark that would be laughed off as a joke; his demands that I spent all my time with him dressed up as love and affection.

In 2006, 16 months after we got together, Martin persuaded me to leave my job and friends in London to move in together in the West Midlands, where he had secured a job in project management after leaving the Army.

I didn’t know a soul and became increasingly dependent on him. His demands for my undivided attention became more excessive and there were instances of aggressive behaviour, especially when he had a lot to drink.

In 2007, in a drunken rage, he struck me across the face. I immediately went to the police, and he was cautioned. Afterwards, he was the picture of contrition, pleading with me to forgive him and promising never to do it again. I stayed.

For a while, things were calmer. I put his worst behaviour down to alcohol, but the reality was I was already trapped, especially once I gave birth to our son in 2008. New to motherhood, and without any family nearby, I was reliant on him financially. It was a fraught time.

I wish I could say things got better, but any victim of domestic abuse will recognise what happened next.

Slowly the verbal abuse escalated once again into physical violence and controlling behaviour. Martin would smash my belongings - from sunglasses and hair straighteners to mobile phones - and ruin my rare nights out by ringing me and demanding I came home, or else he would walk out and leave our son on his own.

As months, then years went by, I repeatedly tried to leave, turning up on my parents’ doorstep more times than I can count, only for Martin to reel me back in with promises to do better - promises I desperately wanted to believe because my misguided instinct was to keep our little family together.

And each time, for a while, it seemed he was keeping his promises, and life would be briefly wonderful. Until he flared up again.

Over the years I persuaded him to go to relationship counselling and even booked him a place on a domestic abuse perpetrator course. He walked away from both saying the experts didn’t know a thing.

In 2014, Martin finally proposed. I accepted. Even after everything I’d been through, I was desperate to believe his assurances that things would be different.

He could be incredibly persuasive and, by then, I was very much under his control.

I know that to those on the outside, situations like mine can seem bafflingly hard to understand. But years of manipulation give men like Martin a hold over you that’s almost impossible to explain or escape, no matter how strong or intelligent you are. Having experienced it, I would never judge anyone trapped in the same hell.

Our wedding in 2015 was followed, two years later, by the arrival of our daughter, and her birth finally swept away any remaining illusions that I could turn our relationship around.

From abandoning me at the hospital to carry our new baby and heavy car seat alone when I was recovering from a C-section, to shouts and threats because my focus was on the baby, Martin swiftly fell back into his old ways.

One evening, as I stared into my baby daughter’s eyes, I realised that if I wouldn’t tolerate such horrors for her, I shouldn’t for myself either.

And so, in May 2018, I finally left the marital home with little more than the clothes on my back, taking the children to my parents’ home.

Martin’s response was to destroy most of the clothes I’d left behind, smash our wedding crockery and break furniture.

Times were tough. While I found a house to rent in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, where we had moved a few years earlier to be nearer to ­family, I was also contending with being a single mother and closing the small PR business I’d built from scratch.

I never stopped Martin from seeing the children, who still loved him. And, as we spent afternoons together in the park with them, he once again managed to convince me he had changed. When Covid struck, we ended up in a bubble, living across two houses.

We had started discussing moving back in together when that final, brutal assault took place on the Easter weekend of 2021.

It was set off by — of all things — Easter eggs. The children were staying with my parents and we had planned to spend some time together. On the Friday evening, we had an argument. The following morning, I went round to Martin’s to talk.

Yet the moment I let myself in, I sensed something was wrong. Martin seemed drunk, and I knew I needed to get out. But as I went to leave, I noticed the eggs I had bought for the children on the hallway bookcase.

I reached for them and he shouted at me to put them back. When I said I wanted to take them as tomorrow was Easter Sunday, he just flipped.

The suddenness of what happened still takes my breath away. He began to hit me around the head, punching me in the stomach and screaming he would kill me. As I attempted to move away from his blows, I found myself in the kitchen, where he picked up a knife and held it to my throat while threatening to kill me, kill himself and orphan our precious children.

Filled with absolute terror, I remember thinking I would never see the children again when he briefly turned away. I spotted the key was still in the front door and took my chance. I managed to run, unlock it in one quick movement and race out into the cul-de-sac.

As I did so, Martin grabbed the back of my jeans, and I screamed for help as I frantically tried to pull free.

By complete luck, a neighbour was in his driveway and the moment Martin spotted him, he let go and went back inside.

I was so full of adrenaline I hadn’t even registered he had sliced my arm with the knife and I was bleeding. The police and an ambulance were called, and an officer from the South Yorkshire force took a statement before I went to hospital. The following day, I was told Martin had been arrested for unlawful wounding and threats to kill.

The officer was confident he would be charged and remanded in custody given the sheer mass of evidence against him, including CCTV of me running for my life out of the house, photos of my injuries and witness statements from neighbours.

Instead, when on Monday I chased the police for news, having failed to contact me as promised, I discovered Martin had been released under police bail pending further investigations.

I was completely terrified. I’d assumed we could move back home, but now we had to stay at a friend’s until I had security systems installed. While Martin’s bail conditions meant he shouldn’t contact me, I felt deeply frightened he might try.

It took four agonising months for the police to finally bring charges against him, during which time I was constantly looking over my shoulder.

The agony continued, with plea hearings repeatedly delayed, and an initial trial date of June 2022 postponed due to the barristers’ strike. His trial was pushed back to November, 19 months since my assault took place.

It was a trial the CPS made clear they would prefer not to have, trying to persuade me that Martin would plead guilty to Actual Bodily Harm (ABH) if I agreed to let the threats to kill charge lie on file. They told me that both offences carried the same sort of jail time - which isn’t the case.

I refused. I’d finally woken up to the type of man Martin really was and exactly how dangerous he could be. I was convinced that if I hadn’t escaped that morning, our children would have been left without a mother — and for that, he deserved to face justice, however long it took.

Instead, it felt like the CPS wanted to take the easiest option rather than the right one, and it angers me to think about all the other vulnerable women in my position who may have been put under the same pressure.

The wait for the trial was exhausting - and worse was to follow. In August 2022, 16 months after I was attacked, I received a message on Facebook - from Martin’s new fiancee. She, too, had been violently attacked, and beaten by him before he tried to suffocate her with a plastic bag.

She had only escaped by locking herself in the bathroom and contacting the police. She, too, thought she was going to die.

I stared at the message, reeling. Here was another woman who had been through hell at the hands of a man who should already be behind bars.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I wrote back. I sat and cried, questioning if there was more I should have done to protect her.

Martin was remanded into custody at last, and the police decided to join our cases together. On February 3, 2023, 22 months after his final attack on me, Martin was sentenced, after pleading guilty to ABH and threats to kill in my case, for which he received four years.

He also pleaded guilty to ABH, non-­fatal suffocation and non-fatal strangulation of his former fiancée, for which he was given another two years and three months.

Of course, it didn’t feel long enough, but six years and three months were significant — even though I knew he would be released after serving half of his sentence, as is currently automatic for prisoners serving fixed-term sentences. His 27-month sentence for his attack on his fiancee would be served consecutively to his time for attacking me.

Factoring in his time on remand, that meant two and a half years of knowing Martin was safely locked away, taking us to September 2025 - enough time for me and my family to slowly heal and rebuild. For the first time in a long time, I could finally breathe. That is until that letter landed on my doorstep in early September, telling me that not only would Martin be released early in June next year, but possibly even as early as December.

Some may struggle to understand why ‘just a few months’ would make such a big difference. But when you have lived in fear for as long as I have, then every single extra day of feeling safe, of knowing that he cannot hurt us, is precious. And to be told that this doesn’t matter is nothing short of an insult.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Aside from my personal sense of betrayal, this letter was also in direct contradiction with the Government’s own statements about early release, which made it clear that offenders sentenced to four years or more - not to mention those sentenced for offences like suffocation and strangulation - would not be eligible. Martin’s early release would break these promises twice over.

Yet here we were, those promises shattered — and with them the fragile sense of peace I’d tried to build for myself and my children.

Frustratingly, Martin has seemingly benefited from a loophole, meaning the Ministry of Justice believes he is now eligible for early release, although I disagree that this is the case.

While no sentence would truly compensate for the damage­ Martin has done, this news felt like a punch in the guts for ­victims who have already had the hell of their abuse compounded by the slow, often shoddy workings of the justice system.

Since that day Martin tried to kill me, I have lost count of the number of times I had to chase for information or was fobbed off.

Indeed, it is only since writing to the Justice Secretary and starting my campaign to raise awareness of cases like mine that the probation service has contacted me to say Martin will now not be released in December.

Yet he will still be released next June under the early release scheme. It’s devastating.

For decades, politicians have failed to fix our broken justice system. But this latest disaster is taking place under a Labour Government that has pledged to treat domestic abuse as seriously as terrorism.

If they mean what they say, they need to honour the promises they made - rather than heap further terror on those of us who have already been through enough.

© Daily Mail