My son was killed by his girlfriend

Article here. Excerpt:

'"I knew instinctively what had happened; that she had done it and that he hadn't fought back," Ashe Smith, 80, says of her son James Self's vicious and ultimately fatal attack at the hands of his girlfriend, Polly Murphy. Self died on December 21, 2023, six weeks after the attack, and Murphy, a pink-haired artist, is now serving a life sentence for murder. But even Smith missed the danger signs – of control and physical aggression towards her son. If she had understood more about domestic violence towards men, she admits today, she might have intervened.

At the crime scene, a room at Smugglers Cove, a hotel in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, paramedics found Self's blood on the walls, bedding, door handle and floor. "She'd smashed his head so hard on the wall it had made a dent," says Smith, speaking today in the calm surroundings of her countryside home near Great Finborough in Suffolk. Self was punched, kicked and stamped on over the course of two hours – and at one point knocked unconscious.

When Smith first laid eyes on her son in Colchester Hospital the following day, accompanied by her husband, Don, he was still "notably concussed", with two black eyes and a wound on his leg "so deep you could see the bone". Self hadn't wanted his mother to see the rest of him. It was only in court at Murphy's trial that Smith saw the photographic evidence of his injuries and what she describes as his "absolutely livid body, covered in bruises". He had eight broken ribs and two broken vertebrae in his back – and a bleed on the brain.'