From the corner of a gym in a residential rehabilitation unit in the East Midlands, Nikki Lynn watches her 20-year-old daughter’s physiotherapy session, as she does every day without fail.
Just two and a half years ago, Angel was an outgoing and adventurous teenager with endless opportunities ahead of her. Then in September 2020, her abusive boyfriend, Chay Bowskill, kidnapped her, and bundled her into a van. As it sped down a major A-road, she fell out and on to the road headfirst.
This afternoon, it’s taking Angel a day’s worth of energy to stand up, and take a few tentative steps forward, with the support of three physiotherapists and a set of parallel bars.
Earlier in the day, mother and daughter had sat together, as Nikki helped Angel put on perfume, write a few single-word messages on her iPad, and take a small sip of Vimto. These might seem mundane tasks, but just a short time ago, the prospect of Angel completing them had felt impossible. Today, loved ones and doctors hope this progress is a sign of what else is to come.
“Angel has been here for a year,” says Nikki, “Before, she could barely move. Couldn’t communicate. Or anything, really. Now she can write on her tablet. Use the remote control to watch TV. Wipe her own mouth. She can’t talk yet, maybe one day, but she can still express her sense of humour.”
Nikki had never been happier to see one of her six children make rude hand gestures as she was the other week. Regular speech and occupational therapies are helping, alongside other physical and mental health interventions.
“She’s going swimming on Thursday for the first time,” says Nikki. “I’ve never seen her stand up on her own like we are today. I’m excited about the potential. It also means I can focus properly on telling Angel’s story.”
In May, a documentary about Angel will be broadcast on Channel 4. “As heartbreaking and hard as it is to talk about what happened, we need to make sure that nobody else has to go through what we all have. People of any gender or age can find themselves in coercive and controlling relationships. Hopefully, this will help others look out for the signs.”
Nikki thinks it was late 2019 when Angel and Bowskill, both 18 at the time, first got together. “She never formally said ‘he’s my boyfriend’ or anything,” she explains, “I didn’t take a liking to him – we didn’t click. But not to let him come round meant she wouldn’t be home as often.” Angel is the fourth of Nikki and husband Paddy’s six children: she is fiercely protective but had also learned to let her children make choices for themselves.
By mid-2020, Nikki had started to notice changes in her daughter. “Small things, individually,” she says. “I just never added them all up. Angel wasn’t presenting herself like she used to: before, she’d only go out with her hair done, makeup on, dressed up. Now she was wearing baggy tracksuits, and not doing anything with her hair or face. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it was a change.”
There were other things, too. Angel spent less time with her friends, which was strange: she was hugely social. “She’d be snappy if he was waiting outside in the car, suddenly agitated and in a massive rush.”
So much has happened since, that Nikki struggles to recall the timeline of her daughter’s teenage relationship in granular detail. Still, certain moments stick out. Midway through Angel and Bowskill’s year together, he was imprisoned for a period. (Bowskill was later found guilty of conspiracy to commit burglaries carried out between June and October 2019.)
“He would phone our landline every day at 6pm to talk to her,” Nikki says. “ Except, of course, she had a mobile he could have easily called. I thought that was weird. Today I’m sure he was making her use the house phone so he could control where she was every night.”
Briefly, Nikki continues, Angel returned to her old self while he was in custody. “But as soon as he was out,” she says, “it all came back.”
A while after his release, Bowskill entered the Lynn family home, shouting and swearing. “He was in Angel’s face screaming: ‘I want my fucking money. You’ve spent some of it’. He was yelling about £80. We paid him the cash, and told him to never come back again. Once he’d left, Angel turned to me and told me I was just making things worse. Again, I just didn’t recognise the signs.”
In retrospect, Nikki can see the pattern of coercive and controlling behaviours, designed to make a person dependent by isolating them from support, exploiting them, depriving them of independence and regulating their everyday behaviour. Since 2015, it’s been a criminal offence.
While not an exhaustive list, Women’s Aid highlight some common signals: isolating a partner, depriving them of basic needs, and monitoring their time and communications; controlling their finances, humiliating and putting them down; dictating who they see, where and when. “They were only together a year,” Nikki says. “And Angel is so strong and independent … I just wish I’d known.”
On the afternoon of 17 September 2020, Nikki was shopping at the Loughborough branch of DIY store Wickes when Paddy called unexpectedly. Her phone was playing up, the signal terrible. “All I caught of what he said was ‘Angel’, ‘A6’ and ‘air ambulance’. I shoved my trolley out the way and dashed back to the car.” Distressed and panicking, she drove to the junction. There had been a road closure, with traffic tailed back. “I mounted the kerb and drove down the grass verge until a lamp post blocked my way.”
Of these moments, Nikki recalls every last detail. “Then I started running. There was a police car blocking the roundabout. Paddy was there. My sister, too. They wouldn’t let us go and see her. I’ve got a group chat with my mates. A friend of mine posted in it, distraught: ‘I’ve just passed a young girl with blonde hair on the A6. Loads of blood.’ I realised it was Angel. We made our way to the hospital. That’s all they told us. I assumed it was a car accident.”
In the family room at Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham, the Lynns waited. Nikki has no recollection of how long they sat for. “Then three doctors came in. She’d had six hours in theatre, but they told us she wasn’t going to pull through.”
For months, this remained the prognosis. Against all the odds, her more recent recovery is remarkable.
Nikki couldn’t stay in court for much of Bowskill’s trial. Hearing what had happened to her daughter throughout their year-long relationship – and on the day of the A6 incident – was too painful. Still, she got a sense of what he had inflicted on her daughter over those 12 months. “Before the accident,” Nikki says, “friends had noticed bruising on her stomach and arms. The police accessed all these vile phone calls and text messages he’d sent her.”
The abusive and violent messages are incorporated in the Channel 4 documentary. “There was the video of him abducting her …”
It’s painful, still, to discuss it now.
Bowskill was found guilty of kidnapping, engaging in coercive and controlling behaviour, and perverting the course of justice. With Angel unable to give evidence, the jury were unable to convict Bowskill for grievous bodily harm with intent. He was initially sentenced to seven and a half years in jail.
“I can’t get my head around how the judge thought that sentence was enough for my daughter’s life being stolen,” says Nikki. “It’s baffling. We don’t take coercive control seriously enough in the justice system.”
Last month, the Ministry of Justice announced tougher sentences for domestic abusers who kill their partners after periods of coercive control. Nikki believes – like many domestic violence organisations – much greater reform is required.
As Farah Nazeer, chief executive of Women’s Aid, said at the time of sentencing: “This sends out a dangerous message about how seriously we take violence against women in this country … The fact that the perpetrator could be out so soon shows that we urgently need domestic abuse training for all judges.” The solicitor general referred Bowskill’s sentence to the court of appeal under the unduly lenient sentence scheme. In March 2022, the court increased his sentence to 12 years.
“It doesn’t feel long enough to me,” says Nikki, “but with that done, we can look to the future now.”
Back at the family house on a quiet residential Loughborough street, major renovations are under way. Downstairs, extensions have been added to accommodate accessible living space for Angel, and a carer’s bedroom. In the garden, a shed is being converted into a therapy room. Without public support, none of this would be possible.
“Angel’s cousin started a crowdfunding page, and the support has honestly been overwhelming.” Already almost £200k has been raised. “But there’s so much more work to be done. We keep doing as much fundraising as possible. It was amazing news when we were told Angel will be able to come home one day. But without public support, it would be impossible to have her here.”
For Nikki, talking about what happened to her daughter is traumatic. She hopes doing so, however, might help others recognise the signs of coercive and controlling relationships. “How didn’t we spot it? She never raised any concerns. We didn’t know what to look for. I’m not sure she did either.
“In schools, young people need to be taught what to be aware of from an early age. Adults need to be educated, too. And we need to know where to turn if we find ourselves or someone we care about in a coercive or controlling relationship. I can’t see another family go through what we have. If telling Angel’s story helps one person get out before it’s too late, the pain of speaking will be worth it. Honestly? That’s all we can hope for now.”
• The Kidnap of Angel Lynn airs on 9 May at 9pm on Channel 4
