There’s an increasingly common pattern emerging whereby documentary makers take a story that was run through the Outrage-A-Tron by the tabloids to produce headlines that warped public understanding (“Britain’s Worst/Most Evil/Most Deadly” and so on), then proceed to put back some of the lost nuance and present the more complicated original picture. Lucy Letby (“Britain’s Worst Child Killer”) has been the subject of at least two such films redressing the lost balance. Last week, the story of Rhianan Rudd (“Britain’s Youngest Terrorist”) was unpacked and its many sadder parts laid out for inspection in The Schoolgirl Terrorist?
In Love You to Death, it is the turn of Lisa Hayden-Johnson, who became known as “Britain’s Most Evil Mum” during her trial and conviction for child cruelty after years spent fabricating her son Matthew’s apparent illnesses. He was put through more than 300 medical encounters, nine general anaesthetics, four operations by the age of nine, and endured many unnecessary constraints on his life, including using a wheelchair, feeding tube and oxygen tank, until Lisa was arrested when he was nine.
