When two police officers arrived at Fiona Drouet’s home in Glasgow in the early hours one Friday in March 2016, she wasn’t unduly alarmed. She guessed that her baby clothing business had been broken into – it had happened before.
The officers asked to come in. In the silence, the sudden gravity, she thought of her father. “I said: ‘Oh my God, is it Dad? A car crash?’ I don’t know why that came into my head,” she says. The police said no, so her mind raced onwards. “I said: ‘It’s my brother, then?’ My brother’s in the police.” One of the officers asked: “Do you have a daughter, Emily, who’s studying at Aberdeen university?”
“I can’t put it into words,” says Drouet now. “It’s like somebody ripping you open, but at the same time you’re thinking: ‘It’s OK, this can’t be happening, there’s been a mistake …’” What she and her husband were hearing made no sense. Their 18-year-old daughter had been found dead, in a violent and horrifying scene. “You mean she was murdered?” Drouet asked the police. They didn’t think so. They thought Emily had killed herself.
But Drouet had spoken to Emily just that day. She had called to ask for money for a ticket for the freshers’ ball later that term. That evening, they had texted back and forth. “She was getting dressed to go out, putting on her makeup – bright‑green eye shadow, because it was St Patrick’s Day. Emily was just a normal young girl who’d really looked forward to university – and when she’d arrived, she was loving it. She made so many new friends.”
Drouet managed to contact one of them after the police left. “I could hear crying and screaming in the background and she was breaking down. I said: ‘Tell me this isn’t true.’ She said that an ambulance had taken Emily away. I asked her: ‘What’s gone on? She was happy. What’s happened?’” This was when Drouet was given her first glimpse of a reason. “She told me: ‘Angus hasn’t been good to her, Fiona. It’s been really bad …’”
It was months before Drouet and her husband, Germain, understood what this meant – in fact, seven years on, they are still learning new, harrowing information about Emily’s last months. Angus Milligan, Emily’s on-off boyfriend, was investigated in relation to her death, but not prosecuted. However, the family spoke to Emily’s friends, trawling through messages, photos and emails, and Police Scotland carried out a separate investigation into their allegations of domestic abuse.
Milligan was later convicted of assaulting Emily, threatening and abusing her and sending offensive, indecent, obscene and menacing texts. In July 2017, he was sentenced to 180 hours of community service. For the Drouets, this was not enough. They are now fighting a civil case, suing Milligan for “loss of society” – meaning, in this case, the loss of their loved one; that bond, all it meant, all its future promise.
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They are one of a growing number of families who are refusing to accept that a suicide after domestic abuse ends there, with no culpability or criminal responsibility. When Phyllis Daly was told to expect a standard two-hour inquest after the suicide of her daughter Jessica Laverack, 34, in February 2018, she refused to accept it. Daly embarked on a four-year legal battle to win a forensic “article 2” inquest, which took place in June 2022. After five days, the coroner concluded that the “underlying cause of her illness [was] domestic abuse”. Daly is now calling for all suicides related to domestic abuse – research suggests they account for a third of female suicides in England and Wales – to be properly recorded and collated. This month, the parents of Kellie Sutton won a landmark judgment from an inquest jury, which found that Sutton, 30, who had killed herself after domestic abuse, was “unlawfully killed”.
For Drouet, any kind of battle was unthinkable in the days after Emily’s death. “You’re falling into an abyss,” she says. “I had never had a fear that I’d lose my daughter this way. You think that happens to people who maybe have long-term health issues, who are really unhappy and have struggled, and surely that’s visible a lot of the time.” It was at Emily’s goodnight (Drouet refused to use the word “funeral”; the drinks were pink and instead of hymns they played Justin Bieber) that Drouet began to learn more. “Emily’s friends were coming up and showing me horrifying texts and screenshots. Someone said that Milligan had strangled her and she’d thought she was going to die. What in God’s name had been happening?”
Emily had arrived at Aberdeen six months earlier, to study law. Drouet remembers the buzz driving her up, hanging photos and fairy lights in her new room. Milligan lived across the courtyard. He was also a fresher, but 20 years old, while Emily was 17. Many students have described him to the press as the “alpha male” on the campus. A descendant of the Scottish American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (their hall of residence was the New Carnegie Court), he had moved through a succession of elite schools. Emily met him early on. “It got really intense very quickly,” says Drouet. “They were with each other all the time.”
Drouet met him once, during the Christmas holiday, and didn’t take to him. “I’ve never thought this about any of Emily’s friends, but he seemed arrogant. He had one-word answers and Emily seemed tense, in case I said the wrong thing. Afterwards, I said to her that I wasn’t sure about him.” Drouet says Emily told her: “Mum, I’ll have you know that, on the station platform, he took my face in his hands and said: ‘You’re the most gorgeous and stunning girl I’ve ever seen!’”
On returning to university in January, Emily learned that Milligan had cheated on her. “She was broken-hearted that the relationship was finishing, but then he agreed to carry it on, but also saying they should sleep with other people,” says Drouet.
“Emily was a game to him,” she continues. “In his messages, he tells her to get to his room within a certain time and sets a timer. You can see the panic in her replies.” He told her to have sex with other people (“Go and shag X from Flat X. He has a massive chode”). Emily’s 18th birthday gift from Milligan was £200-worth of outfits and restraints from the sex shop Ann Summers. He frequently asked her to join him in threesomes, although her friends told the police that Emily found this “creepy”. In fact, the police found nothing on Emily’s computer to indicate an interest in any of this – just one internet search that expressed concern over her boyfriend’s fantasies and asked for advice. Drouet believes Emily was out of her depth.
For Drouet, one of the most haunting aspects was learning that Milligan had composed an email detailing Emily’s sex life, which he was threatening to send to Drouet. Several students had seen a draft and messages from Emily to her friends show she was mortified by the prospect of her parents reading it. “Emily had been a virgin when she went to uni,” says Drouet. “I don’t say that with any pride, it’s just a fact. It breaks my heart to think my daughter died believing his crap. I’d have thought it was weird if she wasn’t having sex and partying; I wouldn’t have cared. I wish he had sent it. I’d have been right there to see what sort of person was sending me this email and why.”
In February, Milligan learned that Emily had been involved in a sexual encounter without him – one that he did not like. Two days later, he stood in the courtyard, shouting: “Emily Drouet from 86b is a slut and a whore.” Emily turned the lights out in her room and shut her curtains. Another time, Milligan shouted similar abuse from his window until he was silenced by a porter. In this university bubble, which was Emily’s whole world, she felt shamed and humiliated, reluctant to leave her flat unaccompanied.
The barrage of messages sent by Milligan to Emily at this time are hard to read. (“You are a slut.” “Did you know you are a whore?” “Also a slut?” “And a bitch?” “And the worst person in Aberdeen hahahahaha.”) On 10 March, a few nights before Emily’s death, Milligan entered her flat with five other female students, who waited in the communal area while he went to her room. There, he shouted at her, slapped her repeatedly, then strangled her to the point where she was losing consciousness – all the time recording the attack. Emily told friends that she “saw stars”. “It scared me so much. I just can’t bear it,” she texted a friend. Later, she added: “It’s my fault … I made him so angry … I deserve it.”
Although Emily did seek support from a resident’s assistant, when asked if Milligan had assaulted her, she replied: “I don’t want to get him into trouble.” The subsequent write-up stated that Emily had come about her angry and aggressive boyfriend. It noted that Emily felt she was “hitting the self-destruct button” and “knows she needs to change her behaviour”. It concluded: “No follow-up required.”
On the night she died, Emily was alone in the flat, ready to go out, awaiting her friend. CCTV shows Milligan entering and then leaving after a few minutes, but what happened during his visit has never been established. Afterwards, Emily ran to the flat next door in huge distress and told her neighbour: “He has done it again, he has put his hands round my throat.” Her account was entirely different from the one Milligan later gave the police. Returning to her room, Emily messaged her friend: “I don’t know if I can go out. Angus just visited me. And he’s angry.” Her friend hurried over, but there was no reply from Emily’s bedroom or her phone, so, eventually, she left. Emily’s body was found later that night when a porter opened her door.
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Until recently, families who have lost a loved one to a suicide related to domestic abuse have been left with only grief and anger and no route to any form of justice – but Dr Jane Monckton-Smith, a professor of public protection at the University of Gloucestershire, believes this is changing. “There’s pressure building to take it more seriously,” she says. In 2015, domestic homicide reviews – exhaustive investigations into every domestic homicide in England and Wales – were changed to include suicides related to domestic abuse. “In the last 12 months, the government has made some attempt to count them, too,” says Monckton-Smith, who estimates there are between four and 10 a week.
Her own joint paper on 40 suicides related to domestic abuse, which was funded by the Home Office, identified hopelessness and despair – the feeling that there was no escape and nothing would get better – as key determinants. Most victims in the study had sought help; often, from then on, the focus had been on their mental health rather than the abuse, which continued unabated. One suicide note said: “I’m cutting out the middle man.” Another victim said: “I’m trapped and miserable till I die. I’m cutting to the chase.”
In France, legislation passed in 2020 imposed a penalty of up to 10 years’ imprisonment for perpetrators of abuse that leads to suicide. In the UK, there has been only one criminal prosecution. In 2017, Nicholas Allen pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of his former partner, Justene Reece, who had previously fled to a women’s shelter before killing herself. Her suicide note said she had “run out of fight”.
Dr Anne Lodge, a lecturer in law at Teesside University, has written on this and believes there is clear scope for more prosecutions under Britain’s existing laws, especially since coercive control became a criminal offence in 2015. The charge of “constructive manslaughter” – which covers, for example, a one-punch killing – does not need to establish that the defendant intended the victim to die, only that their base crime was a significant contributor to the victim’s death. “Even without new legislation, the existing law could hold someone responsible, but the will needs to be there,” she says. “It requires police to recognise and investigate it and the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] to prosecute.”
The Drouets had to fight every step of the way. In Scotland, there is no automatic inquest after a suicide and the family were refused a fatal accident inquiry. “I was actually told: ‘We see two or three of these a week, your daughter’s been depressed, she’s away from home,’” says Drouet. “It’s only because we have an incredible friend who’s a lawyer, who listened and made a full sheet of the charges, that the case was escalated.”
Two months after Emily’s death, the police began interviewing her friends and Milligan. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to three offences. A further five charges, including seizing Emily by the neck and attempting to choke her on the night she died, were dropped due to lack of evidence.
“He has never shown any remorse, his family have never reached out, there has been no apology – nothing at all,” says Drouet. Milligan and his family were contacted for this article, but declined to comment. “Where’s the justice? Emily was used and made to feel like she was nothing. On the night she died, she was going out, she had her green eye shadow on for St Patrick’s Day. What changed? He came in. The humiliation wasn’t ending. This was her escape.” In their civil action, a psychiatrist has been given full access to Emily’s phone messages, her medical history, her school records and all the police interviews. The case has cost tens of thousands in legal fees and dragged on for years.
Meanwhile, Drouet has also built the charity EmilyTest, which now has six full-time employees. It provides training to universities on how to prevent gender-based violence and how to train staff to recognise it, assess risk, escalate action and support victims. Among those universities is Aberdeen. Nick Edwards, the deputy director of people and head of student support services at the university, says that, since Emily’s death: “The university has worked hard to develop a strategy to address gender-based violence in our community … We, and many other institutions, are on a journey to do better.
“We are currently preparing to submit for the EmilyTest Charter, the first of its kind in the world, to further our approach to supporting victims/survivors and to continue our work in this area. We know that we can always strive for better and are working hard to make meaningful changes across the institution.
“In 2019, we were proud to launch two projects in Emily’s honour, an annual intern based in our student support team and the introduction of the Emily Drouet award, which recognises kindness and compassion within our student body. It is important for us to honour Emily’s memory and the many lessons that her story can teach us and the wider sector.”
Drouet gives frequent talks at schools, colleges and universities, telling Emily’s story: “My main message is never suffer in silence, never think this is OK. Never think you deserve it, because the blame isn’t yours – and look out for each other.” Many times, straight after a talk, young women have come forward with disclosures of abuse. Several have led to custodial sentences for perpetrators. “I still get goose bumps when I think about them,” says Drouet.
This and the civil case have kept her going. “I don’t think I’d be here without them,” she says. “Can you imagine if Emily had died this way and nothing had happened, no change had followed and everyone had just carried on ‘back to normal’? That’s the way it is for so many families. What would she have been worth then? Her life matters.”
• In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141, or email pat@papyrus-uk.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. The domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 988 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is 1800 737 732. Other international helplines can be found via befrienders.org
