'Heartbroken' Zara McDermott fights back tears hearing harrowing account of woman's stalking at hands of her ex in new BBC documentary
The first episode of the former Love Island star's latest project, To Catch A Stalker, airs on BBC Three on Tuesday evening at 9pm.
It sees Zara, 28, join and support victims who have been subjected to domestic abuse and stalking and expose how stalking brutally impacts the everyday lives of people across the UK.
She will also follow the journey of those who decided to report the instances to the police and how the claims make their way through the judicial system.
Both instalments are already available to stream on BBC iPlayer and are packed with sobering accounts.
The second episode sees Zara sit down with an anonymous woman who recounted how her ex-partner stalked her after she ended the relationship.
The first episode of the former Love Island star's latest project, To Catch A Stalker, airs on BBC Three on Tuesday evening at 9pm
It will see Zara, 28, join and support victims who have been subjected to domestic abuse and stalking and expose how stalking brutally impacts the everyday lives of people across the UK
She recalled how at the start he was 'very charming, caring, I didn't even imagine there was another side to him'.
However, he would make her video call him '24 hours a day, every day, morning until night'.
When the woman ended the relationship things took a terrifying turn.
'The continuous harassment, being outside of my house every other day, he would cry his eyes out and make me feel bad,' she recalled.
Zara asked: 'Was he calling you and texting you?'
'He would call me more than 500 times a day and I would literally chuck my phone in some corner of my house,' the woman replied.
She appeared to get emotional as she described how 'he made me hate myself for being in that situation'.
The woman gestured a line across her neck with her hands as she recalled what he would do outside of her house, seeming to infer he was saying he would harm her.
'He didn't leave outside of my house for another five, six hours. I was terrified,' she added.
Zara commented: 'That breaks my heart, hearing that.'
'He didn't leave outside of my house for another five, six hours. I was terrified,' she added. Zara commented: 'That breaks my heart, hearing that.'
The woman submitted video, calls and text messages to the police and revealed she would be giving a witness statement at court against him.
Zara asked the woman, 'How are you feeling through this?'
'Like I'm rubbish,' she replied, as Zara held her hand.
The reality star looked tearful as she continued to listen to the woman and said: 'You did not deserve any of that, you know that?'
Zara has brought a range of thought-provoking and critically acclaimed documentaries to the BBC over the last few years.
The star has spoken about several important topics including revenge porn, sexism, and 'rape culture' in UK schools as well as the rise of young people experiencing eating disorders.
But, after wrapping up filming for the stalking documentary in March, Zara admitted it had been one of her 'most emotional' yet, as she praised the brave women who appeared in the programme and voiced her hope that it would open up conversations.
Sharing Instagram snaps of herself filming outside a police station, she wrote: 'It's our final week of filming for my documentary about stalking, and honestly it's been one of the most eye opening, emotional films I've ever made.
'I've learnt so much about the strength of victims / survivors through this process… some of these women are the strongest I've ever met.
'Stalking is one of the most isolating crimes out there. The pure determination of the women I've spoken to, to continually put one foot in front of the other every single day, is nothing short of inspirational.'
She went on: 'I am so grateful to do the job that I do; to be able to hopefully make a difference in this world and make some positive change alongside the incredible people I am working with. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
'This documentary series has been 18 months in the making, from development to where we are now. It's been a long process of finding a careful balance because of the sensitivity of this programme, but I hope it opens up conversations at home, in schools and in society. ❤️'
To Catch A Stalker airs on BBC Three on July 1 at 9pm and is available to stream on iPlayer.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
30 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Inside Queen Victoria's 'thirsty' diaries: The raunchy entries that reveal 'teenage girl' romance with Prince Albert
Podcast All episodes Play on Apple Spotify On a sepcial episode of the Mail's Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things podcast, Robert Hardman and Kate Williams are joined by History Hit's Dr Kate Lister to delve into Queen Victoria 's sex life. Dr Lister, hosts the chart-topping Betwixt The Sheets podcast, which specialises in the erotic lives of legendary figures from ancient times to today. Despite being Britain's most famous monarch and a woman of the prudish Victorian era, Queen Victoria was surprisingly open about her passion for her husband, Prince Albert. Victoria's personal diaries - a staggering 62 million words across her lifetime – reveal the Queen's candid desire for the German Prince, from their 1840 wedding until his death in 1861. Hardman, Williams and Dr Lister unpack the raciest revelations from the diaries and bust the biggest myths about Victoria and Albert's sex life. Queen Victoria's 'sexy' diaries When Queen Victoria assumed the throne at just 18 years old, her ministers and family presented her with an ultimatum: marry quickly or remain in Buckingham Palace under the watchful eye of her domineering mother, the Duchess of Kent. Throughout Victoria's childhood and into her late teens, the Duchess and her lover John Conroy had controlled the young princess through what they called the Kensington System. This regime monitored her every movement and regimented her daily life. Now, as monarch, Victoria desperately wanted distance from her mother's influence. Faced with this choice, she agreed to seek an eligible suitor. According to historian Kate Williams, the young Queen was genuinely delighted when Prince Albert was presented to her as a potential match. She said: 'In her diaries, Victoria wrote how she felt this immediate outpouring of love for Prince Albert. 'The Queen had a pretty miserable childhood, so when they get married at this very young age, all this devotion just comes streaming out of her. 'In 1839, when she first sees Albert climb the steps of Windsor Castle, she writes how he is the most handsome prince in Europe. 'Later that year, Victoria describes Albert coming in from a rainy day, saying: 'He looks so handsome in his white cashmere britches with nothing on underneath.' Victoria's excitement reaches fever pitch on their wedding night, which she labels the 'happiest day of her life' her diaries. 'She is totally thirsty for him', Williams joked. 'After her wedding night, Victoria says that she didn't think it was possible to be so happy. She talks about the bliss of watching him shave, and how wonderful it is when he helps her put on her stockings. 'She wrote: I never spent such an evening. My dearest Albert, sat on a footstool beside by my side - his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness. 'He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again. Oh, this was the happiest day of my life!' Within three months of her marriage, Victoria had conceived her first child - a daughter she would name Victoria, continuing the family tradition. Albert and Victoria went on to have nine children in total, which Williams believes wasn't just because the Queen 'loved the joys of the marriage bed.' She explained: 'Everyone watches Victoria and Albert's marriage like hawks. They want Victoria to get pregnant; that's her big job. 'Victoria has to secure the throne. The family's prestige had been dented by her naughty uncle, King William IV, who managed 10 illegitimate children by 1800. 'She sees sex with Albert as her duty, that she must start producing heirs quickly – although she never expected to get pregnant within three months.' As Dr Lister observed, this passion for Albert continued right up until the prince's death in December 1861. Albert succumbed to typhoid fever at the age of 42, leading Victoria to withdraw from public life for several years. 'She is head over the heels for this guy', Dr Lister noted. 'Throughout her life, she writes obsessively about him. How beautiful his face is, how handsome he looks in a certain shirt and what it feels like lying next to him. 'It is real teenage girl crush stuff. They have arguments too because there's a real power struggle going on. 'You have a weird dynamic because she's Queen, but is still trying to adhere to this very Victorian morality of submitting to your husband. 'It get very tense at times but she definitely fancied him the whole way through. I have no doubt about that.' To hear Betwixt The Sheet's Kate Lister debunk some of the myths about Victoria and Albert's sex life, including an apparent fetish for bicycles, search for Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things now, wherever you get your podcasts.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The two Mr Ps on life in the classroom: ‘I've worked with teachers who have been hit or kicked'
You can learn a lot about British society from what children bring into classrooms. Take sex toys, Lee Parkinson says. He co-hosts the highly popular Two Mr Ps in a Pod(Cast) with his brother Adam – they both work in primary schools – and their inboxes are bursting with stories from teachers of X-rated show-and-tells. 'You would not believe,' Lee says. 'Inundated,' Adam nods. 'Honestly, a variety of objects.' There was the child who brought in the Harry Potter wand that wasn't. 'And the kid was like: 'I tried to get it working but it just kept buzzing.'' Then there was the child whose pretend hearing aid turned out to be a cock ring. And the second world war gas mask that was 'a full-on, PVC gimp mask', Lee adds. Adam, who works as a higher learning teaching assistant, recalls a time when one pupil proudly showed him his end-of-year gift for the class teacher: a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. 'He'd taken it off his mum's nightstand.' The Parkinsons' latest book, How to Survive the School Year, is a portrait of the alarmingly high rates of embarrassing incidents in the classroom and beyond. Anecdotes sent in by their audience of teachers and parents shows that sports days are a hotspot for comical mishaps. Adam once split his trousers playing football with the kids, and had to deliver his big presentation on behaviour later that day in a pair of rugby shorts. The brothers – I want to call them boys, because all their riffs and ribbing seem to summon their childhood selves to the minature table we are sitting at in Adam's classroom in Walkden, Greater Manchester – happily bat stories to and fro. In publicity material, Adam is the one who pulls silly faces, while Lee does his best to look sensible but fun. In person, the dynamic is more nuanced. Lee, at 40, is the eldest of three (middle brother Ryan works in sales) and the original Mr P. He coined the name when he launched his ICT (information and communications technology) training business in 2013, which he combines with teaching a Year 4 class part-time at another nearby primary, and a platform to coach teachers in the use of AI to reduce their admin. Lee very much wears the long trousers, metaphorically and literally. Today he has helped himself to the only adult chair in Adam's classroom ('He took my teacher's chair!'). Adam, 36, is wearing shorts, having returned victorious from a tri-golf tournament with his Year 6s – he's still clutching the trophy – and fidgets in a tiny plastic seat. They're constantly in competition mode, and still vie for the position of 'number one son'. (Lee is now on top, having been awarded an MBE last month.) Adam is known as The Other Mr P, which you'd think might put him at a disadvantage. He blurted it out when he was introducing himself on the very first podcast, and the name stuck. So he othered himself? 'I don't mind, because Lee worked tirelessly for five, six years before we started,' he says. 'And this whole thing has led to a life that I never thought possible.' Back in 2018, the Mr Ps were on holiday in Florida, sipping beer in a hot tub after a day in one of the parks, sharing stories from their classrooms. 'We were just trying to outdo each other with the most ridiculous thing that's happened in our schools,' Lee says. 'I thought: 'We should sit down and record these. Do a podcast'.' Adam had never heard of a podcast but later he came up with the name over dinner in Buffalo Wild Wings in Kissimmee, Florida. Lee bought the microphones as soon as they got home, and the podcast took off. During lockdown, it became a sort of communal staffroom for teachers who were estranged from colleagues, working remotely, or supervising the children of key workers. Now Two Mr Ps in a Pod(Cast) has had 7.5m downloads, and in October the brothers take their Let That Be a Lesson … tour to venues from Edinburgh to Exeter. But while their three books (the previous two being Put a Wet Paper Towel On It and This Is Your Own Time You're Wasting) are full of things going comically wrong, increasingly the Parkinsons receive messages from teachers about things going seriously wrong. Burnout, workload and behaviour are the recurrent issues. 'The number one reason for teachers leaving the profession is workload,' Lee says. Although he believes 'that's going to get overtaken by behaviour … There is a growing number of cases where teachers and senior leaders are being verbally, or in some cases physically, assaulted by parents. And there's the online trolling – parents openly being negative about teachers online.' Lee is hyper-alert to attacks on teachers. We meet in the midst of a heatwave and the fan is going full pelt. Lee enters into a tirade against 'the person who designed primary schools and decided to make it too cold in winter and the surface of the sun when we get a bit of nice weather. What was the mindset? Why do you want to stitch us up as teachers?' Even summer term, with its fetes and sports days, dupes staff with 'a false sense of security'. Truth is, they're behind on the curriculum having crammed for SATs, an exam which Lee thinks has 'no bearing on children's academic development other than an understanding that life's not fair and most of the important things in your existence will be decided by idiots like Michael Gove'. He is especially exercised about Ofsted. 'It is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons we've got 40,000 teachers leaving the profession a year ... Ofsted say they raise standards and improve lives. Well, they were found to be contributing to the death of a teacher,' Lee says, referring to Ruth Perry, the head whose death by suicide was linked by the coroner to her school's Ofsted inspection. 'So you can't say they improved lives. She wasn't the first and she won't be the last unless things drastically change.' He has had teachers contact him with similar stories. 'Why create a framework that makes teachers' workflow go through the roof exponentially, plunging them into this boiling pot of stress and worry?' Changes to Ofsted inspections are due to be published in September, but the proposals have already been met with opposition. 'I think they're not capable of reforming themselves. What we need is a working party of people outside Ofsted, working with Ofsted to make necessary changes.' This sounds like a job he might enjoy. 'I'd have a discussion,' he says. 'But I don't think they'd want to hear from me.' Lee didn't always feel like this. He started teaching in 2007, 'straight from uni'. He'd just turned 22. Labour's Sure Start programme was in full swing. 'He loved it,' Adam says. 'And I loved the thought of doing what he was doing.' At the time, Adam had been going 'from job to job': Next, Co-op, Iceland, Odeon cinema, six months of data handling at Ofsted ('I didn't know what Ofsted was when I worked there. If I had, I would have messed up all the things!') and volunteering as a rugby coach in a primary school. One day, his aunt, a children and families officer, asked him to volunteer one-to-one with a child who was struggling with his behaviour, and in isolation out of class. 'I struck up a real bond with him. I absolutely fell in love with working in a school.' It's fair to say that Adam was able to relate. Of the three brothers, he was the one who their parents were always being called in to school to discuss. Mostly for wrestling with other children and making rude gestures. He was diagnosed with ADHD at the end of primary school. 'I was medicated through secondary school,' he says. 'It helped me massively.' He would take his meds each morning, then button his blazer. 'And I'd look in the mirror, because I knew the saying, Looking smart's halfway to being smart, and I swear I was a different child.' Adam points to Lee, and the empty space between them, which has acquired the identity of their middle brother. 'They were a lot more able in terms of the work than I was. And I don't mind admitting that. I've done well, I think, with what I've got – to get to where I am.' 'My mum and dad always say, if he'd been the first, they'd never have had another kid,' Lee offers. 'Oh, he loves this!' Adam says, feigning indignation – or perhaps not feigning. His legs are bouncing wildly in that tiny chair. In the way of the best family joshing, it's both good-natured and close to the bone. You get the feeling they can – and often do – go on for hours. 'Are they not Mum and Dad's words?' Lee asks. 'MBE! This guy!' Adam shrieks. 'I'm just relaying information,' Lee says, leaning back in his teacher chair with a wink. 'What was the card you got on Father's Day for Dad?' Adam says. 'From your number one son?' 'No! It wasn't!' Adam's voice rises in triumph. 'It was, 'Sometimes you just get it right first time.'' For a moment, it seems as if they never left home. They've always been close and more alike than Ryan. 'We like spicy food. He hates spicy food. We were always drinking blackcurrant squash, but he'd have orange,' Adam says. Both Mr Ps are parents themselves. Lee has 14-year-old triplets and a 21-year-old stepson. Adam has a daughter, nine, and a six-year-old son. Increasingly, he has posted about his experience as what he calls 'a Send dad [special educational needs and disabilities] … Because it took me a long time to accept what the situation was, and learn,' he says. After his son was diagnosed with autism, 'I would say I grieved for the life I expected. I worried if he would ever make friends, be invited to parties, or join a sports team.' Adam's son's diagnosis has led him to reflect on his own. 'Sometimes autism and ADHD really clash.' While his son enjoys being read the same story repeatedly, Adam finds the repetition challenging. 'The last thing I ever want to do is not be there for my son and not give him what he needs,' he says. He has started to wonder whether taking 'tablets again would help me … relax a bit more. I'm a bit of an overthinker. I do struggle with that.' His son has an education, health and care plan (EHCP) and attends special school, having left mainstream education when the one-to-one care his EHCP legally entitled him to had to be shared with other children who needed support but didn't have EHCPs. The schools minister has recently refused to rule out replacing EHCPs, which have become fraught with problems, since the number has risen by 140% in the past 10 years while councils run deficits. Should they be scrapped? 'There's got to be a legally binding document to ensure children get the education they deserve,' Lee says. 'But is the current system working? No. Do education, care and health have to be rolled up or can there be a separate education plan? Are we able to create something that can make mainstream a lot more inclusive?' The Parkinsons speak every day. Do they ever get sick of each other? 'He's like my fifth child,' Lee says. 'Adam can be one of the funniest people on the planet. There's times I think: how do you function as an adult?' 'I feel I bring his silly side out,' Adam says. 'And at times he brings my serious side out, and we complement each other. But you couldn't have two me's because … Well, I wouldn't know how to plug a mic in.' For all the jokes, they have had days where they've gone home and cried. Adam has worked in a number of schools, including in Manchester. 'There are days when you're driving home, thinking, wow, that was a really hard, sad day. I've worked with teachers who have been hit or kicked … I've had all the children crying. And that's the saddest thing for me. Because for a lot of children, if they have a tough home life, this is their escape, their solitude.' 'We're faced with the biggest retention crisis we've ever seen for what should be the best job in the world,' Lee says. But he wouldn't recommend teaching to his children. 'Your job as a parent is to protect your kids. I feel like the current education system can break people – the expectations put on teachers, where you're expected to do more with less, and you're constantly made to feel like a failure, and you're under this incredible pressure and the sort of compassion fatigue teachers feel, working in a system that no matter what you do, no matter how many hours you dedicate – you are still seeing the system fail some children.' But sometimes a teacher will message them or come up to them – this happened to Adam at the tri-golf tournament earlier – and tell them that the podcast has kept them going, or brought them back to teaching, because, Adam says, 'we shine a light on the amazing things and the hilarious things'. 'It's a real privilege to have quite a big impact on a profession that is so special,' Lee says. What they really want is for teaching to be 'respected and valued by everyone'. How to Survive the School Year: An Essential Guide for Stressed-Out Grownups is published by HarperCollins (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘I was constantly scared of what she was going to do': the troubled life and shocking death of Immy Nunn
Just a few hours before she ended her life, Immy Nunn seemed happy. She and her mother, Louise, had been shopping and had lunch. It was the final day of 2022 and Immy, who was 25, appeared positive about the new year. She talked about taking her driving test and looking for a new flat. She was excited about the opportunities her profile on TikTok was bringing her; known as Deaf Immy, she had nearly 800,000 followers, attracted by her honest and often funny videos about her deafness and her mental health. By the early hours of the next morning, Immy was dead, having taken poison she bought online, almost certainly after discovering it through an online pro-suicide forum. On a sunny day, kitchen doors open to the garden, Louise sits at her table; every so often she glances at the photographs of her daughter. Immy's assistance dog, Whitney, now lives with her parents, and wanders around, stopping occasionally to be stroked. Louise describes these last couple of years as: 'Hell. Horrible.' The pain of losing her child, she says, 'you wouldn't wish on anyone'. She copes, she says, 'day by day. I struggle with a lot of things. I don't like doing a lot.' For the previous 10 years, Louise had been on high alert, always terrified something would happen to her daughter. Since she was about 14, Immy had periods of severe mental illness. She had self-harmed, and attempted suicide many times, and for four years she had been an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital. She had spent the Christmas of 2022 at her parents' home in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, then gone back to her flat in Brighton. On 29 December, she had cut herself and gone to hospital – as far as her family knew, it was the first time she had self-harmed in ages. Immy's dad, Ray, went straight to see her and tried to get her to come home with him, but she told him she wanted to stay, and that she had an appointment with one of her support workers the following day. On 31 December, Louise and Ray went to spend the day with her in Brighton. They returned to Bognor Regis with Whitney because Immy was going to a New Year's Eve party at a friend's house in nearby Shoreham-by-Sea. Louise was woken about 5am by the mother of Immy's friend calling to say Immy had left unexpectedly, and without her coat and shoes. They had known Immy since she was a child, and were aware of her mental health problems. Louise phoned the police straight away and kept trying to ring Immy; Ray went out to look for their daughter, eventually driving to her flat in Brighton. When he arrived, the police and an ambulance were already there. Immy's devastated family is one of several that appear in a two-part Channel 4 documentary, Poisoned: Killer in the Post. It is based on an investigation by the Times journalist James Beal, which started after he was contacted by David Parfett, whose son Tom also died after taking a substance he bought online. The documentary shows the impact on vulnerable people of a pro-suicide forum where methods were discussed, including signposting to a Canadian chef, Kenneth Law, who Canadian police believe shipped about 1,200 packages of poison around the world. In the UK, the National Crime Agency has identified 97 potential victims. Law is awaiting trial in Canada, charged with 14 counts of murder – the dead were in the Ontario area and between the ages of 16 and 36 – but is pleading not guilty. About five months after Immy's death, the police told Louise and Ray that they had been given a list of names of British people linked to Law, and Immy was on it. They were doing checks, Louise says the police told her, to see who on the list was still alive. Louise would like to see Law extradited to the UK, though she knows this is unlikely. For a decade, she and her family went through heartbreaking effort to try to keep Immy safe. 'And then it's someone online. You fear the man on the corner, don't you, but not the man you can't see?' And she would like to see more regulation of sites that can be harmful to vulnerable people. 'The [government] are allowing them; no one's stopping them from doing it.' The site Immy is believed to have accessed is now under investigation by Ofcom; as of 1 July, the site was no longer accessible to people in the UK. A journalist had showed Louise the site, and she was shocked at how accessible it was. 'It wasn't even on the dark web,' she says. 'I was just shocked that something like that is just there. How is it even allowed?' Vulnerable people who are struggling understandably might want to find others who are feeling the same, but the site encourages and facilitates suicide – methods are discussed and tips swapped, and the 'goodbye' posts are met with congratulatory messages. As for Law, Louise says: 'I hate him. Hate the sound of his name, hate seeing his face.' Immy was always a fighter, Louise says. She had been born six weeks early and spent her first couple of weeks in hospital. The fourth of her five children, Immy had siblings who doted on her. 'She was just beautiful,' Louise says of Immy as a baby. 'She was so good and happy; everything about her was just perfect.' The family found out that Immy was profoundly deaf when she was 18 months old, though Louise suspected it already (one of her older children also has hearing loss, though not to the extent Immy did). Having a child with additional needs meant they spent a lot of time together. When Immy was three, she had cochlear implants, which involved trips to Great Ormond Street hospital in London every few weeks. She was happy at school, Louise remembers. It was a mainstream school but with a unit for the several deaf children there at the time. Then, when Immy was about 13, Louise noticed a change in her. Some of her deaf friends had left, and Immy stopped seeing other friends. 'You just thought: 'Typical teenager', until one day I saw cuts on her legs and I realised that there was something going on,' says Louise. She had been running away from school, and was clearly unhappy there. She had an appointment with the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services but refused to go, then took her first overdose shortly before she turned 15. 'I thought she was dead at that point,' says Louise. 'Reality hits – this is really serious.' The National Deaf Children's Society helped Louise advocate for Immy at school, and find her a place at a leading school for deaf children, but it took a while, and Immy's mental health was deteriorating. After school one day, Louise could hear her in the bathroom and became worried about what she was doing, but couldn't get her to come out. Immy's older sister went in and found she had cut her arm badly. 'I just remember her face and her saying, 'Mum, you need to get her to hospital straight away.' I was constantly scared of what she was going to do.' There were other suicide attempts. Ray is a roofer and Louise had worked part-time in a shop, around looking after the children, but she gave that up to be there for Immy. 'If she was at home, you wouldn't leave her for second,' she says. Immy was in and out of children's mental health units and then got a place in a unit for deaf children in London. 'We would go up two, three times a week to visit and she was doing really well, but she could only stay there until she was 18,' says Louise. Once Immy was discharged, Louise says there was no follow-up care and she was instead put on unfamiliar medication, which she had a terrible reaction to. 'We ended up right back where we were. She was in her room smashing things over her head, blood everywhere.' The following year, Immy was back in psychiatric hospital, where she would be for the next four years. The family hoped it would be the start of Immy getting better, but it was also, says Louise, 'four years of hell. We just didn't know when you were going to get a phone call.' On the weekends she was allowed home, Louise would sleep in her room with her 'because I was so scared of what she'd get up and do'. Immy had been diagnosed with emotionally unstable personality disorder, PTSD and other conditions including depression and anxiety. There were periods when she was well and she seemed happy; she had a girlfriend for a while. 'She'd have really good days; you'd be able to go on holiday and have fun times. But you just never knew when her mind was going to suddenly hurt herself, and she didn't know. That was the scary thing. She'd just dissociate.' Starting a TikTok account in 2020 helped her, Louise says. 'It took her mind off things. Obviously, she was still really poorly. She'd have her good days and bad days. But I think because of the followers that grew, she felt she could help other people. As her followers grew, her confidence grew, and I think she felt as if she'd finally found something that she could do.' It helped her embrace the deaf and LGBTQ+ communities and gave her a sense of identity. 'She felt as if she belonged, whereas she never really knew where she belonged.' Immy showed her followers what life in a psychiatric hospital was like, and was open about her struggles. But she could also be joyful, and often got her family involved, usually her mum. 'You'd be sat in the evenings, and she'd say, 'Mum: I've got an idea – I want you to be in it.' I loved watching her laugh.' Immy was getting brand and charity collaborations, and positive messages from people who said she'd helped them. 'She just couldn't believe it, and we were just so excited for her,' says Louise. She was desperate to try to live more independently, even though Louise thought she wasn't ready to leave hospital. 'She was determined. She'd been in there for four years; she wanted out, she wanted a normal life.' It was a worry, she says, having Immy live an hour away in Brighton, and she would video-call her often – again and again if she didn't pick up. 'She didn't want me to keep worrying. She was like, 'Mum: I'm 24 – let me have my life.'' And she seemed to be doing well, though Louise could never relax. Early in 2022, Immy took an overdose. Nine months after that, in November, she told her support worker she had been on a pro-suicide forum and had bought poison from it. Louise didn't know about this until just before the inquest. The police went to do a welfare check on Immy, but didn't take a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter – something Louise was familiar with in all the years of trying to get Immy the care she needed. She would go to see doctors with her, she says, and there would be no interpreter. Louise would have to accompany Immy, even when Immy didn't want her to, so that she could explain things to her. After that police visit, Immy wasn't seen by a mental health professional for several weeks. A few days after Christmas with her parents, Immy harmed herself and went to hospital but left before being seen by the mental health team. She told her parents that she'd been in hospital, and Ray immediately went to see her. 'We didn't know how bad she was,' says Louise. 'The plan was that he was going to bring her home, but she said she wasn't coming back.' Of course they were alarmed, but sadly this wasn't out of the ordinary for Immy. 'She self-harmed a lot. That was her coping mechanism. We had no clue that anything else was going on.' Immy had sent a text to her support worker, saying she thought she needed to be admitted to psychiatric hospital and that she 'could easily go to the last resort' even though she didn't want to. In another message to her psychologist the following day, she said she planned to take poison, but also said she didn't have any (she did – it was later discovered she had already bought some online). She agreed to be admitted to a mental health crisis facility, but that didn't happen that day. A meeting that she was supposed to have with her care coordinator also didn't happen. The inquest found failings in mental health care contributed to Immy's death. The coroner also highlighted systemic challenges to deaf patients, particularly the shortage of BSL interpreters. With grim irony, the inquest itself had to be adjourned at one point because of a lack of interpreters. Louise says the family has received no apology. The trial of Law isn't due to start until early next year, and he has been charged only over deaths in Canada. She says she feels stuck. 'I always feel as if I'm waiting for the next thing. It's just hard.' She likes to talk about Immy, but she finds it hard to watch her videos. 'The dogs start crying when they hear her voice, especially Whitney – she still recognises Immy's voice, and then that upsets me.' There are some lovely videos of Immy and her mum together, including the two of them singing and signing You Are My Sunshine – the first song, Immy wrote, that her mum taught her with sign language. She touched a lot of people in her short life. It has helped to receive messages from people who were helped by Immy's videos and her work on deaf awareness and mental health, says Louise. 'I've had some that said: 'She basically saved my life.'' Poisoned: Killer in the Post is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10 July For more information on online safety for young people, visit the Thomas William Parfett Foundation and the Molly Rose Foundation In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
