Epsom College Murder Suicide

[PleaseStopSayingHuBbY]

I'm shocked but not surprised. This world is depressing and scary for women.

Totally irrelevant
This is familicide

Absolutely spot on ⬆️

This case is a very clear example of how women are so often trapped and unable to report. Not merely by shame or fear of being shunned but by the practical reality of career and income. Here there appears to be a malicious threat hanging over the victim. But there are a lot of professions where a conviction for a violent offence can lead to dismissal, so that silences many women too. Just another thing to add to the pressures already there which contribute to the need to be silent and to keep up pretences in the wider world.

It does go to show that even well off, educated successful women can be completely trapped and helpless at the hands of their male partners. I’m sure we all knew this already, but there probably is an underlying subconscious feeling that it is somehow easier to escape DV if you have money and a successful career in your own right. Not so. This could be any woman sadly.

Yes let's be honest. It suits a lot of people to say, professional woman, should be able to handle this.

Really? A good career means you can handle violence and abuse?

No. This is a source of shame. There are abusive, "project" men that like women like Emma Pattison. They like her money and status and will rely on it: I wonder what his background was.

The above is why high achiever women need to think carefully about who they introduce in their lives. Any woman does, come to that.

Mystery man too good to be true? Well maybe just stop there.

When is male violence going to be taken seriously?

These men are angry, resentful, entitled men with poor emotional intelligence. Their response to perceived slights, bruises to their egos or not getting what they deserve is to go nuclear and lay waste to the people around them.
This isn't mental illness, this is misogyny and entitlement writ large.

Men get mental illness too. How ridiculous to generalise like that.

Ah yes. Here we go again. Are we feeling sorry for him now because mental health issues? Ffs

I really agree with all these posts about living on a school site as a woman in the top position of seniority and responsibility actually making someone in this HT’s position specifically more isolated and therefore more vulnerable.

I can’t stop thinking about how at first she might have felt that she and her daughter might be safer living in an environment with other people always around close by. She maybe hoped it might rein in husband somehow to be in the school goldfish bowl.

I completely agree about the gap between her situation and feeling able to go to women’s Aid- she would have been finished as a Head if the governors got wind of this. And that double standard is just horrific and points again to pervasive toxic masculinity still being entrenched in our culture.

I imagine this was very likely - calling the police would have been the nuclear option and caused her significant career damage. At the very least, there would have been significant safeguarding concerns. She most likely had no idea that things would escalate as quickly as they did - she knew she needed help but called family to try to keep things quiet until she could decide what to do. But by then it was too late.

Which also goes some way towards explaining why the relative attended in person rather than phoned the police. He was using Emma's position against her as a tool of abuse.

I wonder if she even knew about the gun registration.

That he'd got out the gun, and she still didn't phone the police... How many times had he threatened her with the gun and not killed her before? Poor woman.

It must have been the first time he had threatened her with a gun, and probably with extreme violence too. I don't believe, even to save her career, she would have risked her daughter's life. Or the safety of the kids at the school.

I can’t help thinking that’s unhelpful
Speculation though. We know from the news that she called the family member minutes before he killed her but we don’t know she had seen the gun before she made that call.

Abusive men see it as the ultimate victory to bring down a vivacious, intelligent, successful woman like Emma.

She would have known. The police carry out home visits to check the weapon is in a secure place for a start.

Exactly, look at women like Mel B - confident, highly successful and still a victim of DV. It’s a source of “pride” for some of these men to take a woman like that down, instead of lifting her up.

And this is what I cannot understand. How they ever signed off a gun being held on a school site. And why the school were remotely ok with this. It's mind boggling

Agreed. And it can be hard to get understanding or support because the courts and society generally find it hard to believe

I totally agree, it's mind boggling.

However, this house is kind of on a residential road- the staff houses are a way from the school and are right behind non school houses with no barrier or anything, i.e. not enclosed.

This is why something doesn't feel right here. I can't see the school management/governors allowing a privately owned gun to be kept on a residential school site (guns kept in the school armoury/rifle range are entirely different) and I can't really see a responsible headteacher (and by all accounts she was this) allowing this either. And the police hadn't done the home visit yet.

I'm pretty sure the police check wrt the gun was done on the phone - a call to verify the new address. Strange that the police thought it okay for him to have a gun on a school site.

Jealousy, envy, inadequacy, narcissism... Probably festering over many years.
So much here is recognisable and rings true from my experience.
(And how many women are behind wars?)
It is about male psychology and violence.
Words fail.

I find it baffling that there doesn't seem to be any outcry in the press about this facet either. Whether there's an element of closing ranks because it is a well connected school I don't know but if it had been a school caretaker on a state school site and this had happened I cannot imagine there would be such silence about this aspect of the case.