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.
Love You to Death interviews Lisa, Matthew and his older sister Laura – who has some memories of being “a trial run” for her mother’s fabrications but whose suffering is largely of the more indirect, but no less damaging, kind that comes with living in a household that revolves around an ill and disabled member, taking on caring responsibilities very young, then finding out that all of it existed only to serve another’s incomprehensible purposes.
The documentary lays out the chronology first, from Matthew’s seven-week premature birth in 2001, through his early stays in hospital as Lisa insisted he was failing to thrive because he was allergic to so many foods. It goes on through his apparently accumulating conditions, his local fame as “the boy in the buggy” whom the community rallied to help, and Lisa’s insistence to their main clinician Dr Broomhall – not interviewed, though their local GP Dr Paul Johnson is – that Matthew be referred to Great Ormond Street for more thorough investigations. This was despite Broomhall’s reluctance and the increasing suspicions among ward staff that all was not well.
Lisa and Matthew at the Children of Courage Awards 2005. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy
Eventually Dr Stella Imong, who had many dealings with Matthew’s “quite demanding” mother on the ward and had noticed the increasing number of factors in his notes that weren’t quite tallying, confronted Dr Broomhall about the situation and the latter reported Lisa to the police. The working presumption was that Lisa was suffering from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy (now known as fabricated or induced illness) and enjoying the attention gained by having a sick child.
It is a glaring weakness of the programme that it does not probe further into the whys and wherefores of the medical establishment’s inertia here. Especially as GP Paul Johnson all but shuffles his feet in embarrassment as he describes how confrontation “before you’re sure” can damage doctors’ reputations and hurt anyone falsely accused of harming their child. There is also mention of nurses raising concerns much earlier than any were acted upon, and any astute viewer will surely have more questions than are answered. A film about medical ethics, arrogance, cowardice and self-protection could easily work here.
But the emphasis is on Lisa and her enduring insistence – bar the occasional slight concessions – that she did nothing wrong. Matthew was ill, she says, and everything she did was to help him. The children have no contact with her now, which clearly upsets her, but there is no sign that she is willing – or perhaps able – to provide them with the acceptance of her condition and what she really did that they need to establish any kind of rapprochement. Another weakness is the lack of anything other than softball questions to Lisa. She is rarely pressed on any issue or incident and it feels like a dereliction of journalistic duty.
Laura and Matthew talk about her with regret, mystification and – particularly in Laura’s case – a longing for her to accept responsibility for their suffering. They are a study in grace and compassion. They manage to see her as mentally ill rather than “evil”, despite their experience of life lived right on the border between those two states. They undoubtedly deserve better – from their mother, from the professionals involved with their childhoods, and this programme, which – though it valuably restores much of what the tabloids eschewed – fails on some of its own quite vital terms.
Love You to Death is on Channel 4 now
