My friend, the sadistic murderer

When we were at school together, Kevin Ashdown was a sweet boy who protected me from bullies. Today he is in prison for the brutal murder of his girlfriend

This article was first published in the Guardian on 16 Jul 2007. I decided to republish it here because I have been thinking a lot about my school days in the course of writing my next book on the theme of lesbians. Kevin knew I was struggling to ward off the bullies at our school, and he protected me. As far as I know, Kevin is still in prison, but will be due for release which would be decided by the parole board, in 2025

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Sharon McShane, brutally murdered by Kevin Ashdown

Teesside Crown Court, Middlesbrough, July 2006. From the press bench, my eyes meet those of the man in the dock. Kevin Ashdown is charged with murder and stands up to tell the usher he is pleading, "Not guilty, Miss." Ashdown killed his partner after he found her in another man's bed. It is a classic case of "spousal homicide", where a woman is killed after suffering sustained domestic violence. Sharon McShane, the victim, was the third woman in Darlington, the nearby town where Ashdown and McShane lived, to die at the hands of an abusive partner that month. On average, 120 women die in similar circumstances every year.

Ashdown's soft Durham accent sounds just as I remember it, and his face, albeit ravaged by age, alcohol and hard living, is essentially that of the boy I last saw 30 years ago. "Ashy" (as he is known) and I were at the same secondary school together in Darlington in the 1970s. We had many connections. He was best friends with my older brother Paul, and served his first borstal stretch with him for joyriding. My younger brother, Michael, was involved for a time with his younger sister, Michelle. Ashdown and I were pals, and he made it his business to protect me from bullies.

"The pathologist in this case," says the barrister for the prosecution, "says he has never seen such a horrific set of injuries in his 20-year career." McShane's body was broken and mutilated. She had 11 broken ribs, a liver split so badly it had almost completely dislodged, and her hair had been both cut off and gouged out.

Julie Bindel, aged 14

Both Ashdown and his victim were alcoholics. They had been involved in an on-off relationship for just over a year. Police had been called on 10 separate occasions to the flat where they lived when McShane had been assaulted by Ashdown. "When he is not in drink he is a lovely bloke," says Anne Howard, a witness in court who ran the corner shop where Ashdown bought his cider, "but as soon as he had a drink in him, he was frightening."

At the end of a four-day trial, the jury returns after just one hour with a guilty verdict. Ashdown's face is expressionless. The judge tells him he must serve at least 19 years before being considered for parole, by which time Ashdown will be 65. As he is led away he shouts, "Wicked!"

Branksome comprehensive school, which served the council housing estate where both Ashdown and I lived, was a school where teachers had few expectations of its pupils. Only a handful stayed on beyond 16, and few went on to university. The National Front regularly recruited from Branksome, and truancy and exclusion rates were high. Ashdown was in the year above me, and was, in a way, my male counterpart. Both of us were regularly in trouble for clowning around in lessons. We were seen as bad influences on our classmates.

The pub on Branksome Estate where Ashdown, along with other Branksome residents, drank (1979)

Often, Ashdown and I would find ourselves outside the head teacher's office to be punished for our various antics. I remember one particular day when Ashdown came out of the office having been caned on his bottom. I was next. "They don't cane lasses on the backside," he advised, "so go and put plenty of soap on your hands - it hurts less." It was sound advice, coming from someone who knew.

Having seen Ashdown after so many years, the memories are flooding back of the funny, sweet boy that would come to my house and ask my mum, "Any chance of a bacon sarnie?", and would offer to wash up afterwards.

I feel almost ashamed at how differently our lives have turned out, and confused as to why I should feel any sympathy for Ashdown at all. I have spent all my adult life writing and campaigning against male violence, particularly in cases of spousal homicide; my old schoolfriend has turned out to be the sort of man I consider the ultimate misogynist - prepared to brutally murder a woman because she refused to be controlled by him. Our humble beginnings were similar. What happened for us to end up living such polarised lives?

I travel to Darlington to visit Ashdown. The prison is 17 miles away in Stockton. Ashdown's sister Michele Jenkinson, a taxi driver, picks me up and drives me there. I ask her about her brother's childhood.

Holme House Prison, Stockton

When he was three years old, Ashdown spent a year in hospital with Perth's disease, a condition that stops the bones growing properly. After several painful operations, Ashdown returned home to find he had twin sisters. "He felt totally left out," says Jenkinson.

Ashdown's early years were dominated by violence and abuse. His stepfather, who was violent to all the children, singled Ashdown out for particularly vicious beatings.

When Ashdown was nine, due to family circumstances, he was taken into care. Jenkinson remembers him screaming in distress after a weekend visit when it was time to go back into the children's home. Ashdown's behaviour began to be of concern to his teachers, but no one approached his parents about it. "Kev started to get obsessed about things," says Jenkinson, "such as collecting birds' eggs." When he was nine years old, he set fire to an aviary.

After leaving school, with no qualifications, Ashdown trained to be a plasterer, but found it hard to keep a regular job, due to his drinking and angry temperament. "He could only ever express himself through anger," says Jenkinson, "He always seemed quite proud to be feared."

At 17, Ashdown was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but was offered little help except medication. In the years since I last saw Ashdown, his life has been chaotic and lonely. Having developed a serious drug and alcohol problem, he drifted from one hand-to-mouth labouring job to another. His life continued to spiral downwards, although there were times when he would give up drinking, move in with his sister and get a job. "It never lasted long," says Jenkinson, "but he tried really hard. No one was giving him any support to help himself but me." Days before he killed McShane, Ashdown asked his sister if he could move back in with her. "I said no," says Jenkinson. "I could not face the disruption and his mood swings."

The prison visiting room is packed with girlfriends, wives, small children and mothers sitting on the small, plastic chairs talking to their loved ones. I feel awkward. What am I doing here? How will I feel talking to a man who tortured and killed a woman? Will he think I am just using him for a newspaper article? Am I?

Branksome Estate in the 1970s, where both Kevin and I lived

Ashdown greets me warmly. I find it difficult not to respond, as I did all those years ago, to the boy I liked so much. Is there anything of the old Kevin there? He asks me about my life, and I tell him briefly - political activism, university, long-term happy relationship, career. I leave out a lot. As I recount my rise into the comfortable lifestyle and career choice of the privileged middle classes, the contrast between my life and Ashdown's seems obscene.

"Who'd of thought it, pet?" he says, "Me in here, and you a journalist, writing about me murdering someone." I ask him why he killed McShane. "You're a women's rights thingy, aren't you," says Ashdown, "but you can't lump me in with all those wife beaters." Ashdown insists he did not mean to kill McShane that night, and has no recollection of having done so. "I must have gone demented, 'cos I'm just not like that."

But Ashdown has a history of serious violence. In the early 1980s, he was sentenced to four years in prison after an unprovoked vicious assault on a gay man in an alleyway. "It was nasty," says Jenkinson. "He nearly died." I ask Ashdown about it. "It wasn't because he was gay," he insists. "He must have wound me up."

Then there was the fight in which Ashdown had his ear sliced off with a Stanley knife. He was refused criminal injuries compensation because of his previous convictions for violence, and the tribunal chair commented that, "You have already disfigured your body with tattoos anyway." Violence became a way of life for Ashdown: having been brought up with it, he learned to both give and receive it in large measures. "I've been battered by gangs," he says, "but never as badly as by my stepdad."

What happy memories does he have? "I loved school," says Ashdown, "because I could be clever there, and be the best at everything." How does he feel now, labelled a dangerous killer? "It hurt to be called 'a menace to society'," he says. "I don't think that's me".

Police involved in the case tell me they believe that getting away with beating McShane gave Ashdown a false sense of security, leading to an escalation of his violence. They blame the fact that McShane, a disorganised alcoholic, would always refuse to press charges against him.

Ashdown says he did not intend to kill her and had no idea she was dead when he left her. I tell him about the injury to McShane's liver, which would have required him to have jumped hard on her with both feet. Ashdown insists he has no recollection of doing so. But the facts I hear in court are those of a classic domestic-violence incident taken to extreme.

On a cold January morning last year, McShane - keen to find some breathing space from Ashdown, who had become very angry and drunk - called at a neighbour's flat close to her home. On entering, she told Paul Lowery, a drinking friend, that she had been beaten up by Ashdown again. McShane fell asleep in Lowry's bed after the couple had sex, while he began to use his PlayStation downstairs. Soon afterwards, a drunken and belligerent Ashdown called at the flat, demanding to know where McShane was. When he realised she was in bed, Ashdown became very angry, punching the walls and doors. Lowery left the couple to "resolve their differences" once Ashdown had calmed down, and waited in a friend's flat upstairs. On hearing Ashdown leave the building, one hour later, Lowery returned to find McShane's body lying in the bedroom.

"I will never get over it," says Lowery. "Sharon was covered in blood, and what looked like oil, with clumps of her hair pulled out of her scalp." It was later discovered that Ashdown had emptied the contents of the deep fat fryer over McShane during the assault, possibly in an attempt to destroy evidence. When a pathologist examined the body, he found almost 90 recent injuries, including a number to her groin.

Over the years, I have monitored scores of murders similar to that of McShane. Had I not known Ashdown, I would have merely added the cutting from the Northern Echo to my files of domestic violence murders. I may have looked out for the verdict, and breathed a sigh of relief when he was convicted. I probably would have taken a few minutes to work out why Ashdown's defence of provocation had been unsuccessful when it so often results in an acquittal when the victim had been unfaithful to her killer. Rarely have I looked at the life of the killer in such detail.

This case confirms how long-term brutality towards children can have disastrous effects, not just on its victims, but on those on whom they take out their rage. But Ashdown's actions were driven as much by misogyny as the effects of his childhood abuse. Why did he kill McShane and not the man she had been in bed with? Why had he beaten her on several occasions previously? Why all the injuries to her groin area?

Despite these facts, I have little doubt that McShane would still be alive today had Ashdown been raised as a child, not a punchbag. "I don't suppose I would ever get a woman now," he muses, as I stand up to leave. "But I reckon that's the least of my troubles. Come and see me again, pet?"

On the way back to Darlington, Jenkinson tells me her worries about Ashdown. "I don't know if he will survive, with nothing but years of prison to look forward to," she says. I find myself worrying about what will happen to him, and feeling sorry that there is nothing anyone can do to help him. By the time I get on my train back to London I feel depressed and tearful. I look on Friends Reunited at home, searching for news of other school friends, missing them for the first time in decades. I hear from my brother that of the boys in Ashdown's year at Branksome, no fewer than five are now serving life in prison.