Demi Hannaway: Discovery made in the days after her death

A young, healthy woman dies suddenly at home and her partner, a violent man with a long and recorded history of domestic abuse, tells police at the scene: “It’s all my fault.”

Incredibly, despite police knowing of his brutal attacks against Demi Hannaway, 23, Andrew Brown is not asked to explain his remark to officers on the morning of May 13, 2021 as they quickly decide his partner has taken her own life.

Failing to question Brown further at the couple’s home in Airdrie is, according to Demi’s parents Helen and John, just one of 32 serious errors made by Police Scotland as they accuse officers of failing their daughter in the hours, days and weeks after her death.

They are calling for ministers to order an urgent review and instruct Police Scotland and the Crown Office to investigate.

Calls for full probe

Helen said: “Months later, an officer was in our home and admitted he was at Demi’s home on the day she died when Brown told him that he was to blame.

“I think he would have liked to swallow his words as soon as he said them because I asked what he had meant. I am still waiting for an answer.”

At another meeting in their home in Airdrie, an officer allegedly told the couple: “He may not have murdered your daughter in the way you think, but he did murder your daughter.”

Demi taking part in a Glasgow fun run. She was a fit, healthy mum of two and, her parents <br />believe, very unlikely to take her own life.

Demi’s parents assume the officer was referring to Brown’s prolonged violent and psychological abuse but if so, they ask, why did police not investigate that in relation to Demi’s death?

Brown, 33, had told officers arriving at the couple’s home in Viewfield, Airdrie, that he had discovered Demi, the mother of two young children, dead around 6am.

At 4.30am, just over an hour before Brown claimed to have found Demi dead, she had been seen outside her house on the phone asking a friend for help because Brown, who could be heard in the background shouting aggressively, would not leave.

Brown, who had previously been accused of throttling and spitting on his partner, told officers arriving at the couple’s home shortly before 7am that he had found her body, already cold, he claimed, in the bedroom.

He would claim she had taken her own life before officers swiftly agreed and left a few hours later.

Her family believe Brown’s account of finding Demi hanging from a curtain hook demanded more investigation given his violent history of throttling her.

His claims that he first started kissing Demi after finding her dead before getting angry and spitting on her should also have prompted further inquiry, the family say.

Brown’s account would change repeatedly. Instead of sparking further investigation, police decided the inconsistencies were caused by the trauma of finding Demi’s body.

But her father, who conducted his own tests on the curtain fitting which Brown claimed Demi used to hang herself, does not believe it could have held his daughter’s weight.

John said: “It wasn’t strong enough and bent when any weight was put on it. His actual description of finding Demi’s body is physically impossible but the police said he must have misremembered because of the shock.

“They took every word he said at face value. They tested nothing, questioned nothing and reinterpreted anything that didn’t make sense to fit their version of events.

“There was no investigation.”

Notes apparently written by Demi suggesting she was considering taking her own life were on display in the house when police arrived. But her family do not believe they could have been written on the day she died. They question whether it was feasible for Demi to have written them when she was on the phone asking for help to get Brown out of the house at 4.30am.

He would tell told officers that Demi had postnatal depression but her family have no knowledge of any mental health issues, certainly nothing that suggested she had been suicidal.

They believe the notes may have been written by Demi the week before her death in a misguided attempt to persuade Brown to return to the family home after a separation.

‘We have so many questions’

Helen said: “Four years since Demi died and we are constantly turning it all over in our minds.

“He had attacked her, spat on her, strangled her, and yet she still protected him, kept it all secret, wanted him in her life.

“It must have been a control thing. She must have been bullied and terrorised so much that she thought she needed him.

“We have so many questions and every one leads to another.

“Drawers had been emptied and there was rubbish strewn all over the bedroom, for example, but Demi always kept her house immaculate.

“None of it makes sense.

“We just go around and around with our hearts breaking.”

Only after the police left on the morning of her death did Demi’s family find her phone, which they used to joke was surgically attached to her hand, smashed beneath her bed, the SIM card removed and missing.

Only then did they notice the marks of someone punching the fridge door in fury, specks of blood on the walls of the hall and kitchen door, and Demi’s hair on the kitchen floor.

Only when the officers were back at their station did Demi’s parents realise that, apart from speaking to her partner, their inquiries had involved taking just one statement, from the neighbour who called 999 after Brown came to her door.

They did not speak to other neighbours who had heard the couple fighting, seen Demi on the phone and had video footage from door cameras.

Worse was to come in the days ahead, when her parents would learn Brown was already flagged on police records as a serial abuser of their daughter, convicted of grabbing her and spitting on her in the street.

A year after that he was convicted of spitting on an officer when police had been called to the couple’s home, one of several visits, her parents would learn.

Then, in the most alarming and dismaying revelation, Demi’s sisters, who she had sworn to secrecy, revealed they had witnessed Brown choking her and spitting on her in fury.

Two weeks before she died, Demi had told them she had feared he was going to kill her in his latest, most violent attack.

After accessing her Facebook account, her parents discovered a litany of abhorrent messages from Brown, threatening Demi, calling her awful names and, on at least one occasion, wishing her dead.

He would, eventually, in May last year, be convicted of sending the threatening and abusive messages and sentenced to three and a half years. But her family believe he has never been directly questioned about the events leading to Demi’s death.

The couple’s complaint is now being considered by Police Scotland’s Professional Standards Department.

The family’s lawyers have been given no indication as to when that investigation will end and Demi’s family fear Brown may be freed before it does.

John said: “We are not prepared to wait months, years, for an admission that officers might have done better.

“We know they could have done better.

“They could have done their jobs.”

The red flags

The death of Demi Hannaway should have immediately raised a series of red flags with police, according to experts.

Campaigners fear the deaths of hundreds of women have been wrongly ruled suicide and highlight a 2015 Home Office investigation into the deaths of 32 women who apparently took their own lives.

It found 10 of the women had been killed while another five deaths demanded more investigation.

In an article – The Perfect Murder: An Exploratory Study of Staged Murder Scenes and Concealed Femicide published by Oxford University Press in 2019 – researchers Yifat Bitton and Hava Dayan identified six factors that should trigger further inquiries:

A woman in good health dies suddenly.
Her body is found by her current or former partner.
She is found dead in her home.
She has apparently taken her own life.
There is a history of domestic violence.
There is a suggestion that she wanted to end the relationship.

The Alliance for Hope International, a US-based charity campaigning against domestic violence with a team of experts dedicated to reinvestigating suspicious suicides, added another four signs that investigators should be alert to:

A history of domestic violence that includes strangulation or suffocation.
The dead woman’s partner was the last person to see her alive.
He had control of the scene.
Her body had been moved or the scene potentially altered.

Demi’s family believes the circumstances of her death should have raised almost all of the red flags.

Forensic psychologist Joni Johnston wrote in Psychology Today, however, that police will often be reluctant to investigate what appears to be suicide, particularly if it is reported by a partner.

She said: “No matter how much an officer is trained to treat any sudden and unexpected death as a homicide until proven otherwise, we are all influenced by what we are first told about an event.”

COMMENT: Police can finally do right thing with an investigation

Demi's parents, Helen and John Simpson. — Demi’s parents, Helen and John Simpson.

By Jim Wilson, journalist and former Sunday Post editor

Smart, funny and kind with her shock of bright red hair, Demi Hannaway would light up a room, according to her parents.

She died almost four years ago but, listening to Helen and John talk of their daughter, it could be four weeks. They are, like any parents would be, shattered by loss, but their grief remains raw-edged.

Unable to move on and unwilling to leave questions surrounding Demi’s death unanswered, they are entirely convinced Scotland’s police and prosecutors failed her.

It is hard not to share their bewilderment at how officers responded, or failed to respond, to the sudden death of a young woman who, they knew, had previously suffered physical and psychological violence inflicted by her partner, Andrew Brown.

Her family will never believe Demi killed herself. It would have been, they say, completely out of character. She would, they insist, never have left two young children without their mother. Her suicide is, to her family, to the people who knew her best, not implausible but impossible. Whatever happened that night, police made no effort to find out. In the house for just a few hours, they saw nothing suspicious, noted nothing that demanded further investigation, and were back in the station in time for lunch.

Their apparent lack of interest would seem indefensible even if the family’s own inquiries had not later secured Brown’s conviction for sending his partner abhorrent threats and abuse. Whatever the outcome of their formal complaint to Police Scotland when it grinds to a close, her family deserves more than warm words and carefully worded, finely tuned apologies.

They don’t want it. What they want is an investigation launched, the evidence scrutinised, and new charges considered. Official hand-wringing is by now the default response when the death of a young woman has been so preventable, the inquiry so inept, or the cover-up so egregious that it can no longer be ignored.

It often comes with a promise to learn lessons but the death of Demi Hannaway is not just an opportunity. It is an enduring tragedy for her family, a mortifying disgrace for police and prosecutors, and a chance, even now, to do the right thing.

We have heard too many promises of lessons learned, public inquiries, specialist units, fresh initiatives, new legislation. It has become meaningless white noise, hollow talk of change tomorrow as women and girls suffer appallingly today.

When, well into the 21st Century, police can be called to the sudden death of a young woman who has previously suffered domestic violence, and lack the basic training to investigate first and decide later, that should still have the power to shock.