Achi news desk-
A violent serial offender who previously tried to strangle his partner was free to murder her after being wrongly assessed as a “medium risk” by the probation service.
When Lee Kendall killed charity worker Michaela Hall on 31 May 2021, police had received 34 pieces of intelligence about his domestic abuse against her and he had almost 50 convictions, relating to 100 offences.
The police, social services, charities and probation officers knew he had tried to strangle Hall, threatened her with weapons and beaten her so badly she could not go to work.
He had been arrested 10 times for assaulting the mother-of-two and officers had attended at least 14 times in as many months, often after calls from neighbours.
Michaela’s father, Peter Hall, told the Observer that the death of his daughter, an RNLI fundraiser, was caused not just by human error but “systematic failures”. “It broke our hearts to hear that if these errors had not happened, our Michaela would not have died that day,” he said.
He added that his “fascinating” daughter – who is described as “the best mother ever” by her sons – has paid “the ultimate price” for their shortcomings.
“The probation service signed her death warrant, without question,” he added. “How many people are they letting out of prison that they shouldn’t be letting out, that have been wrongly assessed?”
Michaela, 49, was referred to a specialist multi-agency panel six times because of the very high risk she was facing. But despite detailed information about his background, the probation service assessed Kendall, 45, as a medium risk after his conviction for two attacks on Hall in early 2021.
An inquest heard that it should have been classified as “high” or “very high risk” and that the assessment was carried out by an unqualified member of staff. A supervisor then co-signed the report, telling the inquest she sometimes skimmed such documents because of what she described as a “horrendous workload”.
If he had read it correctly, he might have noticed that it had failed to include crucial facts including Kendall’s attempted strangulation – a red flag for future fatal violence, the inquest heard. The risk rating was also put on the assumption that Kendall would go to live in Plymouth, rather than return to Cornwall to live with Hall, despite the fact that he said he intended to do so.
The report led to a judge imposing a non-custodial sentence on Kendall for two assaults against Hall, after which he was released from prison with minimal supervision. Kendall’s case was then allocated to a private contractor, rather than the national probation service, which would have been responsible if he had been classified as a more dangerous offender.
About two weeks after his release – after other failures, including a mandatory face-to-face test appointment not happening – he murdered Kendall Hall at her home near Truro.
The inquest heard he grabbed her neck and stabbed her in the head with a kitchen knife, severing an artery. He has since been jailed for life.
On Friday, Andrew Cox, Cornwall’s senior coroner, said Hall’s murder was “entirely foreseeable” and could have been prevented.
He said if Kendall’s risk had been correctly assessed, he could have been jailed and then served a period on license where he would have been seen at least once a week. “Had the lapses and errors not occurred, it is more likely than not that Michaela would not have died when she did,” he said.
The details of the case have shed light on a probation service that has repeatedly been found to have failed to do its job. In June 2022, violent misogynistic racist Jordan McSweeney successfully sexually assaulted and murdered law graduate Zara Aleena after he was wrongly assessed as “medium risk”.
In September 2021, Damien Bendall, who had convictions for armed robbery and GBH, murdered his pregnant partner Terri Harris, her two children and one of their friends after being categorized as “low risk”.
The Michaela Hall inquest heard that efforts to undo the failure to privatize parts of the probation service had left staff under pressure. At the time of Kendall’s incorrect risk assessment, this “failed enterprise” was consuming a “significant amount of management time”, the coroner said.
“Every hour involved planning for the reunion is now an hour not spent managing criminals. It caused an extra workload to be piled on an already depleted workforce.”
The inquest also revealed a litany of failings by other agencies, including detailing how the police and council failed to do all they could to protect her, and how police officers failed to enter her property on the night she was murdered despite receiving a tipoff on the day she died she was attacked.
Her friend told a Crime Stoppers call handler that she was on the phone to Hall, who said Kendall was “on one” and that he had strangled her. Then he heard her shout “Don’t come near me, Lee” and “Get off me”, followed by screams and dull thuds.
The report was passed to Devon and Cornwall police but, although it was rated as urgent, it took 20 minutes for officers to be dispatched. When they arrived, they knocked on the front and back door but did not enter the property. As they drove away, one officer said she had visions of Kendall lying on Hall with his hand over her mouth. “What can you do if she doesn’t help herself?” the officer asked a colleague over the radio. Hall’s body was found the following evening.
On Friday, a coroner said that even if they had broken in, Hall would not have survived; Kendall was so badly injured that even if the attack had happened on the doorstep of a hospital, it wouldn’t have mattered.
But he said they should have done it anyway. “If they had a concern that something serious had happened, they should have made entry to see if they would have been able to save Michaela’s life or limb,” he said. The coroner acknowledged that the police were working in a “complex” environment and said they had been “generally more responsive” to Hall’s case than other agencies, but that he believed “not everything that could have been done done done”.
He also highlighted the failure of the council’s adult and children’s social services teams to share information, adding that although Hall’s two children were being effectively safeguarded, Hall’s needs were not being properly assessed.
Kendall’s abuse of Hall could also have been prevented if the charity where she was working when they met around April 2019 had carried out proper checks on an incomplete employment reference they had obtained for her.
By failing to do so, the charity, which supports vulnerable people including ex-prisoners, was unaware that Hall had been banned from a similar role due to concerns about her professional boundaries after she gave a lift outside to hours for one service user and let another sleep in her car.
This led to her being employed in a role “she was known to be unfit for,” the coroner said. “If that had never happened, she would never have met Kendall,” Peter said.
Hall’s family are now considering legal action against agencies found to have failed them and want their story to be shared so improvements can be made across the system.
Peter, 72, said they had been “really shocked” by how “pathetic risk-critical agencies are and ill-equipped to protect us”, and so far, he had seen nothing to reassure him that things has changed. In relation to the probation service, for example, “there was still no robust system in place” to check who pre-sentence reports were allocated to. “It’s an accident waiting to happen,” he said.
He added that in the days before his daughter died, things seemed to be looking up. Throughout Kendall’s campaign of abuse, Hall had initially refused offers of help from agencies, fearing it might make things worse.
In early 2021, however, she agreed to give a statement to the police, and told officers she feared the violence was escalating. She later retracted it, but Kendall pleaded guilty to two counts of assault – the first time he had been convicted in relation to his offending against her.
He was subsequently remanded in custody, during which time Peter said his daughter appeared to undergo a “seismic shift”. Two weeks before she died, she sat in the kitchen of the family home drinking coffee with Peter and her mother, Anne, and making plans for the future that did not include Kendall. “She was laughing and full of life,” he said. “Even her son said, ‘Mum has changed.'”
“That’s when it’s most dangerous,” he added. “The victim realizes, ‘I need to do something’. And the criminal knows he’s letting go.”
A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said Hall’s murder was “a horrific crime and we are very sorry for the unacceptable failings in this case”.
He said he has since reunified the probation service, eliminating the role of private contractors such as the one overseeing the Kendall case, and is investing to provide more robust oversight, reduce caseloads, and recruit more staff.
Devon and Cornwall police said the two officers who failed to enter her house had been given a “reflective exercise review” after a complaint was upheld by the police watchdog.
He said their “thoughts and condolences” were with the family and “there were no police actions to be attributed to her death”.
