(Image: DURHAM POLICE)
JEREMY CHIPPERFIELD, the senior coroner for Durham and Darlington, is right to hold an inquest into the death of Angela Lloyd in Newton Aycliffe on August 13 even though Patricia Hewitt pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was ordered to be detained indefinitely in hospital.
There is much that, certainly with the benefit of hindsight, doesn’t seem to add up.
Hewitt, who had 122 convictions, had been in hospital with severe mental health issues six times between 2009 and 2024.
She last had contact with medical services in June 2025 when she refused to engage with them and just over a year later, she was in such a psychotic state that she killed Angela.
It doesn’t seem that these services protected Angela or helped Hewitt very well.
Then there are questions for magistrates who gave Hewitt a suspended sentence, for assault, a few hours before Angela’s death, and there are questions for the police who, despite reports of Hewitt’s seriously erratic behaviour and her shoplifting of alcohol, allowed Hewitt to go on her way just minutes before Angela’s death.
These now look like missed opportunities for intervention.
And then there are questions for the care call system, which Angela rang four times in 10 minutes, but because her messages were “unclear” — she was being brutally attacked, poor lady — there seems not to have been the most rapid of responses.
None of these aspects were looked at during the criminal trial, and so an inquest is needed to ask if one of several services had been more pro-active, more inquisitive or had asked where Hewitt’s degenerating behaviour was heading, could the tragic outcome have been different?
These answers are needed not just for the sakes of Angela and her brothers but so that the rest of society knows that the network of protective services is doing its job.