Why judges MUST ban all abusive fathers from ever seeing their children – by a mother whose husband lured their sons to the loft, locked the door and set the house on fire

The moment the doorbell rang, Claire Throssell knew the worst had happened. Hands trembling as she opened the door, she saw a police officer on the doorstep.

Frozen to the spot, she begged him: ‘What has he done?’ The look in the policeman’s eyes confirmed her worst fears.

Claire’s abusive ex-husband, whom she had finally plucked up the courage to leave six months earlier, had done exactly what she had warned the family court he would do if given unsupervised access to their sons. He had taken their lives, and his own, to get back at her for leaving him.

It is a tale of such unspeakable horror that, at times, Claire is too overcome with emotion to speak.

Having lured their sons, Jack, 12, and Paul, nine, into the loft to play with a train set he’d bought that day, Darren Sykes had set 14 petrol-fuelled fires around the family home, blocking the exits with padlocks and furniture, before locking the hatch behind them.

Despite the boys’ brave attempts to escape, all three had suffered fatal injuries by the time the fire brigade managed to break down the door. Claire, thanks to a mercy dash to hospital, got to hold her sons as they died.

‘There is no more wonderful feeling in the world than holding your babies when they’re born, and no worse one than cradling them as they take their last breaths,’ says Claire.

‘I felt this searing pain in my heart and honestly thought I was going to die too. I wanted to. I had nothing left to live for.’

As well as unending grief, however, Claire felt searing anger that still burns to this day. Not only towards Sykes, but to the authorities that allowed him unsupervised access to her precious sons — despite years of abuse.

‘I warned social workers and the family court that he was evil enough to kill our sons,’ she says, tears filling her eyes. ‘But no one listened and he was granted five hours’ unsupervised weekly access.

‘I said, “What about the rights of the child? They don’t want to see him.”

‘The judge who signed that court order signed their death warrant.’

Claire says her sons were terrified of their father and would spray themselves with her perfume before visiting him so they’d have her scent with them as a form of comfort.

‘My children were so scared of him that they’d beg me not to make them see him. But I had no choice, the court had ordered it. It broke my heart.’

This sense of injustice has propelled Claire, now 52, to campaign tirelessly to stop unsafe child contact with dangerous perpetrators of domestic abuse.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of her sons’ deaths, and Claire, who received an MBE in 2020 for campaigning on domestic abuse, is determined to bring about a law to ensure children’s safety is at the heart of any parental contact decisions.

This would include a review of the ‘presumption of parental involvement’ in children’s lives in the family courts. This presumption assumes that the involvement of a parent in a child’s life will further the child’s welfare, and was designed so that one parent was not able to exclude their ex-partner from their child’s life.

Part of the Children Act 1989, this presumption is supposed to exclude cases where involvement with a parent would put the child at risk of harm. However, campaigners such as Claire have long believed that the family courts’ ‘pro-contact culture’ means the criteria are not being enforced nearly rigorously enough — and children including Jack and Paul are paying the price.

Claire, together with the charity Women’s Aid, is calling on the Government to make a commitment to child safety, saying the family courts must not allow known abusers access to their children.

Claire’s Child First petition to bring this before Parliament currently has 80,577 of the 100,000 signatures needed.

Frustratingly, her first petition got as far as the House of Lords — but when Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister in 2022, her campaign went with him, meaning Claire had to re-start it from scratch.

‘I live with an open wound that never heals, never stops bleeding. There are times — Mother’s Day, their birthdays, anniversaries — when that wound gets deeper,’ she says.

‘What keeps me going is a determination to help create a change in the law that gives hope to other women and children. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.’

Claire’s first fateful meeting with Darren Sykes was when she was 25 and they were working for the same company — she as a bookkeeper and him a carpet estimator.

‘He asked me out and, when I turned him down, he sent me a red rose every day for three weeks until I agreed to go on a date,’ says Claire, grimacing at the memory. ‘Now I know that’s love-bombing, typically narcissistic behaviour, but back then I had no such understanding.

 ‘I fell for it, thinking: “He really must care about me.” In fact he was conditioning me to think nobody else could love me like he did.’

After a two-year courtship, they married. Claire says that, although he was possessive and seemed insecure, it wasn’t until their eldest son was born that his ‘nasty’ side truly emerged. ‘The mask just came off,’ she says. ‘He’d say: “You’re not interested in me now, you’ve got what you want.” He couldn’t bear no longer being the centre of attention.’

Paul came along three years later. When the boys grew, as well as directing his rages at Claire — throwing remote controls at her head, or plates of food that didn’t meet his ‘standards’ — Sykes turned on them, too.

After Claire left Sykes, the court deemed that Claire’s evidence — that he forced Paul, daily, to eat every scrap of food on his plate, leading to frequent vomiting at the dinner table; hit the boys on the back of the head if they didn’t obey his orders quickly enough; and threw their clothes onto the outside patio when they left them on their bedroom floors — was not serious enough to warrant him being denied unsupervised access.

Nor did the judge think that her reason for finally plucking up the courage to leave was grounds for keeping Sykes from his sons. Claire left after she stepped in to prevent Sykes punching Jack in the face, and he had then hit her instead, spinning her round and knocking her down a flight of stairs.

She had told the boys, who had hurtled downstairs to check she was OK, to run to the car, Sykes’s words: ‘Look what you made me do’, ringing in their ears. Bruised from her fall, Claire then drove the three of them to her mother’s, where they lived for the next six months.

Claire had a ‘gut instinct’ that Sykes, whom she refused to let see the boys for the first three months, would harm their children and was ‘deeply frustrated’ that no one believed her.

‘At the access hearing in the July, he was told he wasn’t allowed to have them overnight or at mealtimes — as he would force Paul to eat until he was sick — so they knew he was a threat to them,’ she says. ‘And yet they didn’t stop him seeing my boys during the day.’

Having contravened the terms of the court-ordered visitation agreement — which allowed him to have the boys for two hours on Wednesdays and three on Sundays — by bringing them back late on several occasions, Sykes feared he would lose access at the next court hearing.

So on Wednesday, October 22, 2014, two weeks after Claire had divorced him for ‘unreasonable behaviour’, he sent messages to the boys telling them he had bought a £600 train set and ‘all I need now are two engine drivers’. He later picked them up from their grandmother’s house while Claire was at work and took them to the family home.

While they were in the attic, innocently playing with the train set, Sykes set fires all around the house before pulling up the loft hatch and locking them in.

From there, Sykes sent messages to six friends saying he was ‘going to be at peace’.

Claire cannot bear to contemplate the terror her sons must have felt in the minutes that followed. Brave little Jack made a valiant effort to escape, opening the hatch and pulling his younger brother Paul with him. However, he fell onto the landing below, leaving Paul suspended from the opening to the loft, which is where a fireman found him.

‘Jack told the fireman: “My dad did this and he did it on purpose”,’ says Claire. ‘He said the same to a policeman, and later to a consultant at the hospital.

‘He wanted to make sure that those who refused to believe what his dad was capable of knew exactly what he’d done.’

The police officer who broke the news to Claire that she must go with him to Sheffield Children’s Hospital must have known that the boys’ injuries were life-threatening. However, he focused on getting her there quickly, leaving doctors to break the terrible news. The smoke inhalation had been too severe for Paul’s nine-year-old lungs to survive.

‘When I walked in, a doctor asked, “Are you their mum?” and, when I told him, “Yes”, he replied, “I’m very sorry but we’re going to let Paul go now, in your arms.”

‘Confused, I asked what he meant by “go”. He explained there was nothing more they could do,’ recalls Claire, closing her eyes. ‘I just scooped him up in my arms and said: “Come on Paul, you can’t leave. Please stay.”

‘Then I watched his beautiful blue eyes turn grey as the life went out of him, rocking him in my arms and sobbing so much his hair was soaked with my tears.

‘They gave us a moment and then said I had to leave him as my little boy was “a crime scene”.’

Claire mourned Paul’s death as she kept a round-the-clock vigil at the bedside of Jack, 12, sedated after suffering burns over 56 per cent of his body.

News reached her that Sykes had also died from his injuries, meaning, to her fury, he would not face the consequences of his ‘evil’ actions.

Incredibly, Claire was asked if she would like ‘to take responsibility’ for her ex-husband’s body — an offer she declined in no uncertain terms.

Claire had been advised by doctors to speak to Jack as if his little brother, whom he had done his best to rescue, was still alive, in the hope this would give him an incentive to fight for survival.

However, his burns were so extensive his vital organs were failing and, five days after the blaze, after several surgeries, doctors delivered the devastating news that there was nothing more they could do.

‘I held him in my arms as they switched off the machines. I will never forget the noise of the monitor at the end, that continual sound, knowing he was gone,’ says Claire.

‘It’s a moment that haunts me to this day.’

It’s thanks to her own mum, now 83, who forced Claire out of bed and insisted she eat, that she kept going in those early months, which she spent wrapped in her sons’ blankets on her mother’s sofa.

Claire found it particularly hard to bear that her sons’ death certificates state they were ‘unlawfully killed’, rather than murdered, because Sykes never stood trial.

But this was very much a premeditated act. In the weeks after the fire, it emerged that Sykes had cancelled the house insurance in June, written to his bank stating Claire would have sole responsibility for the outstanding £50,000 mortgage and transferred thousands of pounds of joint assets into the account of a new girlfriend he’d met online.

‘Taking my precious sons was not enough for him, he wanted to make sure I was homeless and penniless too,’ says Claire.

The three-bedroom semi-detached house in South Yorkshire was razed to the ground but, in an act of generosity that still makes Claire emotional to recall, her local community rallied round, raising £50,000 for materials, while local tradespeople donated their time to rebuild it.

Claire was able to sell it, pay off the outstanding mortgage and buy a small flat, enabling her to stay in her village, Penistone.

‘Jack and Paul were laid to rest here, with my father, and I never want to be far from them,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how I’d have survived without the support of the wonderful people in my village.’

She believes that the much-vaunted issue of parental alienation, in which one parent turns a child against another, is clouding the judgment of social workers, the Child and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS), and the courts, meaning children’s safety is no longer the priority it should be when access arrangements are being made.

There were 19 child homicides, including Jack and Paul, at the hands of parents who were known abusers between 2004 and 2014. Although there are no records, Claire believes there have been a further 30 in the decade since.

A revision of the legislation, which would have put the onus on the parent with a history of abuse to prove that their children were safe to have unsupervised access, was passed through the House of Commons in 2021 — but then blocked in the Lords.

Claire says she won’t stop until her petition gets the 100,000 signatures it needs for this to go back before Parliament for reconsideration.

‘Holding my sons in my arms, as they took their last breaths, I promised I wouldn’t let what they’d been through happen to any more children,’ says Claire. ‘I believe this is the reason I’m still here, a mother without children.

‘And I will keep on trying until the day I can go and put my hand on their stone, where they sleep, and say, “We’ve done it”.’