Linda Westcarr shares the poignant lesson she is teaching her young granddaughter about staying safe around strangers, all the while knowing that someday she’ll face the painful task of revealing a devastating truth about a danger that once resided within their own home.

‘Eventually, I will need to tell her: “Your daddy killed your mummy,” but for now, I’m struggling with comprehending the tragedy. It’s incredibly challenging, and I haven’t had a chance to properly mourn. There are countless responsibilities to juggle, making it a tremendous ordeal.

‘My daughter has passed away, and I cannot rationalize it. I’m still in disbelief, waking at night imagining her presence, feeling like she remains here. I just can’t accept that she’s truly gone.

‘She radiated hope and happiness; such a loving and spirited individual, full of joy and humor, always dancing. She adored her career in the caregiving field, and we had lived together her whole life.

‘We were an inseparable duo; harmonious and close. It feels like a part of me is missing. Yet it’s not just her death that’s painful. My granddaughter remains, with her life altered forever.

‘I wish I could erase her father’s influence, but it’s not possible. He’s imprisoned now, yet retains his parental rights. His opinions still matter legally, but why should I care about them?’

She is incredulous, struck by the absurdity of this anomaly. But there is yet another, abiding injustice that riles her. Linda’s daughter charity worker Kennedi Westcarr-Sabaroche, 25, was strangled to death by her partner of nine years, Gogoa Tape, 28, in April 2024.

‘He was her first boyfriend, also her last,’ says Linda. To begin with – in fact for eight months after her death – Tape, who was widely known by his middle name, Lois, had been charged with her murder. Then in December 2024, the family was notified that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was amending the charge against him to the lesser one of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility.

The basis for this decision were two ‘fragile’ psychiatric assessments carried out, belatedly, five and seven months after the killing, which concluded he could not exercise self-control or form a rational judgment and had probably suffered a ‘psychotic episode’ at the time of the killing.

Linda is distraught that on such evidence the charge against a man she believes is guilty of murder was downgraded to a lesser one and his trial abandoned.

Today, as Tape was handed an indefinite hospital order having pleaded guilty to manslaughter by diminished responsibility, blaming a mental health disorder precipitated by his habitual cannabis use for a psychotic episode, Linda said: ‘Justice has not been done; for Kennedi or for our family.’

At Inner London Crown Court, Judge Freya Newbery told Tape his actions on the night of the killing had been ‘cold and calm’.

‘You were responsible for Kennedi’s death, but your responsibility was diminished. You were in the grip of a major psychotic illness. Your psychosis wasn’t caused by cannabis use, but it was probably precipitated by it.’

Linda says: ‘I feel absolutely devastated. This is a huge miscarriage of justice. It’s beyond belief that a man my daughter trusted and let into her world has killed her, showed no remorse and wouldn’t even hold his hands up and say he’d murdered her.

‘The evidence that he has a mental illness is flimsy, totally inadequate. He lived under my roof, even called me ‘mum’ and shared my home with Kennedi for much of their relationship, and I saw no sign that he was mentally ill.

‘He has no history of psychosis. He has not needed hospital treatment since the killing and has spent his time in remand in prison, not in a secure psychiatric hospital.

‘Even on the afternoon before he killed Kennedi, he’d taken their daughter and another child to visit two museums without any issues.’

Significantly, however, Linda became concerned that Tape was intimidating Kennedi, who had said she wanted to end the relationship in the months before she was murdered. He exerted escalating levels of coercive control and insisted, repeatedly, that she had a DNA test to prove his paternity of their child.

‘Yet the police did little to investigate this pattern of behaviour, in which he became increasingly possessive, falsely claimed she was having an affair, showed signs of violence and excluded her from seeing three close friends.’

The law permitted Linda to do nothing to challenge Tape’s conviction for manslaughter. However, she says: ‘I hope lessons will be learned. In a climate of police shortages and with pressure on courts mounting, I’m worried we’ll see a repeated pattern of accepting manslaughter pleas without sufficient scrutiny.

‘The fact that a lesser charge was accepted should not impact the amount of time Tape serves for my daughter’s death,’ she says. ‘He deserves to spend his life a secure unit.’

Linda has a formidable ally in Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, chairman of Refuge and founder of the Joanna Simpson Foundation – charities supported by the Queen which help adult and child victims of domestic homicide and abuse – who is backing her campaign.

‘The failings of the police and CPS have only deepened Linda and her family’s suffering and grief,’ says Hetti. ‘Even if the psychiatric assessments were really sound, the other evidence of coercive control should have created a doubt about whether Tape’s medical condition had a substantial impact on his actions. At the very least there should have been a trial.’

Linda has a close-knit and supportive family. Divorced with two other daughters – Danielle, 39 and Simone, 36 – she sits in her north London home surrounded by photos of Kennedi. Some are at toddler height on the wall so her granddaughter can reach to kiss them before she goes to bed. Others surround a shrine with lighted candles, burning all day in her daughter’s memory.

Linda is not a vengeful woman. Her tone is even, her thoughts considered. She is hard-wired to think the best of people, to champion the underdog. Her job as a senior education welfare officer demands compassion tempered with practicality. Her remit as schools’ exclusion head is to help troubled children find pathways back to education.

So her sense of injustice, though fierce, is expressed with quiet eloquence. There are no tears today although often, in private, they overwhelm her. She talks with heart-breaking affection of the daughter she loved so much, who was – it soon emerges – so like her mum.

‘She looked out for people, stayed in touch, gave advice. She never judged anyone but her moral compass always pointed in the right direction.’

She also strived constantly to better herself, first securing an apprenticeship with the Prince’s Trust – she met the King twice during her time with them – then working in marketing for the charity Marie Curie, which cares for the terminally ill.

Kennedi met Tape when they were both studying at Westminster College. She was 16, he 18.

‘I invited him here to have a chat,’ recalls Linda. ‘I wanted to talk to both of them about their relationship, what their expectations were.

‘I was apprehensive about it becoming physical. I felt Kennedi was very young.’

As the relationship progressed, Kennedi began to ask if Tape could stay over. Linda agreed. ‘But something did not sit right with me. While Kennedi always strove, he lacked drive and ambition.

‘He didn’t get a job. I don’t even know if he graduated from college. It was a great worry for me that he also smoked cannabis. He hid the fact to start with, then smoked it more openly in the garden.’

As so many parents do, Linda faced a delicate balancing act and did not want to force a confrontation by raising her concerns.

‘I wanted to give him a chance. To judge him too harshly would have made it hard for Kennedi. I didn’t want to force her out of her home or make her feel she had to choose between us.’

But during the Covid lockdown Linda told Tape he would have to decide whether to live with his parents in nearby Hackney or move in with Kennedi at their home. He opted for the latter.

And there were redeeming factors: Tape loved children and when Kennedi found she was pregnant – and their daughter was born in April 2022 – Linda hoped he would step up to the plate: ‘I hoped that becoming a father would make him more responsible. Actually I’d say he felt he was no longer the centre of Kennedi’s world and he became very possessive.’

Neither was she always happy with his parenting. ‘My granddaughter sucked her thumb and he kept pulling it out of her mouth until she cried. I tried not to interfere but I noticed these things.’

In the final two years of their relationship, Kennedi also began to find his controlling behaviour oppressive. Linda recalls: ‘I heard her tell a friend, ‘The only time I get a break from him is when I’m in the bathroom.’

‘Whenever he left the house he would constantly call or FaceTime her. He questioned her girlfriends, too, asking them if she talked to other men when she went out with them.’

Her patience at an end, Linda forbade Tape from staying in her house during the day and insisted he go to college to complete a course in plumbing and heating engineering.

One morning, his anger tipped into aggression: ‘He woke her, grabbed her and said, ‘I know what you’ve done’. He accused her of cheating. He just wouldn’t leave her alone.’

Her concerns mounting, Linda questioned him about his behaviour. ‘He admitted to me he’d cheated on Kennedi and he said he felt she’d retaliate. She didn’t and hadn’t, but he was constantly suspicious. He kept asking for a DNA test to prove he was the father of their daughter.

‘Kennedi said, ‘You know she’s yours but if you want a test I’ll have it. But our relationship is at an end.’

‘I was worried for her. I knew that she was trying to break free while he was pulling tighter. It was dangerous.’

Four weeks before he killed Kennedi, Linda sent Tape back to live with his parents. Kennedi, by then, had told him repeatedly the relationship had run its course. His possessiveness was becoming oppressive.

Linda remembers the awful prescience of a conversation she’d had with her daughter: ‘I was frightened for her. I said: ‘I don’t want the police knocking on my door telling me something dreadful has happened to you.’ But she reassured me. She said, ‘Mum, he won’t hurt me or our little girl.’ She was so wrong. That’s exactly what he did.’

The day before Tape killed Kennedi he was ringing her incessantly: ‘She got to the point when she was no longer taking his calls because he was driving her mad,’ says Linda.

Their daughter, who had been on an outing with Tape that afternoon, was staying at his home, with her paternal grandparents, overnight.

That same evening – April 5 last year – Tape asked Kennedi to drive her, in a car she and Linda had just bought and shared, to quote for a job in nearby Enfield.

‘She left here at 9.30pm. Dead on. She never came back,’ says Linda. ‘I remember thinking it was very late to be going out to quote for a job. I was worried.

‘Did he really have an appointment or was it a way to lure her out late at night?

‘I had a tracker on the car and I was watching where they went. It was going on roads I didn’t recognise, I thought in the direction of his house. Then there was a point when it stopped. I kept refreshing the app because I couldn’t understand why the car wasn’t moving.

‘My mind was racing. I thought: ‘Should I phone her?’ She always said I worried too much, that she was an adult, that I shouldn’t over-think everything. So I didn’t call. But I stayed up.

‘I thought she must have fallen asleep in the car. By 3am, when she still wasn’t home, I sent a Whatsapp message: ‘You good, Ken?’ No response, so a minute later I called. Her phone was switched off, which was unusual.

‘Then I called Tape’s phone and it just rang out. By then I was worried but I didn’t imagine he’d hurt her. It crossed my mind to call the police but I didn’t. I stayed up. Finally at 5am I went to bed.

‘Then, when I woke at 9.48am there were missed calls on my phone from Kennedi’s dad Kelvin.’ They’d separated when Kennedi was five, but had kept in touch.

‘I was frightened. I thought: ‘Something’s not right.’ Immediately I called him back and he said: ‘I’m outside. Can I come in?’

‘I said, ‘What’s happened. You’re scaring me.’ Then he came in, sat down and just said, ‘Lois has killed Kennedi.’ I screamed. I didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it. You just think everyone has got it wrong. You try to take it in but you can’t comprehend it.

‘From that day to this I still can’t believe that she’s never coming back. I’m still in shock. I still don’t believe I’m never going to shout upstairs: ‘Ken, are you coming down for your dinner?’

Almost immediately police arrived and said she had been killed by strangulation in her car, close to Tape’s Hackney home. Later Linda was told there was sufficient evidence to charge Tape with murder. Then came the ‘devastating’ news that the charge had been reduced.

‘He hid behind a plea of mental illness because he has realised it would work in his favour. The protection of other women is paramount in a case like this and in a year when the Government has stated it wants to halve violence against women and girls, it is vital that justice is seen to be done, not only in Kennedi’s memory, but also for the protection of the wider public. He should not have got away with this lesser charge.’

She steels herself to be strong for the granddaughter she is now raising: ‘I thank God for her every day. She cries for her mum and asks for her and I’ve had to tell her, ‘Mummy has died.’ She says, ‘I didn’t want Mummy to die’ and I tell her, any time she wants to talk to her she just has to say something out loud.’

Linda struggles, too, with the fact that there is no financial support for ‘those left behind.’ Her retirement plans are on hold.

‘Meanwhile Tape will stay in a secure hospital. He has three square meals a day; therapy if he wants it – all of which I help pay for with my taxes – while I have to keep a roof over our heads and face the intrusion of the local authority who scrutinise me to see if I’m a fit guardian for my granddaughter.

‘She says, ‘Mummy is in the sky now. She’s an angel and you are my mummy now,’ which is just heartbreaking. I say: ‘Mummy has asked me to look after you.’ And yet I still feel I’m just baby-sitting and that one day Kennedi will come back.’

To support Linda in raising Kennedi’s daughter go to: https://www.gofundme.com/f/in-memory-of-kennedi-westcarrsabaroche