I Begged The Courts Not To Let My Evil Ex-husband See My Beautiful Sons. No One Listened. Then He Locked Them In The Loft And Set The House On Fire: CLAIRE THROSSELL

On Monday morning, Claire Throssell drove to the cemetery where a memorial stone marks the deaths of her two young sons.

She came with a message she’s spent 11 years longing to share with them.

Kneeling with one hand on the granite stone, her cheeks wet with tears, she told them: ‘We’ve done it, boys. The Government has ­promised to change the law, so that no more children need die at the hands of an abusive parent.’

However, the promise Claire was given last week by the Prime Minister of a repeal of The Children Act – which currently presumes a child will maintain contact with a parent, even if they have a history of violence or abuse – is a bittersweet victory.

She would give anything for her sons, Jack and Paul, aged 12 and nine when they were killed by their father in 2014, to still be alive. They would now be young men; studying, working, dating, like their friends.

At the same time, Claire knows it is because of their deaths – and her campaigning – that no other children will be forced by a court to see a ­parent capable of such brutality.

‘I miss my sons every moment of every day and will never forgive the judge who signed the court order granting their killer unsupervised access, after I’d warned social workers and the family court that he was evil enough to kill them,’ says Claire.

‘He took away my entire reason for living and the only thing that’s kept me going since is a determination to help create a change in law that means no other child will be ordered by the courts to spend time with a parent they’re terrified of.’

Claire, 53, who had finally plucked up the courage to leave her abusive ex-husband Darren Sykes six months before he killed their sons, has since their deaths campaigned with charity Women’s Aid for changes to The Children Act 1989.

Plans for a repeal were announced on October 21. Claire believes this date was chosen to coincide with the 11th anniversary of the boys’ deaths.

Claire sat beside Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street as he uttered the words she feared she may never hear: ‘We will take presumption of contact out of law. It is going to happen.’

She adds: ‘He said during Prime Minister’s Questions that he will repeal it, but it needs to pass through the Houses of Commons and Lords before there can be a change in law.

‘I can’t wait another 11 years, so I’m relying on Sir Keir to make this happen now.’

It was this ‘presumption’ of contact that left Claire’s sons at the mercy of a man so devoid of humanity she now refers to him as ‘It’.

Having lured the boys into the loft at the former family home in Penistone, near Sheffield, to play with a train set, Sykes set 14 ­petrol-fuelled fires around the house, blocking the exits before locking the loft hatch behind all three of them.

Haunting thoughts of what ­happened next have tormented Claire ever since.

From firefighters, she knows that 12-year-old Jack made a valiant attempt to drag his little brother to safety through the hatch.

However, he fell on to the landing below, ­leaving nine-year-old Paul ­suspended from the opening.

‘I wonder, in the darkness, when they could hear the flames below, did (Sykes) taunt them? Did he tell them they were going to die? I wouldn’t have put that past him,’ says Claire, closing her tear-filled eyes.

Both boys, and their father, were still clinging to life when firefighters managed to break into the house.

‘Jack told the fireman: ‘My dad did this and he did it on purpose’. 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 what he’d done.’

Jack’s courage, despite his young body having suffered 56 per cent burns, in ensuring the authorities were left in no doubt that his father had intentionally set out to kill his sons, has been a huge help to Claire in her campaigning.

After learning about the fire from a police officer who turned up at her door – she and the boys had been living with her mum – Claire raced to Sheffield Children’s Hospital. But despite brave battles, neither of the boys survived.

‘I’m glad I got to be with Jack and Paul, but they were the very worst moments of my life, the complete opposite of the joy I felt when they were born,’ she says. ‘I clung so tight, and it was as if my heart, my soul, my very being, was ripped out as my boys took their last breaths.’

Paul died that same night, and soon afterwards a distraught Claire was told not to touch her little boy again as he was ‘a crime scene’.

She was advised to pretend to Jack, who clung to life for another five days, that his brother was still alive, as this might give him extra resolve to survive.

The news of Sykes’s death was an enraging development, as it meant he would not face justice for his actions.

She kept a round-the-clock vigil at Jack’s bedside until, despite several surgeries, his organs were failing so badly that doctors said there was nothing more they could do.

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

Having lost both her sons, Claire could see no reason to go on.

‘I remember shouting: ‘My life’s over’, and no one could dispute that,’ she says. ‘I had nothing left.’

It wasn’t enough for Sykes to kill their sons; he had razed the family home. It also emerged he had cancelled the house insurance in June – four months before his despicable act – having written to his bank stating that Claire would have sole responsibility for the outstanding £50,000 mortgage, and transferred thousands of pounds of joint assets to a girlfriend he’d met online.

In the months that followed, in an act of generosity for which she will be eternally grateful, Claire’s local community raised £50,000 for ­materials, while local tradespeople offered their services for free to rebuild the three-bedroom semi.

She was eventually able to sell it and buy a small flat, enabling her to stay in her village, close to the churchyard where her sons ‘sleep’.

It is thanks to her own mum – who sadly died last year, aged 83 – forcing Claire out of bed and insisting she eat, that she was able to keep going in those early weeks. She spent them wrapped in her sons’ blankets on her mother’s sofa.

However, beneath the crippling grief, Claire felt a deep, burning rage, not only towards Sykes but the system that had left her sons at his mercy. This is what propelled her to fight for a change in the law.

In the aftermath of their ­separation, the Family Court had deemed that Claire’s evidence that Sykes 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 head if they didn’t obey his orders quickly enough, and threw their clothes outside when they left them on their bedroom floors were not serious enough to warrant him being denied unsupervised access.

The judge didn’t believe that her reason for finally having the courage to leave – she had stepped in to prevent Sykes punching Jack in the face, and he had hit her instead, knocking her down a flight of stairs – was grounds for keeping him from his sons.

Though ‘presumption of access’, designed so that one ­parent is not able to exclude an ex-partner from their child’s life, is supposed to be disregarded when children are at risk of harm, campaigners have long protested that the Family Courts‘ ‘pro-­contact culture’ means this doesn’t always happen.

‘It’s a national disgrace that over the past 30 years, 67 children – 19 of them between 2015 and 2024, a 50 per cent increase on the previous decade – have been killed by a parent who was also a perpetrator of domestic abuse in circumstances relating to child contact,’ says Claire.

While welcoming the promise of a repeal of presumption of contact, Claire will not rest until it is set in law. Her initial petition for this change got as far as the House of Lords, but when Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister in 2022, Claire’s campaign went with him.

She spent the next two years amassing another 100,000 signatures to bring the petition back to parliament last November. It followed earlier campaigning, together with Women’s Aid, which led to children being ­recognised as victims in the Domestic Abuse Act in 2021.

Claire’s tireless efforts resulted in her being awarded an MBE in the 2021 New Year Honours list.

‘I’m glad of every development, but it’s not over yet,’ she says.

‘My sons told everyone who would listen that they were frightened of their dad and didn’t want to be alone with him, and still, because of this ­’presumption’ in law, his wants were prioritised above theirs.’

While the Family Court wouldn’t allow him to have the boys ­overnight or at mealtimes, Sykes was granted five hours unsupervised access a week, three on Sundays and two on Wednesdays after school, which was when he set his deadly trap.

Claire is haunted by memories of her sons clinging to her, ­begging her not to make them go and spraying themselves with her perfume, a source of comfort, before every visit.

But she did not dare keep them away, aware that, if she breached the terms of the court order, not only would she risk imprisonment but, worse, might lose custody of her children.

With hindsight, she wishes she had taken that risk.

‘Jack would now be 23 and Paul would be 20,’ she says, smiling. ‘I was incredibly proud of them both and know they would have grown into wonderful young men.

‘My friends, mums I met at the school gates, have children the same age and I like hearing about what they’re doing, though it’s a bit like picking at a scab for me.

‘All the milestones they reach – GCSEs, proms, learning to drive, A-levels – they’re all reminders of what could have been.

‘Some of these kids were so affected by what happened it’s even influenced their choice of career – we’ve a criminal ­psychologist, a firefighter, someone working for the Ministry of Justice and another for the domestic abuse charity Refuge.’

Claire believes Jack, a skilled trumpeter, would have joined an orchestra, while Paul, a keen sprinter, wanted to represent his country at the Olympics.

‘Then he was going to become a police officer because, in his words, he was fast and ‘would be able to catch nasty people like Dad’,’ she says, sadly.

But instead of being able to share news of their achievements, all Claire has left of her sons are their ashes, mixed in the glass-fronted signet ring she wears on the ring finger of her left hand.

‘After my sons were taken from me I had no intention of going on living,’ she says. ‘I will, however, keep going until children are at the heart of every decision made in the family courts.

‘I want everyone to remember Jack and Paul and there could be no better legacy than a bill that protects other children.’

Claire hopes, but doesn’t like to presume, her sons’ names might actually feature in the new law.

Surely this is the very least that this remarkable woman deserves.

For My Boys by Claire Throssell (Mirror Books, £9.99) is out now, available at amazon.co.uk