In some ways Paula Mullan wants the inquest into her niece’s death to be over because she’s worried about the impact that the horrific details of Katie Simpson’s murder will have on Katie’s mother.
‘You’re going to have to listen to it all again,’ she says. ‘I worry about my sister Noeleen having to go through all that and my parents.’
As the oldest of her siblings, Paula is the one who speaks for the family as much as she can. But since showjumper Katie’s death in August 2020, life has never been the same for the Mullan family.
The initial trauma that this beautiful 21-year-old with everything to live for had taken her own life soon spiralled into a nightmare, during which the family tried in vain to get the Police Service of Northern Ireland to listen to their fears that she had in fact been murdered.
Had it not been for the courageous actions of a journalist, a police detective from a different jurisdiction and the concerns of a family friend, horse trainer Jonathan Creswell – the partner of Katie’s eldest sister Christina – would have got away with murder.
Creswell battered, raped and strangled Katie, then pretended she had hanged herself from the bannisters of the home she shared with Creswell and her sister, their children and another woman from the horsey set, Rose de Montmorency Wright. The women were all working with Creswell in a business along with his former girlfriend Jill Robinson.
He was a known abuser, having been convicted and jailed for serious assaults on his ex-girlfriend Abigail Lyle, but Paula says she knew nothing of Creswell’s past crimes when he was with her niece.
During his trial for Katie’s murder, the 36-year-old could see that the odds were stacked against him and while he was out on bail, he took his own life.
Later three women, who had also at some point been in sexual relationships with Creswell, were given suspended sentences for withholding information from police about the circumstances of Katie’s death.
Now Paula says she hopes the upcoming inquest will bring some kind of peace for the family, when it finally happens.
She is frustrated that it is taking this long.
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Jonathan Creswell battered, raped and strangled 21-year-old Katie Simpson, then pretended she had hanged herself from the bannisters of her home
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The young showjumper succumbed to her injuries six days after the attack in August 2020
‘The system needs to be looked at, because you feel as if you’ve moved on a wee bit and then, bang, you’re back to square one again,’ she says.
She was angry, she says, when Creswell took his own life, as the family never got to see him stand in the dock and be punished for what he did to Katie.
‘We were sort of waiting for that,’ she says. ‘But now you sort of feel, well, it’s the best outcome because he’ll never be near them children, he will never hurt any other girl.’
It’s something of a cold comfort, given what the family has been through in the last five years.
The Mullans are a Catholic family from Middletown in Co. Armagh, close to the border with Monaghan. Noeleen married Jason Simpson, a Protestant from nearby Tynan, and they had four children – Christina, Rebecca, Katie and John – before the marriage broke up.
Katie was brought up in Tynan, in the thick of an equestrian community where horses were everything. She was a keen rider and sought work within the industry that was her passion, which was the reason she moved to Greysteel in Co Derry with Christina, Jonathan and Rose who, along with Jill, also worked in the business.
Paula lived close by but says she rarely saw her nieces, who called to see her occasionally, but only when Creswell was away.
She never really warmed to the ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed horseman but couldn’t put her finger on what it was she didn’t like about him. She kept her counsel, though, as most would do in a family situation.
When she was called to Altnagelvin Hospital on that terrible day in August 2020, Katie was her priority and she didn’t think of anything else, apart from the fact that her niece had seemed like such a happy girl.
As she lived nearby, she got to the hospital before her sister, who was faced with a drive of almost two hours. The police were in the family room, speaking to Creswell at the time, Paula remembers.
Shortly after that, they left, before Noeleen and Jason had arrived.
‘Katie was being treated, the doctors and nurses were trying to save her life,’ says Paula. ‘I was trying to keep my parents updated and keep in contact with my sister.
‘The police left before my sister got there. I just thought that was very strange. Why would you not meet the parents and explain to them what they had found, that this had happened to their daughter, you know what I mean?’
There was no case number, no one to ask questions to. The PSNI had decided it was a suicide attempt at that stage, despite nurses expressing concerns about the bruising on Katie’s body and about the fact that she was experiencing vaginal bleeding.
Katie didn’t recover from her injuries and died six days after she was admitted to hospital. While suicide is a devastating blow to any family, worse was to unfold.
A friend of Katie’s named Paul Lusby, who has since died, came to Paula’s house, and spoke to her partner James.
‘We knew him very well and he said to James that he had real doubts [about the death],’ she says.
Paul had offered to help Creswell and Christina move house from the one they shared with Katie in Co. Derry. But he told James that he had seen blood spatters at the top of the stairs and bloody fingerprints in the house at Greysteel, and he was worried that Katie had come to harm at the hands of Creswell.
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Former Armagh detective James Brannigan stands with Katie’s aunts Paula Mullan (left) and Colleen McConville
It was something Paula couldn’t let lie so she went to Strand Road Police Station in Derry herself.
‘I wanted to say to them, I don’t think this is suicide, and I went to the station but they just said: ‘We’ll pass that on,’ she recalls. ‘I had never been in a police station in my life so I didn’t know I should have asked to make a full statement.’
Others approached the PSNI in Derry too but it wasn’t until local journalist Tanya Fowles contacted James Brannigan, a detective from Armagh, over suspicions she had about Creswell that anything happened. Brannigan contacted the family.
‘This policeman on the phone says: ‘How are you? How are you all doing?’ recalls Paula. ‘Well, my God, it just hit me like a tonne of bricks because nobody had asked that.
‘Up until this point, this was suicide as far as the police were concerned, so we had no liaison officers, nobody visiting, nothing. There was the wake, the funeral and then you were just left to it.’
Paula says she told Brannigan everything about how she had been to Strand Road and what her concerns were. That was the beginning of the family’s contact with Brannigan, who fought to get the case investigated and pushed to get it into court.
He has since left the police force and, with the blessing of Paula and her sister Colleen, has set up The Katie Trust, a charity to help families like theirs, who might find themselves in a similar, horrific situation.
The Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland found that the PSNI investigation was ‘flawed’ and while the then assistant chief constable Davy Beck apologised to the family following the ombudsman’s report, there is still to be a full independent review into how Katie’s case was handled.
‘We’re very supportive of James and what he is doing,’ Paula says of The Katie Trust.
‘We just think it’s a great thing for people to have somebody to listen to them because when you’re going through that, it’s just like a nightmare, like an explosion going off.
‘So to have someone to guide you, to help you even with what to say or what to ask…’
But it wasn’t only the PSNI who let the Mullan family down. After being charged with Katie’s murder, Creswell was allowed out on bail, which had been posted by members of the equestrian community. Paula was afraid of what Creswell might do to her own family.
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Ex-assistant chief constable of the Northern Ireland Police Service Davy Beck has since apologised to Katie’s family members after the force originally deemed her case a suicide
‘When he got out on bail, I had the fear he was coming here to the house because it does happen, if you stir the pot, people like that don’t like it,’ Paula says.
‘It felt like everything was going against us.’
It meant she was also faced with having to see him in the area, and for Paula that happened when she was grocery shopping.
‘There was always that fear of bumping into him, which I did once in the supermarket, which was very traumatic,’ she says.
‘He came round the corner and just bumped into my trolley and he was like: ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I don’t think he recognised me,’ she says. ‘I recognised him right away and I said: ‘You will be sorry for what you did.’
‘He answered me and he was so calm and his body language was almost as if he was asking me for a ten-minute chat to explain it all away.
‘I just said: ‘Oh my God, get out of my way.’ It took him a while to move and then he went on over towards the fridges and he was roaring and shouting because I said to him: ‘You will be sorry.’ He was shouting: ‘You’ll see all the whole truth has come out,’ and ‘just wait and see’. That was a hard day.’
The family are also still angry that three women who either were or had in the past had sexual relations with Creswell, received only suspended sentences when they were brought to court in 2024 for withholding evidence surrounding Katie’s death.
Hayley Robb, then aged 30, admitted to withholding information and to perverting the course of justice by washing Creswell’s clothes and by cleaning blood in his home. She was sentenced to serve two years in prison, suspended for two years.
Jill Robinson, then 42, admitted to perverting the course of justice by washing Creswell’s clothes, and was sentenced to 16 months in prison, suspended for two years. Rose de Montmorency Wright, then 23, admitted to withholding information while knowing of Creswell’s alleged assault on Katie, and was sentenced to eight months in prison, suspended for two years.
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Horse trainer, 36, accused of raping and murdering female showjumper, 21, is found dead at his home while out on bail on the second day of his trial
Although no one has been jailed for Katie’s murder, Paula can only hope that by telling Katie’s story, it could help other families and it could help other women in coercive and abusive situations see that they aren’t alone, that there is help out there.
‘You are always thinking, I should have done this or I should have done that,’ Paula says. ‘But he was smart, in that part of coercive control is isolating people.
‘When my niece was moving up here, I never was in their house because he isolated them away. The only time that they visited here was when he was away somewhere at a show or something. We thought they were busy working.’
But the work itself was part of the abuse, Paula explains.
‘He was abusing her,’ she says. ‘That’s different. A relationship is where you go on a date and you take them out for dinner in the cinema and you’re happy to tell your family and all that.
‘That was not a relationship, that was an abuse. He was raping her whenever he wanted. He felt he could do whatever he wanted.
‘He had that confidence around him,’ she says, insisting that Creswell would have made her niece feel that if she went against him, no one else in the industry would take her on.
Katie’s death has affected the family in different ways. Paula says it has aged her parents, Katie’s grandparents, with what she describes as the heartbreak of it all. As the eldest, Paula is the one with the broadest shoulders but each family member carries the others through their good days and bad days.
‘It’s brought us closer in a way,’ she says.
Paula is passionate about speaking up on the subject of coercive control and instilling in the younger generation what this looks like.
‘There are times when you feel so stupid that you didn’t see things,’ she says. ‘That’s why speaking out about it is good because it gives people a wee bit more knowledge. We are just an ordinary family and if this can happen to our family, it can happen to any family.’
