Yet another shocking true-crime documentary concerning the appalling actions of a crazed male towards a former female partner, my wife and I watched this just after the much-publicised ITV dramatisation of the horrific Raoul Moat case.
This story was almost as bad, with just about the only good thing you could say about it being that this time no-one died but it didn't seem to be for the want of trying as the young thug, Chay Bowskill, already a convicted felon, almost certainly threw his recent ex-girlfriend, the pretty 19 year old Angel Lynn from Loughborough, out of a fast-moving van onto the concrete street, where she suffered calamitous head injuries which tragically left her in a coma and now a near-vegetative state.
It's heartbreaking to see this young girl's life blighted by the uncontrollable jealousy of her spurned boyfriend Bowskill, although as ever in these tragic stories, you're left wondering just what was her initial attraction to such a toxic individual. Throughout the programme we're told of Bowskill's history of stealing cars and hear him abusing his own mother for not providing him with an alibi for what he did to Angel. In his poisonous texts to Angel as the relationship started to break down he calls her every vile name under the sun, each text coming over as progressively more sinister and menacing.
It reached its sorry conclusion with him forcibly bundling Angel in broad daylight, thankfully caught by a street camera, into a van driven by one of his stooge friends, soon after which she "fell" from the moving vehicle to receive the cataclysmic injuries which still greatly impair her daily life. We see her loving mother and father tending to her every need at home as she makes slow but hopefully steady progress back to what one can only hope will one day be a full recovery.
Bowskill was tried and sentenced to seven and a half years imprisonment, later increased to twelve years on appeal that the original term was too lenient. There are no interviews in the programme with anyone who professes to know him, which is unsurprising and I really fear for society at large when he's eventually released from prison as he will be, as he very much comes across as the type of monster who will never change his evil ways.
It doesn't seem very important or relevant given the context here, to mention the style of the programme itself, but I will say that the constant use of drone shots on high as well as the unusual device of lighting up the night sky with "The Queen's Gambit"-type neon recreations of Bowskill's ominous texts, seemed somewhat flashy and unnecessary given the seriousness of the subject matter.
Nevertheless, this is clearly yet another terrible story which needed to be told in this era of social media and grooming, in the hope that anybody else out there, of either sex, but usually female, might recognise similar signs of obsession in their own relationship and get out of it unscathed. Angel thought she had but clearly her unhinged former boyfriend thought otherwise and exacted a terrible retribution on her.
