Julia Pemberton was terrorised for 14 months by her husband before he shot her and their son dead. In the 18 years since, her brother has devoted his life to preventing similar crimes and supporting other families
The first time Frank Mullane’s sister Julia confided that her marriage was unhappy, that her husband of 23 years was controlling and abusive, and that she intended to ask for a divorce, Mullane responded in what he now calls “a John Wayne kind of way”. “I asked: ‘When can I give him a thump?’” he recalls. “My life is completely different now, but at the time I didn’t have a clue. I knew nothing about domestic abuse, but I felt 100% solidarity. I wanted to show I was on her side – the cavalry.”
Mullane and Julia were two of eight siblings from a close Irish family. Their parents had come from Cork to London, then Wiltshire, where their father built a house big enough for all of them. As adults, they stayed close. “We were a loving family, always in each other’s houses,” says Mullane. He was unmarried and had remained in Wiltshire as a business consultant for Nationwide. Julia had trained as a nurse before marrying Alan Pemberton, an accountant and businessman. She later retrained as a health visitor. They lived with their two teenage children 25 miles away, near Newbury, in a house they built – large, secluded, set in acres of woodland.
