The death of Lloyd Brian Twells in custody, just one week before his sentencing for the attempted murder of his ex-partner, has left Lynn Carrington feeling utterly bereft of justice. The 60-year-old mother of six from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, survived a horrific knife attack in her own home last June, an ordeal during which she truly believed she would die. Having endured a 14-hour surgery after losing a life-threatening 2.7 litres of blood, she endured the subsequent trial, clinging to the promise of legal closure. Twells’s conviction in December offered a grim vindication, but his subsequent death from bladder cancer while awaiting sentence has shattered that expectation. For Lynn, the procedural conclusion of his case has delivered not solace, but a profound and painful emptiness, as the man whose violence nearly ended her life has escaped the formal punishment of the court.
Lynn’s anguish is palpable and deeply human. “I feel like I’ve gone through a nightmare and nobody’s paying at the end for what they did to me,” she expresses, her words heavy with a sense of betrayal. The anticipated moment of sentencing—a societal declaration that his actions were criminally and morally wrong—has vanished. “I feel cheated. I’ve got no ending in my head,” she says, highlighting how crucial that formal end was to her psychological processing. Her torment is compounded by the nature of his death; he died in a hospital, not in a prison cell. “He’s got away with it,” she states, a sentiment that speaks less to a desire for vengeance and more to a desperate need for a definitive, external affirmation of her suffering and his culpability. This unresolved justice has severely impacted her mental health, plunging her into a state of persistent fear, flashbacks, and a crushing loneliness that makes being by herself unbearable.
The nightmare that haunts Lynn began on June 27 of last year, a day that started with a tragic misreading of a moment’s humanity. As Twells visited her home, Lynn, seeing a familiar kindness in his face, moved to hug him. In that instant, he plunged a knife into her neck. What followed was a frantic and brutal struggle for survival through the rooms of her house. As she retreated, Twells chased her, grabbing her hair and repeatedly attempting to stab her again while uttering the chilling words, “die *****, you’ve got to go.” In a desperate act of self-preservation, Lynn reached for the blade itself, slicing her hand open but momentarily stopping its deadly path. Her screams, she recalls, were sounds she never knew she could make—a raw, primal response to the immediacy of her mortality. In the corner of that room, with her attacker upon her, Lynn’s thoughts crystallized into a terrifying certainty: “I’m going to die here.”
The attack was interspersed with moments of psychological torture, as Twells threatened to kill Lynn’s dog, further amplifying her terror. In a bizarre and violent shift, he eventually walked away and deliberately slashed his own arm. This brief, seemingly calmer interlude allowed Lynn to retrieve the knife and place it on a kitchen drainboard. Yet, as she attempted to call her daughter Kayleigh for help, the violence erupted once more, with Twells seizing the blade back and forcing her into another struggle that ended with the knife embedded in her hand. It was her daughter, Kayleigh, then 30, who became her savior, arriving home to the horrific scene of her mother bleeding profusely from the neck. The two women fled to a neighbor’s garden, too terrified to re-enter the house where Twells remained. There, Lynn made the grim decision to pull the knife from her own hand as they awaited emergency services.
Lynn’s fight for life continued in the ambulance and at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. The medical battle was touch-and-go; during efforts to transfuse blood, doctors accidentally dislodged a critical clot. Rushed into emergency surgery, Lynn was acutely aware of the gravity of the situation, even saying goodbye to her family as she was wheeled to the operating theatre. Doctors later delivered the staggering news that had she lost just another 300 millilitres of blood—roughly the volume of a small soda can—she would have died. The physical scars remain: a lack of feeling in her thumb, a significant cut on her hand, and the need for annual thyroid checks due to the neck wound. Yet, these are stark reminders of a survival that feels, in the wake of Twells’s death, painfully incomplete.
The court heard that Twells, claiming to be suicidal, said he was commanded by an imaginary woman named “Jenny” to not take his own life without also taking Lynn’s. This disturbing detail adds a layer of unsettling psychosis to the crime but does nothing to alleviate Lynn’s suffering. For her, the legal process was the final, necessary chapter in a story of profound trauma. Its abrupt, anticlimactic end has denied her that resolution, leaving her in a suspended state of grief and terror. Her story is a stark reminder that justice is not merely a verdict, but a process, and when that process is truncated, the victim can be left bearing a unique and isolating weight. Lynn Carrington survived the knife, but now faces the longer, more complex struggle of living without the closure she needed to truly begin healing.
