Closure for Carrie: How Caroline Flack’s Mum is Still Fighting for Truth Four Years After Her Death

On 15 February, the family of Caroline Flack sat together on a bench memorial in their local woods, raised a glass, and held her in their hearts and thoughts. Four years ago, the television star – one of the most recognisable faces and admired personalities in British entertainment – took her own life at the age of 40.

“We just go to her bench in the woodlands,” her mum Christine explains quietly to Byline Times. “We meet there each year – Lizzie, my eldest daughter, and Jody, Carrie’s twin, and Paul, her brother, come. “This year we took a bottle of wine to toast her, and had McDonald’s because that’s what Carrie would have had. And we usually end up smiling, really. She did some funny things. She was always so funny.”

For those who knew ‘Carrie’ best, it’s been four years of heartbreak, grief, and an open-ended search for understanding and acceptance. It’s also been a quest for answers from a police and justice system the Flacks feel failed her.

They are a close-knit bunch. Chris lives with her partner Nigel and Caroline’s strapping grey Scottish fold cat Waffle in a neat white-washed apartment in a Georgian conversion in Norwich. Jody and her family are based nearby. Chris adores her grandchildren. They’re in and out of each other’s lives daily. Her home is decorated with reminders of happier moments – framed magazine covers and photos celebrating Caroline’s many remarkable achievements; winning Strictly Come Dancing; collecting a Bafta for Love Island; being Cosmo’s Celebrity Influencer of the Year 2018. 

It was here, amid such great memories, that Chris took a call on 15 February, 2020, that changed everything. It was Jody. She had just found her sister.

No Way Back

Caroline Flack’s emotional struggles were long-known to her inner circle as well as many in the tabloid media and at her employer ITV. For five years she had presented the channel’s top-rating show Love Island; her bubbly kindness and relatable girl-next-door glamour a hit with millions of viewers.

But behind the confident public persona Caroline’s mental health fluctuated. She was deeply sensitive to online negativity, and obsessed over disparaging remarks on social media – “There could be 30 nice things said, one bad thing said, and that was it,” Christine says – to the point of depression.

So when, two months earlier, a domestic incident with her then-boyfriend – Lewis Burton, a tennis coach and model –  snowballed into a career-threatening court drama, it was a cause for deep concern.

Caroline’s greatest fear was always that her mental health challenges – for her a source of unspeakable shame and anxiety – would become public knowledge. To lose control of this deeply personal information, in the glare of a tabloid media with which she had long-endured an often abusive relationship, was devastating.

The facts of Caroline’s criminal case were established by Mary Hassell, the Coroner investigating her death, in August 2020. In the early hours of 12 December 2019, following nights out separately in which both had been drinking, Caroline and Lewis Burton returned together in cabs to her flat in Stoke Newington, east London.

The couple had gone to bed and Burton was asleep when his phone lit up with a message from a woman. Caroline picked up the device, holding her own phone in her other hand. She wanted to confront her boyfriend about it. Some “choice words” were used, says Chris.