Delia Balmer is rarely lost for words in true crime drama Until I Kill You. The Canadian-Australian nurse with the continent-wandering accent knows her mind and speaks it, often to the discomfort of people around her.
In one scene of the four-parter though, Balmer is silenced and not by fear: she’s just come from a mental health assessment designed to judge whether she should be compelled, as her ex-boyfriend, rapist and attempted murderer John Sweeney has requested, to give in-person evidence against him instead of a video statement. During the assessment, Balmer is brittle and recalcitrant. She complies, but with resentment and sarcasm. As played by Anna Maxwell-Martin (Ludwig, Motherland) whose performance was based on interviews between Balmer and Until I Kill You writer Nick Stevens, the impression that she makes here and elsewhere doesn’t endear her.
Balmer expects no help from the psychiatrist, and so is stunned when he recognises her intense suffering. Instead of following some of his police colleagues’ suit and taking Delia’s hostility as evidence of her unreliable and tricky character, the psychiatrist rules that under no circumstances should she be compelled to attend court at the behest of the man who raped, savagely beat and stabbed her. 15 years after it had released Sweeney on bail, thereby enabling the attempted murder Balmer had warned would happen, the law finally protected her.
Sweeney, played by Endeavour and Vigil’s Shaun Evans, wanted Balmer to give in-person evidence because he sadistically enjoyed her distress on the stand and knew that it would work in his favour. Balmer’s rage and exasperation was unlikely to charm a jury. Her forthrightness and the matter-of-fact approach to the human body gained through her nursing expertise, were off-puttingly blunt. Her alcohol-quelled anxiety at a previous trial made her unpredictable. She was the very thing women of her generation weren’t socialised to be – loud, angry, direct, voicing her distress, and devoting no energy to making other people feel at ease.
Balmer might well have been stunned by the law finally listening to her. As the drama tells it, she was ignored, patronised, fobbed off, asked imbecilic questions (‘if your mind had shut down while you were tied to the bed and raped, how do you know that you didn’t consent?’), and forced to act against her will by the police. Years before Sweeney was charged with the 1990 murder of Melissa Halstead in Amsterdam, Balmer relayed his confession and offered the police Sweeney’s crime-referencing drawings as evidence. The drawings weren’t filed and nothing happened over for a decade, during which time Sweeney killed another of his girlfriends Paula Fields.
If Delia had presented as a different kind of victim, would she have been more believed, asks Until I Kill You. She was already educated, employed, articulate and not a criminal, thereby ticking some of the many boxes required for a so-called ‘perfect victim’, but if she’d been a less confrontational woman, who was easier to get along with, and less filled with rage, would she have been listened to more?
That’s the twisted paradox presented by Nick Stevens and director Julia Ford’s drama: the more a victim is shaped by suffering, the less sympathy they get. Because Delia Balmer’s response to the pain she suffered at the hands of John Sweeney was anger and protest instead of passivity and gratitude, she was viewed as part of the problem. She drank to self-medicate, which made her seem unreliable. The righteous rage that arose as a result of how badly she was treated led to more bad treatment. Illogically that’s the Catch-22 Balmer and others like her are trapped by: the more traumatised they are by their experiences, they harder they find it to prove and get justice for those very experiences.
Based on Balmer’s memoir, Until I Kill You pivots on Maxwell-Martin’s spiky central performance. It’s staggering work that digs down to reveal the foundation of pain beneath the outward behaviour. We meet a complex, recognisable woman who was deeply injured, both physically and mentally, but who is nonetheless capable of extreme resilience and kindness. Most emotionally striking across the four episodes is Balmer’s isolation, and ultimately, her strength. As she tells her police liaison officer, her attitude to serial killer John Sweeney is “Fuck him”. The drama shows Balmer being sustained by the anger that pushed people, and perhaps justice, away for so long, and invites us to feel it alongside her.
Until I Kill You is streaming now on ITVX.
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