“How can I be Britain’s most evil mother?” Lisa Hayden-Johnson asks in the new Channel 4 documentary series, Love You to Death. It is a rhetorical question; she is not really interested in the answer. “I just did my best,” she responds instead. Over three episodes, Love You to Death unfurls a troubling story of control, abuse, narcissism, delusion and, ultimately, denial.
When Matthew Hayden-Johnson was born prematurely in 2001, his mother Lisa was, understandably, concerned. These concerns turned into a nightmare: Matthew suffered from a range of debilitating intolerances, as well as conditions like diabetes and cystic fibrosis, and needed a stroller to help him walk, earning him the nickname “buggy boy”. But his resilience proved inspiring. He won a Pride of Britain award and met Tony Blair at Downing Street. “We got to do so much that a normal family wouldn’t have got the opportunity to do,” Matthew’s sister, Laura, reflects now. There was just one problem. When doctors looked more closely at Matthew, they couldn’t find evidence that he had any significant medical issues. In fact, it seemed increasingly likely that his doting mother, Lisa, had fabricated everything, endangering her son’s life with invasive medical procedures.
The three-part documentary series, directed by Sophie Robinson, is upfront about its subject. “I’ll answer anything that you can possibly throw at me,” Lisa announces defiantly, as she sits for an interview (though she declines to appear on screen, citing privacy issues). Her daughter Laura, who believes her mother is guilty of Munchausen by proxy (an outdated clinical term which has been replaced by “fabricated or induced illness” or FII), also appears as a talking head, as does Matthew himself. It is a real coup to have these key players – both perpetrator and victims – sit for extensive interviews, allowing Love You to Death to tell the full story and reflect on both ends of the abuse. In a world swimming with mediocre true crime, this should be a clear differentiator. And yet, Love You to Death stumbles from the off.
Munchausen by proxy, as it was, has become a subject of fascination in recent years, especially on the internet. Perhaps this is because it inverts the traditional dynamics of violent crime, where the destruction is caused by hatred. Here, the damage is done with an apparent abundance of love. It is also a crime overwhelmingly perpetrated by women, which offers a break from the relentless misogyny of serial killers. As such, it has served as a plot device in numerous film and TV projects: Sharp Objects, Ma, Run, A Haunting in Venice. In fact, there has already been a movie called Love You to Death, which came out in 2019 and starred Marcia Gay Harden, which dramatised the notorious case of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, who conspired to murder her own controlling mother. On top of all that, the BBC earlier this summer released The Mother of All Cons, a similar FII case, albeit one with far more twists and turns.
Where Love You to Death might have offered something novel was in the juxtaposition of Lisa’s reflections and those of her children. Yet Lisa is a profoundly unreliable narrator, apparently totally unable to grapple with her crimes (though she concedes on some points, such as a fabricated sexual assault allegation). “The only thing I was guilty of is putting my son first,” is her ultimate opinion. Given Lisa was jailed for more than three years for child cruelty and perverting the course of justice, the story of her own innocence has clearly calcified in her mind. Her daughter, Laura, is more introspective. She believes that she was her mother’s “test subject” before Matthew was born, something that Lisa denies and the documentary cannot bear out. The series also rather hastily exonerates the father (“He didn’t really know what was going on,” a police officer says, “some fathers have never changed a nappy”) and does little to interrogate the myriad failings within the health service that allowed Lisa to fictionalise her son’s conditions.
The series does make some bold creative choices – such as restaging events from Laura’s childhood, and having a spectral present-day version watch over – but they don’t really pay off. The problem is that we have been spoiled by truly wild FII cases, like that in The Mother of All Cons or the Blanchard affair, so the Hayden-Johnsons’ story feels more limited. Child abuse is so endemic, so pervasive, that seeing Matthew appear, a well-adjusted 25-year-old, is both a relief and a reminder that most victims are not so lucky. (Why exactly the series is called Love You to Death is never properly explored).
True-crime documentaries are engaged in a race to the bottom, and, frankly, Love You to Death is short on shocks. Instead, it is a portrait of a woman who cannot accept the truth. “The truth is really a social contract between us all,” a child psychologist, Freda Gardner, judges. Viewers will find Lisa repulsive and delusional, but her testimony adds little to a story that was, perhaps, better left in the past. After all, her crime was a self-serving one. She wanted to meet celebrities and get free holidays, appear on Good Morning Britain and get front row tickets to The X-Factor. Rather than adding something new to our obsession with Munchausen by proxy, Love You to Death runs the risk of further indulging Lisa’s desire for the limelight.