Not a Suicide: The Exposing of Jonathan Cresswell and the Murder of Katie Simpson

A young showjumper is found on a landing. The first form calls it non-suspicious. Months later, small marks, mixed timings, and a single line in a nurse’s note refuse to let the story rest.
Not a Suicide: The Exposing of Jonathan Cresswell and the Murder of Katie Simpson is a forensic, human account of how an ordinary night was read too quickly and then read again. You will walk the first sixty seconds with responders, see what was touched and what was missed, and watch how one word in early paperwork shaped everything that followed. You will meet the nurse who said this does not sit right, the friends who compared phones and diaries, and the officer who wrote start again on a whiteboard and did.
Built from lawful records, interviews, and careful re-examination, this book shows how coercive control arrives as care, how a tidy room can be staged, and how delay is never neutral. It follows the reopening, the courtroom, and the sudden halt when proceedings ended without a verdict. It explains what justice can still look like in practice: better first-night wording, daylight photography with scale, and safeguarding that acts on clinical doubt. At its heart is Katie’s life and work, set down plainly and with respect.
If you read true crime to understand what went wrong and how to make it right, this is for you. If you work on the front line and want details you can use tomorrow, you will find them here. If you are a friend looking for signs you can recognise, you will leave with a checklist you can hold in your head.
Read it for the truth that survived, the lessons that now sit in policy, and the promise to keep Katie at the center. Then share it with someone who makes decisions in the first hour.