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There was a moment in the summer of 2022 when 26-year-old Cherrie-Ann Austin-Saddington, a female prison officer in a men’s jail, had to make a choice. She was on her wing at HMP The Verne in Dorset, in the day room where inmates go to read books and newspapers, when a prisoner called Bradley Trengrove handed her a magazine. Concealed within its pages was a slip of paper with a number written on it – the number of his secret, illicit mobile phone. Under the watchful eye of the prison’s security cameras, Austin-Saddington had to decide what to do next.
“I was thinking, do I report it? Do I not report it?” she says. “I wasn’t thinking, I’ll text him – that wasn’t in my head.” But she did not throw the piece of paper away. She kept it, and in the end decided not to report anything.
It was the first in a series of catastrophic choices that would lead Austin-Saddington to a sexual relationship with Trengrove, and transform her from a prison officer into a convicted criminal, in line for a custodial sentence of her own. It’s a decision she says she will regret for the rest of her life. The story of how she came to make it reveals much about Austin-Saddington. But it tells us even more about the state of our prison system, the worrying flaws in how staff are recruited and managed, and how failures in its duty of care to prisoners and staff are undermining the course of justice.
Austin-Saddington is one of dozens of prison officers in recent years to enter into sexual relationships with the inmates they were supposed to be guarding. In response to a freedom of information request, the Ministry of Justice told me 64 prison staff have been recommended for dismissal because of inappropriate relationships with prisoners between 31 March 2019 and 1 April 2024. This is likely to be a fraction of the true number. It does not include those who resigned before they could be sacked, those who were not members of staff (such as employees of the NHS and other organisations who work in prisons) and, of course, those who were never caught. This phenomenon goes far beyond the bad judgment of a few individuals – it shows there is a systemic problem within the Prison Service.
Overwhelmingly, it’s female former prison officers who have had relationships with male prisoners who are facing criminal charges. In May, Austin-Saddington became one of at least 10 women in the past year alone to be convicted of misconduct in public office for this reason. Linda de Sousa Abreu was sentenced to 15 months in prison in January, after a clip of her having sex with an inmate at HMP Wandsworth went viral. Morgan Farr Varney was sentenced to 10 months in May after she was captured on CCTV going into a cupboard with a prisoner at HMP Lindholme. Toni Cole and Aimee Duke worked at HMP Five Wells in Northamptonshire at the same time; they were both sentenced to 12 months earlier this year following their relationships with two different prisoners. Katie Evans was barely 21 when she began her affair with an inmate; she received a 21-month sentence in March. Kerri Pegg, former governor of HMP Kirkham, was sentenced to nine years in May following her relationship with a notorious drug trafficker.
In this crowded field, Austin-Saddington’s story stands out. She knew Trengrove was a convicted sex offender when she embarked on her affair with him. She was arrested in May 2023 after she was caught trying to smuggle a Calpol syringe to him, which he wanted her to use to inseminate herself with his sperm. And in February 2024 – nine months after their relationship ended and more than a year before her case came to court – she suffered a spinal stroke that left her paralysed from the chest down. That was the reason why the judge chose to suspend her two-year sentence.
“I know I didn’t get prison time, but I am locked inside my body for the rest of my life,” Austin-Saddington, now 29, tells me from her wheelchair at her home in Weymouth.
Misconduct in public office is a serious offence – one to which Austin-Saddington pleaded guilty. She is a convicted criminal, and the story she tells me over the three hours I spend with her should be understood in that context. But it is about much more than sex. It reveals how some of the most dangerous men in the country are able to get what they want, even behind bars, by gaining control over the staff who hold the keys to their cells.
“Working in the job, you hear all these stories about people having relationships with prisoners. You think, that’s awful. God, how can they do that? I never thought I’d be that person. And I was.” Her eyes brim with tears. “I feel like a massive fuck-up. I can’t hide away from it – it happened. How did I let that happen to me?”
Prisons had always intrigued Austin-Saddington. She knew someone who was in and out of jail while she was growing up. She was too young to visit him, but he would write to her, describing the harsh treatment he received at the hands of prison staff. “I was curious to see what it was like inside,” she says. “I wanted to help. I wanted to go in and make a difference.”
Austin-Saddington’s childhood ended early. She gave birth to a daughter and became a single mother at 16; she missed out on a lot of secondary school, she says. There was a year of college, followed by four years of working in social care, helping people in their homes. “I really enjoyed it,” she nods. “I like to make other people happy. Even though it was such hard work, it was rewarding just to know at the end of the day that you’d helped somebody.” But she quit in 2018, when she became pregnant with twins with a new partner at 22; she was too unwell during the pregnancy to continue caring for other people. “I had a long gap to think about what I wanted to do with my life.” That’s when she saw the online ad for the prison officer’s job. “At the time of applying, I was very confident. I wanted to find a career for myself, to better myself for my family.”
She had to attend an in-person assessment day, where her maths, English and physical fitness were tested, and there was role play. “There were three rooms and inside each was a different actor, playing a prisoner with a situation that needed solving. Two got up and were quite aggressive. You had to calm the situation down.” There were online personality tests and assessments of how quickly she could count the number of people in a picture. The process seemed designed to identify candidates who could take an accurate headcount and de-escalate aggressive situations.
The job offer came within a few weeks: Austin-Saddington was going to be paid around £1,800 a month to work long, irregular hours, including nights and weekends, beginning in July 2019, when she was 23. She was never officially informed that she was going to be working in a prison for sex offenders; she only found out from friends who recognised the name when she told them about her new job.
The Verne, a Category C men’s jail five miles south of Weymouth, is not a typical prison. A third of inmates are over 60; Gary Glitter served part of his sentence here. “It was a completely different experience to what I was expecting,” Austin-Saddington says. “It wasn’t a violent prison. The staff didn’t have anything to do. There was lots of gossiping, lots of politics among them.” Her idealism quickly evaporated. She realised many of her fellow prison officers had favourites – and inmates they didn’t like. When she tried to do her job – finding out information for a prisoner, for example – she found herself being redirected from person to person. “It was like banging your head against a brick wall.”
Two weeks into her job – and more than two years before she was to meet Trengrove – Austin-Saddington discovered that a prisoner on her wing with a history of poor mental health and self-harm had been hurting himself. “He’d been punching the door, and his hand was quite infected.” She says the more experienced staff working with her made it clear that they didn’t like him; they told her to ignore him. She went above their heads and spoke to the custodial manager, and the inmate was put on a care plan. After that, he began to gravitate towards her. It seemed innocent enough to Austin-Saddington: he wanted to thank her for her help, or tell her if he’d been having a bad day. They’d talk in an office on her wing. It wasn’t unusual for her colleagues to talk to prisoners in the offices, she says, but most of her fellow prison officers were male. Within days, she was called in to see the security governor – responsible for ensuring a safe environment for staff and prisoners – and told a colleague had claimed an inappropriate relationship was forming between Austin-Saddington and the inmate. She was moved to another wing, and her probation period was extended.
Austin-Saddington was sanctioned, but says she wasn’t given any feedback or advice about what kinds of interactions were inappropriate. There had been on-the-job training when she arrived at The Verne, with more role play involving high-conflict, high-pressure situations, but the prisoners she was guarding were not aggressive. “You get a false sense of security at The Verne, because they are very respectful. You forget they are also very dangerous and very manipulative people.”
During the early weeks of training, Austin-Saddington was warned that she would be committing a crime if she had an inappropriate relationship with a prisoner. She was told about how these relationships can begin, with prisoners testing boundaries. “They pick the target, then they try to get close. They ask you to do little things that then build up to bigger things,” she remembers being told. But at the time it felt like just another set of facts to absorb, along with the meanings of the different radio call signs. “You don’t ever think you’re going to be in that situation. I didn’t think a prisoner would ever be able to manipulate me.”
When Bradley Trengrove was transferred to The Verne in January 2022, Austin-Saddington’s life was in disarray. She was homeless, sharing a single room in a B&B with her three young children. She’d recently escaped from a relationship she says was abusive; she had used her holiday allocation to get her jaw repaired after she’d been thrown to the ground in the street. The council placed her in temporary accommodation next to a drug rehabilitation centre, and when she left for work dressed in her uniform, she would be spat at. It was an effort simply to get through each day.
Trengrove had already been at The Verne for months before she even noticed him. She was doing patrols at a workshop where inmates learn bricklaying, checking the headcount. As she walked out of the workshop, he shouted after her; he wanted to borrow a copy of Farmers Weekly and he’d been told that she could get it for him. There was nothing unusual about that kind of request, she says – inmates often sought her out when they wanted things. She found the magazine on her wing and left it in Trengrove’s post slot.
Then she began to see him everywhere. Whenever she’d set off to do the post run, or help with searches, he would appear. “I’d come out the door and he’d stand in the pathway as I’m walking past. He’d be like, ‘All right, Miss? Thanks for the magazine. Everything all right?’ It started like that.”
He was popular with the other prison officers. “He’d come to the office door and start making jokes.” Sometimes, he’d talk about the other prisoners. “He’d say, ‘Oh, they’re all wrong ’uns in here.’” He knew how to get people to like him, she says, how to make people look at him differently.
Three or four weeks after he borrowed the magazine, he returned it to Austin-Saddington in person, with his phone number hidden inside it. He also asked her to kiss him. She told him to get away from her, and he did: he left her in the reading room, deciding what to do next. “I was shaken. I didn’t know who to trust.” Her mind went back to getting in trouble during her first weeks at The Verne. “If I report it, I thought, are people going to accuse me of something else going on?”
She decided to just try to keep her distance from Trengrove. “Then I thought, it’s no biggie. He hasn’t attempted anything since then. Maybe it was some sort of joke. Maybe he didn’t mean it. Maybe somebody’s trying to set me up.”
For a month, nothing much happened. One of Trengrove’s friends started messaging Austin-Saddington on Facebook, begging her to text Trengrove’s number. Trying to avoid him was futile. “Every time I stepped out, he was there.” And then Trengrove shared some gossip he’d been told about her: Austin-Saddington had had a brief relationship with one of the other prison officers, and Trengrove knew all about it. “He said the officer was telling him about what positions he’d put me in, being really derogatory.”
She was devastated. “That’s a really private thing. It was outside of work, and it wasn’t really anything. It was so inappropriate for [the officer] to be telling prisoners about it. He must have said something, otherwise how would Bradley know? Obviously, I can’t trust staff. I just felt so isolated.” Trengrove told her the officer was an arsehole, and she should forget about it. “I was angry and upset, and Bradley comforted me. It was after that that we started texting each other.”
It was one or two texts a day, at first, she says; they would bitch together about the officer who had broken her trust. “Then it turned into talking about how my day was. He’d message me and say, ‘I saw you at work earlier. You looked nice.’” Trengrove got his mother, brother and grandmother to contact her. “It was like I’d gained a family of support,” she says. “And then, a couple of months in, he said, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’”
Of course, Austin-Saddington knew Trengrove was a convicted sex offender. But people served time at The Verne for a range of offences, she points out. “Sometimes it’s really huge crimes. Sometimes it’s – I don’t want to say minor, because I don’t want to diminish the importance of it – but they weren’t as severe,” she says, carefully. The computer system she had access to showed only the length of an inmate’s sentence and the main offence they were serving time for. She knew Trengrove had been found guilty of rape. But he told her it was because he’d had a relationship when he was 15 with a girl who was six months younger than him; he had cheated on her and, when he turned 16, she’d reported him. “He was saying, ‘She stitched me up.’”
It’s a shame Austin-Saddington didn’t Google Trengrove. I found an article published in 2015 that details how he was described as “exceptionally dangerous” when he was sentenced to 13 years in 2015 for “repeatedly raping a teenage girl” and having sexual activity with a child. The article reveals that twenty other women came forward alleging he had assaulted them following his conviction.
“After all this happened, the police showed me his convictions. I just couldn’t believe it. I felt sick,” Austin-Saddington continues. “At the time, his explanation sounded absolutely plausible. I just took every word as gospel rather than thinking, hang on a minute, Cherrie, these are the moves – this is how it starts. At the time, all I could think was, I’ve got somebody here that’s giving me the attention and support I need right now.”
He told her he was going to be out in three months – another lie. When I ask why she didn’t check his conditional release date, she winces. “I don’t know why. I was blinded.” A few weeks after he told her he loved her, their relationship became physical.
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They would get together in the space where vocational workshops took place. Trengrove had been given a job as a general handyman, which came with privileges: he had the freedom to walk around the workshop area without anyone questioning why he was there. “He’d nod at me if it was quiet down there. We’d find somewhere where there was no one around.” There were cameras, “but they don’t cover everything. Sometimes they don’t work. It’s quite an old prison.”
Trengrove would later claim they had sex 30 to 40 times. A wild exaggeration, Austin-Saddington says. “I think it was maybe four or five times in total. We were together for a number of hours each time – two and a half maybe – and we’d sit and talk, get physical, then carry on talking again.” The logistics of finding an opportunity without anyone getting suspicious meant it couldn’t happen very often, she insists.
When I ask if it felt exciting, Austin-Saddington winces again. “Yeah, I think so. But at the same time it made me feel sick. It was nerve-racking.” It must have been flattering to have all this attention, I say. “I think so,” she replies again. “I’ve had a lot happen to me in younger life that’s skewed my way of thinking. I’ve been sexually assaulted on quite a few occasions. I feel like I have to give my person everything because I’m not enough.” Most of the time, the sex was “quite aggressive”. At one point, Trengrove removed her contraceptive IUD from inside her. “I just said yes to everything.”
After a couple of months, Trengrove’s phone broke. “He turned suicidal. He said that if he wasn’t able to speak with me, he was going to start kicking off, smashing things up, he was going to do something to hurt himself.” Austin-Saddington would have felt responsible if he’d harmed himself, or anyone else, she tells me. So she smuggled a phone in for him.
During her trial, it emerged she had stored his number in her phone as “Husband to Be”. She looks mortified when I bring this up. “It’s ridiculous.” But it made sense, at the time. She had begun meeting up with his family; she’d become close with his mum. He told her he had bought a plot of land and some building materials. He had printed off pictures of the kind of place he was going to build for them to live in with her kids. “He was presenting me with a future. He gave me hope.”
The third time they had sex, Austin-Saddington says, she became pregnant. She took the positive test in to show Trengrove. “Part of me was happy, but at the same I time I didn’t know what to do with myself.” He was delighted. His mother told Austin-Saddington she was officially part of the family. But a couple of weeks later, she lost the baby. The miscarriage was hard enough, but she also had to deal with Trengrove’s frustration. “Bradley was fixated on having a child,” she says. He told her he couldn’t wait until he was released – he wanted a baby now; she should be making more time to come and see him. Austin-Saddington had been a keen amateur boxer, winning regional titles. Trengrove told her that had to stop. “He said, ‘You need to stop boxing. You can’t try to have a baby and box at the same time.’”
Trengrove became increasingly controlling. “I was in the wrong for everything. I needed to be punished for everything.” If she missed a call from him, he would cross-examine her. “He’d have to be on the phone to me from the minute I walked out of the prison gates and got in my car until I’d fallen asleep. Sometimes I would have to wait until he allowed me to go to bed.” She felt like she had to obey him; he could hurt himself or other people if she angered him, he could report her and ruin her life. Even though he was behind bars, he seemed to have all the power.
I ask if she thought about quitting. “Lots of times,” she nods. “He convinced me that if I quit, he wouldn’t be able to cope. Then there was the income for the kids – and the fact that I’d just moved into a new flat and taken on a tenancy. I felt trapped.”
In March 2023, seven months into their relationship, Trengrove’s cell was searched and his phone was found. He hadn’t bothered with a nickname for Austin-Saddington; all her messages discussing their physical relationship in explicit detail where there for all to see, under her full name. He was immediately moved to HMP Channings Wood, a two-hour drive away. Austin-Saddington heard about the transfer from Trengrove’s mother and handed in her resignation the same day. When she went into The Verne to return her key chains and uniform, several senior managers approached her at the gate. Wait for further contact, they said, someone would soon be in touch.
It was the end of her career in the Prison Service, but her relationship with Trengrove continued. Using his mother as a go-between, he begged Austin-Saddington to go and see him in his new prison. Channings Wood would never have allowed her name on the list of visitors or approved people to call from the prison phone, so Trengrove told her she had to change her name by deed poll, which she did. Such was the extent of the control he was able to exert over her, even from his cell.
The first time she drove from Weymouth to Channings Wood – with Trengrove on speakerphone all the way – her car broke down. She suddenly had a moment of clarity. “I thought, what am I doing? Why am I doing this?” But five minutes later she was waving a car down so she could hitchhike the rest of the way to the prison. Trengrove seemed delighted to see her. “But he would slip in little digs about my appearance. Tiny things. ‘I’d prefer your hair to be a different colour’ or, ‘You should wear makeup – you don’t look right without it.’” Austin-Saddington was now making her living teaching boxing and was in the shape of her life, but he made comments about her belly. “‘Look at you – you’re getting fat.’” Still, she went back, even bringing his grandmother to see him once. “A lot of people would say I was crazy in love with him. I’d say that he was the only bit of support in my life and I clung on to it.”
Before her fourth visit, in May 2023, Trengrove told her to bring the Calpol syringe with her. “He wanted me to inseminate myself. I said, ‘I’ll do whatever you say.’ I didn’t actually plan to use it.” When she arrived at Channings Wood, something didn’t feel right. Each visitor was being carefully searched by a senior officer; when Austin-Saddington arrived at the front of the queue, she was immediately taken into a side room, where five officers were waiting – both prison staff and police. They asked whether she had anything on her. She told them about the syringe hidden in her bra. She was then told she was under arrest, on suspicion of misconduct in a public office.
This still wasn’t enough to end their relationship. It continued for another two weeks, with Austin-Saddington ever more dependent on Trengrove’s family for support and now receiving legal advice from his solicitor. But once the police visited her at home and showed her Trengrove’s rap sheet, she knew it had to end. She told his mother to tell Trengrove she no longer wanted anything to do with him.
“He was still finding ways to contact me through his friends, friends’ girlfriends, through random people’s numbers,” she says. She got a message from his mother saying he had tried to kill himself. Then, in early 2024, she received a bloodstained letter. “It was 10 pages of him saying he can’t live without me, that I can’t leave him, that he will find me.”
Austin-Saddington shared every message with the police, her new solicitor and social services. She was keen to demonstrate that she was now doing the right thing: someone had reported her to social services shortly after she was arrested; she says she has not seen her twins, now six, since that day in 2023.
Two months after her arrest, Austin-Saddington began a new relationship with the tattoo artist she’d hired to ink a sleeve down her right arm, a man called Jonny. They married in November 2024, eight months after her stroke. Jonny is now her carer. He has been keeping their puppy quiet in the bedroom next door while she tells me her story.
Spinal strokes – where blood flow to the spinal cord is interrupted – are rare, particularly for young, healthy people. The reason for Austin-Saddington’s stroke is still a mystery. She has no memory of it happening. Jonny came around to her flat late one Saturday evening and found her on the floor, unable to move. She was in a coma for nine days. She can now wiggle the toes on her right foot, but her doctors have told her not to expect much more improvement.
Austin-Saddington was relieved to have her prison sentence suspended. But the news reporting around her trial means she is living with a sentence of another kind, one she did not anticipate. “My eldest daughter saw it all, which was really difficult. It was very hard for her at school, and that made me feel awful.” She breaks down again. “People I’m friends with – people I’ve known for years – were sharing the story around, saying, ‘What a vile human being.’ Me and Jonny were getting messages all the time. I felt like I just wanted to get in my bed for the rest of my life and never leave it.”
The female former prisoner officers convicted over the last 12 months were recruited to work in a service stretched to the limit, at a time when low wages were the norm. It was their responsibility to maintain physical and emotional boundaries between themselves and the prisoners they guarded, but they were unable to do so. They were either the wrong people for the job, or inappropriately managed, or both. There have been so many cases like Austin-Saddington’s over recent months that British psychologists have begun to study sexual boundary violation in the prison and probation services as a specific phenomenon. In a recent article on the subject, the psychologists Tanya Garrett and Rosie Gray wrote, “We have seen concerning cases of young female staff who become emotionally/sexually involved with male prisoners, often convicted for serious offences, who appear to have inverted the power relationship, then used this power for their own gain.”
“People don’t understand the job,” Austin-Saddington says simply. “They are desperate for work so they’ll take anything. Prisons are so short of staff that I don’t think enough attention is paid to the staff they’ve got.” For short periods, Austin-Saddington was drafted in to provide emergency support to cover staff shortages at HMP Portland and HMP Bristol, where she said female officers were even more exposed than at The Verne; twice, when she was at Portland, she says two different inmates tried to grab her and pull her into their cells. “In situations like that, you need to feel you’ve got your team to back you up. And when you’ve got problems at home, you need to have time off, because it’s very easy for things to go wrong if you’re not in the right frame of mind. Not just relationships, but other things, too – doors being left unlocked.”
Part of Austin-Saddington’s sentence required her to undergo 25 days of rehabilitation; she has been spending them having therapy with the Sexual Trauma and Recovery Service, and working with the domestic abuse organisation Refuge. Her contact there has suggested Austin-Saddington becomes a mediator, helping other victims of domestic abuse. Her face brightens when she tells me this. “I’m really excited about that because it gives me something to give back. I do feel like I still need to give back.”
The relationship with Trengrove has left Austin-Saddington racked with shame and guilt. It happened at a time when she was young, naive and desperately in need of support. Her story follows a pattern that will be familiar to anyone who has studied the warning signs of coercive control. But she still blames herself for allowing it to happen.
It is unusual for prisoners to be prosecuted for encouraging misconduct in public office. But after reading Trengrove’s messages to Austin-Saddington, the Crown Prosecution Service determined that he, too, should go on trial. Trengrove was also found guilty and received another two years and three months to serve on top of his 13-year sentence. In his ruling, the judge said, “This was a relationship of equal halves, both making the wrong decision.”
“I agree and I disagree,” Austin-Saddington says when I put this to her. “I am equally guilty. But now I’ve had time to reflect – being in a wheelchair, I’m sitting around a lot – I do think I was very vulnerable. He did take advantage of me. He knew what he was doing.”
I ask if she thinks he groomed her. She lowers her eyes, as if considering what to do with this opportunity to absolve herself a little. “Yes,” she eventually replies, “there was a lot of pursuing there. But equally, I did wrong. It’s all well and good saying that he groomed me, but I also take responsibility.”
When Austin-Saddington heard that Trengrove’s sentence had been extended, she felt guilty at first. “I thought it wasn’t fair – he’s getting a longer sentence, and I’ve had mine suspended, that’s not equal,” she says. “But then later on, when I thought about it, I was glad. I know what kind of man he is. He’s an extremely dangerous man.”
