Trudi Burgess had been in intensive care for less than 48 hours when she had a dream that inspired her to live.
Paralysed from the chest down by her partner, Robert Easom, in an act of unimaginable violence, she was afraid and facing a very dark future.
But in her sleep, the 57-year-old was transported back more than 20 years to a beautiful ‘Garden of Eden’, where her late husband, Craig, and their two small children, Gina and Jackson, were laughing and playing by her side.
‘It seemed heavenly, I was so happy,’ she says. ‘I was fully able and striding through this absolutely beautiful garden.
‘I remember waking up and confusing the sunlight of the dream with the bright lights of the intensive care unit.
‘Although that was one of the worst moments of my life – waking up to the worst version of reality you can imagine – that dream made me realise there is beauty in life, there is that beauty for my children and their children, and you can find those moments.’
That worst version of reality – a fractured and dislocated spine – had been inflicted on Trudi by Easom, 56, a few days earlier, on February 17 this year.
Using his bare hands, the landscape gardener had pushed down so hard on her head that he broke her neck after she told him she had finally had enough of his abusive and controlling ways, and was leaving him.
A smiling Trudi Burgess, 57, pictured at Southport Hospital’s Spinal Care Centre in Lancashire
This week, a jury, sitting at Preston Crown Court, took just 27 minutes to convict Easom of deliberately and intentionally causing her grievous bodily harm.
Trudi felt ‘vindicated’ by the jury’s decision but what they didn’t know, and what could only be revealed once their verdict was in, was that the attack was the culmination of almost seven years of unpredictable, violent behaviour from Easom, whose sudden rages, Trudi says, turned a once charismatic and kind man into a beast.
‘He just had this monster side to him, like a Jekyll and Hyde,’ she says. ‘He was very, very, very frightening when he was in a rage, but I would always know he’d soon come out of it and then he’d be back to normal. I likened it to The Incredible Hulk.’
That Trudi, a languages teacher, is able to recount what she suffered during her eight-year relationship with Easom is a miracle.
When she awoke from 11 hours of surgery at the Royal Preston Hospital, doctors warned her she may never be able to breathe for herself, let alone speak, because of the serious damage caused to the section of her spinal cord that controls the diaphragm.
However, over the past nine months, Trudi has made remarkable progress and, as she talks to me, sitting in a specially-adapted wheelchair in a side room at the North West Regional Spinal Injuries Centre at Southport Hospital in Merseyside, where she is still undergoing rehabilitation, her determination and positivity is astonishing.
The only time she breaks down is when she discusses the impact of her injury on her children – Gina, now 28, and Jackson, 27 – or recalls the detail of that dreadful day itself.
In her first interview since Easom’s conviction, she explains that she had tried to leave him ‘at least 30 times before’ February 17, although that day she felt different, more resolute.
Trudi (left) was left paralysed from the neck down after her partner Robert Easom (right) flew into an ‘uncontrollable’ rage and attacked her
By then the couple were living somewhat separate lives – on the Saturday, Easom had spent the day go-karting with his sons, while Trudi went for dinner at her sister Sophie Bashall’s home on the Sunday. She returned later to stay the night at Easom’s semi-detached home, in the village of Chipping, near Longridge, Lancashire, although they slept apart, in separate bedrooms.
But when Easom brought her a cup of tea in bed the following morning, and asked if they were having cottage pie for dinner, as was their usual Monday routine, Trudi’s reply sent him into an uncontrollable rage, the kind of which she had never seen before.
‘I said, “No, I’m not making cottage pie tonight, I’m going home and I’m going home full stop. We cannot carry on like this. All we do is argue. You verbally abuse me and my family, and you hurt me sometimes, and I can’t carry on, I’m really unhappy in this relationship.” Easom, who had had two previous failed marriages and three sons, was furious.
‘He was very angry,’ Trudi says. ‘His whole demeanour changed, his face was just terrifying. He became aggressive, started pacing with his chest out. He was swearing at me, incredible swearing.
‘I was arguing back and then it escalated and his anger became more than I’ve ever seen.’
Easom grabbed Trudi, who was dressed in her nightgown and underwear, and pinned her up against the headboard.
‘I was screaming, “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me,” she says. ‘I was saying, “I’m coming back tonight. I promise, I love you. There are no problems. It’s all good.” I was just trying to calm it [but] I couldn’t calm him down. Then he came and he grabbed me from the bed head to the foot of the bed, screaming, “Shut up. Shut the f*** up.”
‘He got his hands on my head, from behind me, and he started to push my neck forwards. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, that hurts. I’m going numb. What is he doing?” ‘I thought, “He’s never done this before,” and then, “Oh my God, he’s actually not stopping.” I couldn’t utter a word and he folded my head into my chest.’
Trudi needed emergency surgery and spent three months in intensive care following the vicious attack
Breaking down and sobbing, Trudi says she heard a crack as her neck snapped and immediately thought she was going to die. ‘I just thought, “This is the end of your life,” she says tearfully. ‘I couldn’t feel my body. I just thought, “It’s happening so quickly. My life’s ending and I can’t speak to anyone. I can’t tell anyone anything.”
‘And then I was on the bed and I was alive but I couldn’t feel my body at all.’ Afterwards, Easom tried to tell Trudi she was feigning her injuries. ‘He tried to say that I was imagining it, that he hadn’t hurt me that hard,’ she says. ‘He kept touching me and kissing my face and I was saying, ‘Stop kissing me. You’re going to make it worse. My neck is broken.’ I could hardly speak. I just remember saying to him, ‘You’ve ruined both our lives.’
Trudi admits that she was emotionally vulnerable and still grieving the loss of her beloved husband Craig, who died of an aggressive brain tumour aged 57, in November 2016, when she first started dating Easom, who was her sister Sophie’s gardener.
She and Craig had been together all her life – Trudi met him at 17 – and she admits the ‘bottom fell out of our world’ when he died.
She found it desperately hard to cope and, about six months later, asked Easom if he could help with some gardening and odd jobs at her house in Chorley, Lancashire.
She says she was immediately attracted to his straight-talking manner and was flattered when he asked her on a date to a local pub. ‘We got on really well because we were interested in a lot of the same things,’ says Trudi, an accomplished singer, who secured a professional record deal when she was 23 and regularly gigged in a band with her late musician husband. ‘Rob was very interested in my music career.’
Trudi says she and Easom fell ‘head over heels’ in love and, at the beginning, their relationship was ‘passionate and very good’.
Trudi pictured with her late husband, Craig, who died of a brain tumour in 2016, and children Jackson and Gina
She describes losing Craig as like having an oxygen mask that was sustaining her life ripped off, before Easom came along and put it back on. ‘Craig is the love of my life and always will be,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think I’d fall in love again. You just don’t think that [will happen] when you are grieving for somebody. Robert made me feel alive, like the oxygen mask was on again.’
The only fly in the ointment was her teenage children, Gina and Jackson, who thought their grieving mother wasn’t thinking straight and resented Easom for moving in on her so quickly after the loss of their father.
But Trudi says, to her regret, she ignored their concerns and told them that they simply needed to get to know him better.
Then, about seven months into their affair, Trudi says the ‘poison’ began seeping into the oxygen mask and Easom’s abuse began.
In February 2018, the couple had gone to York for a weekend away when Easom attacked her for simply waking him up after he fell asleep. He dragged her into the bathroom and swore at her, quoting a line from the film Rambo: ‘Don’t push or I’ll give you a war’.
Trudi says she was so shocked by his temper that she packed her bags and left the hotel to call a taxi home. But he told her he loved her and begged her ‘literally on his knees’ to stay, so she agreed.
That began a pattern of abuse that continued for the next seven years. By May 2019, the arguments and violence had got so bad that Trudi began chronicling them on her phone for her own sanity. She says Easom would tell her she was useless, would never be able to cope on her own and that her own family looked down on her.
Trudi says the gaslighting was ‘endless’, although she didn’t appreciate it at the time. In November that year, Easom flew into a ‘terrifying’ rage when she accidentally woke him when she got up in the night because she couldn’t sleep. He banged her head on to every step of the staircase, leaving her with bruising, as he dragged her back upstairs.
Mr and Mrs Burgess were together for almost 30 years before he was diagnosed with brain cancer
But Trudi didn’t tell a soul what was going on and became adept at hiding her injuries from her children and close family by either staying at Easom’s home until they disappeared or making up excuses for her bruises. ‘I was so desperately ashamed,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t let the cat out of the bag because what would people think of me for putting up with it?’
Then, in 2021, during a weekend at a cottage near Whitby, North Yorkshire, Easom tried to strangle her. It was the first time that Trudi thought he might kill her. The argument wasn’t about anything serious but Easom became furious and wrapped a bedsheet around her head and then put his hands around her neck so tightly that she almost suffocated.
‘I thought I was dying,’ she says. ‘I thought it was the end and then he suddenly let go, just in time.
I found that one so upsetting. I remember not speaking to him the next day and making an absolute decision that I was leaving but then he must have minimised it and talked me around.’
In one note on her phone, dated August 2022, Trudi wrote: ‘Okay, so you have to get out of this relationship because he scares you and he hurts you. But he always talks you round, you always end up thinking that you are overreacting and that he was just tired.’
Trudi says: ‘That is a cycle of abuse in a nutshell. I’m writing that on my phone in August 2022, but I didn’t leave him properly until the morning he did this, in February 2025. I was incredibly lonely. I so nearly said something to certain people at different times, but I was ashamed. He used to tell me, “You’re useless. You could never live on your own. You’ve no common sense.’ And I started to think he was right.”
In January, a month before Easom’s final attack on Trudi, she was forced to flee his car after they rowed about inviting friends to his home for dinner. Easom drove at terrifying speeds to frighten her, before slamming on his brakes and headbutting her. Again, she feared he was going to kill her. Then, just a few weeks later, he almost did.
By then, Easom had isolated Trudi from her family and she was so under his control that, even immediately after he broke her neck, she desperately tried to protect him.
Knowing he would go to jail and, for the sake of his ‘lovely’ sons, she says she decided to tell the 999 operator that she had been hurt in a ‘playfight gone wrong’.
When she awoke from 11 hours of surgery at the Royal Preston Hospital, doctors warned Trudi she may never be able to breathe for herself
Only once she had reached hospital and the doctors explained that she needed a lengthy, potentially life-threatening operation to try to repair the damage, did Trudi suddenly realise she needed to tell the truth.
‘Tell my children I love them and tell them that he did this’ – those were the two things I said before they put me under [the anaesthetic],’ she says.
Easom didn’t call anyone from Trudi’s family to tell them what had happened and they only found out when Sophie, 60, rang him to see why her sister hadn’t been answering her phone all day.
Although Trudi had told no one about the abuse, when Gina, a vegan influencer, saw her mother in intensive care the following day – flat on her back and hooked up to a ventilator and other machines – she knew instinctively that Easom was to blame.
‘Gina came in, she looked completely distraught and she said, ‘Mum, did he do this?’, Trudi says, breaking down again.
‘I nodded… and she was grief-stricken. She just burst into tears. I was in tears, too. I was so damn sorry about what I’d let happen to me, and to all the people that love me, and I was desperately blaming myself.’
Trudi describes those first few weeks in intensive care as a ‘living hell’ and I wonder if there were times when she thought she couldn’t go on. ‘Yeah, regularly I’d fall apart,’ she replies. ‘I was in so much pain [and] the realisation of what I’d allowed a man to do to me, a man who didn’t even deserve me. It’s a slow, slow, slow erosion of your self-worth.
‘You start to be confused. You feel isolated and alone because you can’t tell anybody what’s happening to you because you feel ashamed of it.’ But since then, she insists, her confidence has ‘grown and grown’. The love of her family – Trudi is a grandmother to two little girls – coupled with the ‘incredible’ care from ‘compassionate’ staff in the NHS have helped get her to keep going. Through sheer hard work and incredible inner strength, she managed to breathe, then speak. Thanks in part, her doctors say, to her strong ‘singer’s diaphragm’.
However, she is unlikely to be able to ever perform again and, although she has some feeling in her arms, her hands and fingers remain paralysed and she will never walk.
For that reason, her financial future is also uncertain, given the level of round-the-clock care she will require when she finally returns home, hopefully in the new year.
Trudi’s lawyer, Natasha Ross, of JMW Solicitors, told me that she is hoping to secure damages from the Government, via the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme, and that this will ‘go some way towards making things a little easier for Trudi’s new and very different life’.
But the amount payable is capped at £250,000, so Trudi’s family are also fundraising online to pay for the adaptations to her home and specialist wheelchairs she will need to regain her independence. So far, more than £80,000 has been donated.
‘I will never be able to teach again,’ Trudi says. ‘So I can’t thank everyone who has donated enough. The amount of money and lovely messages I’ve received have really been a great comfort. I’m speaking out and planning to write a book about my experience because I know there are thousands of women up and down the country in similar abusive relationships. If I can help just one of them to leave, then it’s worth it.’
To donate to Trudi’s fund, go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-care-for-our-mum-trudi