‘My gift killed my girlfriend – I can't get over that'

As the fourth anniversary of the Salisbury poisoning approaches, Novichok survivor Charlie Rowley gives a rare interview about the guilt he suffers over his partner’s death

- SUSANNA GALTON

Builder Charlie, 44, fell critically ill and his partner Dawn Sturgess died after exposure to the deadly nerve agent Novichok at his home in Amesbury, Wiltshire. In March 2018, three months earlier, ex-Soviet spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been found unconscious on a Salisbury park bench, seven miles away…

I didn’t mean to, but I killed my girlfriend. How do you ever get over that? I can’t. But that is the surreal heartbreak that happened when my partner Dawn and I became unwittingly dragged into the news story that rocked the world.

Salisbury is idyllic, the most unlikely place you’d imagine a Russian spy to be poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent.

People were scared, but we were told repeatedly that the nerve agent areas had been identified and made safe. In the cruellest way possible, I would learn this wasn’t the case…

Dawn and I had been together for 18 months when she died. We’d met when she was staying in a supported housing scheme, for people who were homeless. She was a mum-of-three, rebuilding her life. I was in a similar situation. We supported each other.

We loved the same music and living close to Stonehenge, where we’d recently celebrated the solstice. A natural hippie, she was kind and spiritual. We just clicked. She was Dawny, my soul mate.

I was lucky enough to be re-homed a few months after meeting her. I was so excited – my own proper flat in Amesbury, seven miles north of Salisbury. Dawn was pleased for me, she was a generous, lovely person. My life was finally falling into place.