Episode 20: Karen Youdell

Karen Youdell was fifty years old, a mother of four, known and well liked in Newton Heath. In the early hours of a July morning in 2023, she was attacked in the garden of a house on Rosebank Road and left with catastrophic injuries. She never regained consciousness. She spent nearly ten months in a persistent vegetative state before dying in May 2024. Her daughters said it plainly: they had to lose their mum twice. This episode covers the attack, the hours that followed it, the cover-up constructed by three people who arrived at the scene and chose not to call for help, and the legal process that eventually brought a murder conviction - nearly two years after the night on Rosebank Road. Dean Johnstone was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 2025.