“Kill Me Now”: The Horrific Story of Berlinah Wallace, Mark van Dongen, and the Acid Attack That Led to Euthanasia

Dec 22, 2024

9 min read

Updated: Oct 6

A collage with two people overlapping a bed with dark stains. Diagrams with red highlights in the background. Expressions vary from serious to neutral.

At about three in the morning on 23 September 2015, a man in his boxer shorts ran out into a street in Bristol screaming for help. Neighbours who came to their windows thought he was covered in mud. One said he "looked like he had been dipped in clay". It wasn't mud. Mark van Dongen, a 29-year-old Dutch engineer, had just had a glass of sulphuric acid thrown in his face by his ex-girlfriend.

He lived for another 15 months, paralysed, nearly blind and in constant pain, before choosing to die by euthanasia in Belgium. The woman who did it, Berlinah Wallace, was cleared of his murder but is serving a life sentence. The case also forced English judges to answer a question they'd never really faced before. If someone hurts you so badly that you ask a doctor to end your life, have they killed you?

Quick Answers

What did Berlinah Wallace do? She threw 98 per cent sulphuric acid over her ex-partner Mark van Dongen as he lay in bed at her Bristol flat on 23 September 2015.
What happened to Mark van Dongen? He was left paralysed from the neck down, lost a leg and most of his sight, and died by euthanasia in Belgium on 2 January 2017.
Was Wallace convicted of murder? No. In May 2018 a jury cleared her of murder and manslaughter but found her guilty of throwing a corrosive substance with intent.
What sentence did she get? Life imprisonment with a minimum term of 12 years.
Where did she get the acid? She bought it online from Amazon for £17.07, three weeks before the attack.

A man and woman smile in front of a brick building with arched windows. They're dressed warmly, with the man holding an umbrella. — Mark van Dongen and Berlinah Wallace

Who Were Mark van Dongen and Berlinah Wallace?

Mark van Dongen grew up in the Netherlands and moved to England at 22 as a student. He stayed on in Bristol and worked as a civil engineer. Berlinah Wallace was almost 20 years older. She'd grown up in South Africa and left the country in 1994 with her then husband, Ray Wallace. By the time she met Mark she was studying fashion in Bristol.

The pair met through a dating website and were together for about five years. It wasn't a calm relationship. They split up and got back together more than once, and each later accused the other of being abusive. By the summer of 2015 it was over for good, at least as far as Mark was concerned. He moved out in August and started seeing someone else.

The Weeks Before the Attack

Wallace didn't take it well. Mark went to the police to report her for harassing him and his new girlfriend. His father later told the court that Mark was frightened of her and had rung the police several times without getting much help.

On 2 September 2015 she went on Amazon and bought a litre of 98 per cent sulphuric acid for £17.07. She then spent days reading up on what it does to people. The jury later heard she'd watched footage of a toddler who'd swallowed it by accident and looked at post-mortem photographs. The prosecution's case was simple: she searched for news stories about acid attack victims because she was planning one.

Wallace always had a different explanation. She told police the acid was for her fashion course and that she'd been using it to distress fabric.

Four-panel image: Clear liquid in a mug with a pH strip, a dirty mug, a bottle labeled "Sulphuric Acid 98%," and a white jug with a red cap. — The acid used on Mark

The Night of 22 September 2015

Three weeks later, Mark went round to Wallace's flat and ended up staying the night. Why he did isn't completely clear. It's the kind of decision that makes sense in the muddle of a long break-up and looks terrible afterwards.

At around 3am he woke up in bed, wearing only his boxer shorts, to find Wallace standing over him with a glass. The Court of Appeal's summary of the evidence records what she said: "If I can't have you, no-one else will". Then she threw it. Police said she laughed as she did it.

Bed with white sheets covered in dark brown stain splatters in a dimly lit room. Two pillows and a bedside table visible. Distressed mood. — Chemical burns left in the bed.

Mark ran into the street. One neighbour, Thomas Sweet, heard the noise and assumed it was foxes before he realised it was a man screaming and dialled 999. Another, a doctor called Nicola White, later found her doorbell corroded where he'd pressed it. Neighbours got him into a shower. When the first police officers arrived and asked who'd done it, he pointed at a tattoo of her name on his stomach. "She needs to go to prison for this," he told PC Thomas Green.

Wallace, meanwhile, hadn't lifted a finger to help. Officers found her calm, and she showed them where the acid was. The judge would later single that out as the clearest sign of what she'd meant to do.

The Injuries

The damage was about as bad as acid burns get. Mark had full thickness burns over a quarter of his body, and by the time surgeons had finished taking skin for grafts, around 40 per cent of his body surface was affected. He lost the sight in his left eye and most of it in his right. His lower left leg had to be amputated after an infection. He was paralysed from the neck down.

Diagram of two human outlines, front and back, showing red shaded areas with percentages. Indicates surface area distribution. — The extent of damages to Mark's body

He spent four months in a coma at Southmead Hospital and 14 months in hospital in total. When he came round he couldn't speak, so his father Kees worked out a system. He'd read the alphabet aloud from a sheet of A4 and Mark would stick out his tongue at the right letter. That's how, four months after the attack, he spelled out the name Berlinah.

The detective leading the case, DI Paul Catton, didn't even show the photographs to his own team. "I kept the photographs under lock and key because they were that bad," he said.

This is where the line in the headline comes from. When Mark arrived at hospital he could still see enough to know what had happened to his face, and he begged the staff treating him: "Kill me now". He told them he didn't want to live looking like that. It wasn't a one-off either. "I don't want to be here. I want to die. Look at my face," he told one carer.

Why Mark van Dongen Chose Euthanasia

In July 2016, once he could talk again, Mark gave police his full account of that night. He never got to give it in court.

On 22 November 2016 he was discharged from Southmead to a care home in Gloucester. It went badly from the start. He was in distress within hours. His father, who drove through the night from Belgium after a desperate phone call, told the court he found Mark lying in his own faeces. The next day his family hired a private ambulance and took him to St Maria Hospital in Overpelt, Belgium, close to where his father lived.

About a week later, doctors there told him the paralysis was permanent. He described it as the straw that broke the camel's back and applied for euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium for patients whose suffering is unbearable and can't be relieved. Three doctors assessed him and agreed he met the legal test.

There was a more immediate reason too. Mark had a chest infection, and treating it meant a tube in his throat that would probably cost him his voice, the one thing he'd got back. Kees offered to take him home instead. Mark's answer was that it would only be a different ceiling to stare at. From then on his father was at his bedside for all but half an hour of every day.

Two smiling men pose together, one in a blue shirt, the other in a red polo and black jacket. Stone wall and window in the background. — Mark and his father

He told his father he couldn't do it any more. "Dad, I am tired of fighting," he said. Mark van Dongen died at 7.15pm on 2 January 2017 with his father beside him.

Could It Be Murder? The Court of Appeal Steps In

Wallace was charged with murder as well as throwing a corrosive substance with intent. That was a bold move by prosecutors, because Mark hadn't died from the burns themselves. He'd died because Belgian doctors, at his own request, gave him a lethal injection. In law, a free and deliberate act by someone else normally breaks the chain between what a defendant did and the death.

When the case first came to trial at Bristol Crown Court in November 2017, the judge agreed with the defence on exactly that point and took the murder charge away from the jury. The prosecution appealed.

On 28 March 2018, three Court of Appeal judges led by Lady Justice Sharp overturned that ruling. It's now a leading case on causation in English criminal law. Mark's decision to die, they said, couldn't be neatly separated from the injuries that drove him to it. A jury would be entitled to find there was nothing truly voluntary about either his suffering or his choice, and that Wallace's act was still a significant cause of his death. So the question had to go to a jury.

The Trial and the Verdict

The case went back before a jury that spring. Wallace's defence was that she was the real victim. She said Mark had been violent and controlling, that he'd put the acid in the glass himself hoping she'd drink it, and that she thought she was throwing water at him.

On 17 May 2018, after 15 and a half hours of deliberation, the jury gave its answer. They didn't accept her story, and unanimously found her guilty of throwing a corrosive substance with intent. But they cleared her of both murder and manslaughter. So the Court of Appeal said a jury could convict of murder in a case like this, and this particular jury decided not to.

Six days later, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies sentenced her to life with a minimum of 12 years. She said Wallace had wanted to burn and disfigure Mark so no other woman would find him attractive, and called it "an act of pure evil". The judge also rejected the abuse claims as lies meant to wreck his reputation.

Kees van Dongen sat through every day of the case. He said he was glad she'd be locked up but that 12 years was too little, because the family had been handed a life sentence of their own. The trial left him, in his own words, a broken man, and the family were struggling for money as well. Mark's brother Bart set up a fundraising page to help.

In South Africa, Wallace's family were struggling to take it in. Her brother Dankie Mtimkulu told the Sunday Times they found it hard to believe she could hurt anyone, and that their mother had suffered a heart attack when she heard the news.

What Changed Afterwards

The case landed in the middle of a wave of acid attacks in Britain. Recorded attacks in England and Wales peaked at 941 in 2017, the year Mark died. They fell to 427 by 2021, then jumped back up to 710 in 2022, which was also the first year women were more likely than men to be the victim.

Mark's case didn't fit the usual pattern. Most acid attacks in Britain at the time were men attacking other men over drugs, debts or robberies. A woman using it on a partner was rare. But one detail stuck with people: you could buy near-pure sulphuric acid online for less than twenty quid and have it delivered to your door.

The law has tightened since. The Offensive Weapons Act 2019 made it an offence to sell corrosive products to anyone under 18 and to carry a corrosive substance in a public place without good reason, and it brought in stricter rules for online sales. Strong sulphuric acid was also added to the list of chemicals the public needs a licence to buy.

Wallace won't be able to ask for parole until she's served at least 12 years, and a life sentence means she could be kept in for much longer than that.

There are other cases on this site where a jealous ex turned violent, like Jodi Arias and Travis Alexander or Sada Abe in 1930s Tokyo. What sets this one apart is the legal puzzle at its centre. Wallace didn't end Mark van Dongen's life with her own hands. She made it one he couldn't bear to keep living, and the law still hasn't fully settled what to call that.