‘I didn’t mean to kill wife, it was self-defence’ – Ukip man
A FORMER Ukip councillor accused of murdering his Scots wife has claimed he held her by the throat to stop her stabbing him.
Stephen Searle said his spouse, Anne, had flown into a rage and attacked him with a steak knife at their home.
The 64-year-old admitted he had been ‘trained to kill’ during his nine years of service with the Royal Marines but choked back tears as he told a jury he had no intention of killing Glasgow-born Mrs Searle.
He said she had been left angry and upset last August after discovering his secret fling with their son Gary’s partner, Anastasia Pomiateeva, 39.
But he said that the relationship with his wife of 45 years had ‘gone back to normal’ after she insisted that she wanted to make their marriage work and he promised to end the affair.
Searle said he and his wife had been fine together over Christmas last year until the evening of December 30, when they had both been drinking heavily.
He said he went to the toilet at their home in Stowmarket, Suffolk, and when he came out he was confronted by his 62-year-old wife, who was holding a serrated steak knife. Searle, who served with 45 Commando in Arbroath, Angus, told Ipswich Crown Court: ‘I turned around and she was there in front of me.
‘Anne stopped my access into the living room. She was looking straight at me. She looked very angry. I said to her, “What the hell is wrong?”. The next thing, I felt a stinging to my stomach.
‘I looked down and I saw a blade going backwards and forwards.
‘It was in Anne’s hand. She was stabbing me with it. I tried to grab it and she pulled her arm away. It went through three layers of clothing and I felt a penetration.
‘I knew it was serious. I just had to get hold of this bloody knife.’
Searle said he cut his hand while trying to grab the knife, adding that he was left with minor injuries to his stomach.
He said he was concentrating on trying to disarm his wife when he gripped her throat for around 25 seconds.
The couple ended up on the floor as they ‘struggled frantically’, the court heard.
Searle then gripped his wife’s right arm with his left hand and put his right hand around her neck. Having subdued her, he
‘I looked down and saw a blade’
went into the conservatory to smoke a cigarette, the court was told.
Searle choked back tears as he described leaving the conservatory later to see his wife on the floor in the position in which he had left her.
Searle said: ‘I realised things were certainly not right. She was a sort of grey colour.
‘It was hard to take in. I didn’t really understand. I held her hand and she was just limp. It just didn’t make sense. My head was spinning.
‘She was not warm. I had seen bodies before and I thought, “She’s gone”.’
Asked by defence counsel Steven Dyble if he had wanted to kill his wife, Searle said: ‘No sir, I didn’t.’
He denied intending to cause her serious harm and also denied a prosecution suggestion that he had used a choke hold learned in the Marines to suffocate his wife, which would have involved holding her neck from behind in the crook of his arm.
Under cross-examination, he insisted that he had no idea why his wife had suddenly become upset on that night. But he suggested she may have been looking at old screenshots on her mobile phone of intimate text messages between him and his son’s partner, which she had found months earlier.
Searle, who denies murder, said he had joined the Marines in 1970 and had been posted the following year to Arbroath. He met his wife in a nightclub and they married in 1972.
He stood as a Ukip parliamentary candidate for the Central Suffolk and North Ipswich in the General Election in June last year.
He lost his Suffolk County Council seat in May last year.
The trial continues.
‘Held her hand and she was limp’