‘He’s bleeding to death in the kitchen... with any luck’
Wife’s comment during 999 call after knife attack that left ‘abusive’ husband dead
A RETIRED accountant accused of murdering her husband told 999 call handlers ‘he is in the kitchen bleeding to death with any luck’, a court heard.
Penelope Jackson, 66, stabbed her husband David repeatedly at their home in February. She claimed she had ‘had enough’ of his ‘abuse and nastiness’.
A jury was played the harrowing 999 call in which Mr Jackson, 78, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, begged for help – only for the call to be interrupted by his piercing screams, then shouts of ‘She’s stabbed me again’.
Jackson then took the phone from him and told the call handlers: ‘Just send the police – he’s getting a bit slumpy now.’
Asked to say where she had stabbed her husband, she cracked a joke, saying: ‘I thought I got him in the heart. Well, he hasn’t got one. Then twice in the abdomen so the abdomen is b ***** ed.’
She added: ‘I did not call you – he did. He thought I wouldn’t go through with it. It’s not my job to help him – he’s a total s***. I accept everything that’s coming my way.’
Jackson is accused of stabbing her husband three times with an eightinch filleting knife after a row at their home in Berrow, near Weston-superMare, Somerset. The court heard that she accepts she killed him unlawfully but denies that it was murder.
Dressed all in black, she switched between crying uncontrollably and sitting with her head in her hands as a recording of the call was played to the jury at Bristol Crown Court.
Asked by call handlers if she would check on her husband’s condition, she calmly refused and added: ‘He’s moaning a bit.’
She threatened to stab him again in the back if they kept insisting on her giving first aid.
When emergency services arrived, Jackson told police as she was led away: ‘I admit it all. With any luck you will be too late.
‘I am totally compos mentis, whatever. He deserved it, so do not judge me. I will end up in prison, which is preferable to my life now. Yes, I stabbed him. He was an aggressive bully and nasty. When he said, “You would not do it” I did it twice more.
‘I know what I have done, I know why I have done it. If I have not done it properly I am really annoyed.’
Mr Jackson suffered a cardiac arrest due to blood loss and was pronounced dead on his kitchen floor.
The incident was said to have been triggered when the couple had a disagreement following a ‘virtual dinner’ with their daughter Isabelle Potterton and her husband Tom.
Prosecutor Christopher Quinlan QC told the court: ‘David Jackson telephoned the emergency services. He said that his wife had stabbed him. Penelope took over the call and thereafter she was calm and resolute and perhaps in places resigned and, to use her words, “compos mentis”. She said, “I have done it again”.’
‘Asked where he was, she said, “He is in the kitchen bleeding to death with any luck”. She refused to follow the operator’s instructions in their call to help her dying husband. She had had enough of the abuse and nastiness.
She said at one stage she might do it again. She told the operator she stabbed him three times. She will accept his unlawful killing but she denies her guilt applies as murder.’
The court was told the couple met while Mr Jackson was still with his second wife then married in 1996 and raised their daughter together.
The husband was described as a ‘softy’ by family friend Veronica Statham, while her husband Malcolm Compton-Bishop said he was ‘sometimes opinionated and intolerant’.
Mr Compton-Bishop claimed that Jackson had spoken frankly about her husband’s recent health troubles and ‘complained she would end up with a vegetable’.
But in the days before the killing, she said he had sent her a ‘lovely’ Valentine’s Day card.
Police had been called to the home a few months earlier following a row over their television remote which led to Mr Jackson smashing a glass door in their conservatory with the poker from a wood stove after his wife locked him in there to ‘calm down’.
A video of the row, which Jackson filmed on her phone, showed him calling her a ‘control freak’.
The trial, which is due to last three weeks, continues.
‘He deserved it, so do not judge me’