Husband gets life for mercy killing of his dying wife
AN ESTRANGED husband who killed his terminally ill wife as “an act of mercy” when she had just days to live has been jailed for life.
Cornelius Van Der Ploeg suffocated lung cancer victim Cherith, a former nurse, after telling their children he wanted some private time alone with her.
Half an hour later, he invited them into the downstairs bedroom and said: “I throttled her.”
Police were called and he admitted when he had done, Norwich Crown Court was told.
Yesterday, the 64-year-old was jailed for life after admitting murder and was ordered to spend a minimum of five years and 187 days behind bars.
In a moving impact statement, one of the couple’s daughters said Van Der Ploeg’s actions had robbed them of precious final moments with her mother.
She said: “We don’t know why Dad did what he did.We can only assume its because it’s the only thing he could do to help with mum’s suffering.”
She insisted her father “would not have done what he did if Mum had not been in such a bad way”.
She said: “I know he did it out of love and not hate, but it was not his decision to make.” She said her mother was “a strong, independent and private woman” who “did not want to be in the position she found herself in with the disease having taken so much from her”.
The daughter also said she had not been able to properly grieve the loss of her mother while having daily visits from the police, “going over and over what Dad had done”.
She said the procedure had caused her more anxiety than her mother’s death, leaving her unable to grasp the fact that her mum “was gone forever”.
She added that she did not know whether she would ever speak to her father again. Mrs Van Der Ploeg, 60, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2019 and only had days to live, the court was told.
In agony, she had lost most of her sight and her ability to speak.
She had expressed a desire not to be a “burden” on her family and even contemplated ending her life at a clinic in Switzerland.
She had split up with her husband two years earlier but he continued to support her at her home in Costessey near Norwich.
The court heard that she had returned home for end-of-life care at the start of the year.
Former driving instructor Van Der Ploeg, of Telford, Shropshire, came to the UK with his wife from South Africa in 2011.
He told police he “hated to see his wife suffer so much” after 39 years of marriage and had killed her in “an act of mercy”.
He told officers: “I couldn’t see her suffer any more.”
Judge Stephen Holt described the case as “tragic”, saying Mrs Van Der Ploeg knew the “end of her life was inevitably coming”.
There was “no doubt at the time of her death she was suffering greatly and in serious pain from the cancer,” the judge said.
But he added: “It was not right for anyone to make a choice over life or death.”