My wife begged me to kill her every day for six weeks
Expat husband of 52 years denies murder
EX-MINER David Hunter wept in a Cypriot court yesterday as he recalled how he killed his terminally ill wife.
The expat said Janice, 74, cried and begged him daily for six weeks to kill her as her blood cancer deteriorated.
David, of Ashington, Northumberland, said he refused until one day he agreed, hoping it would calm his wife of 52 years – but he insisted he had no intention of carrying it out.
Nine days later in December 2021 he pressed his hands over her mouth and nose. David, 75, told Paphos
‘It was her decision that she didn’t want any more treatment’
District Court: “Fifty seven years – the last thing I would want to do is to kill my wife.
“It was her decision that she wanted to die, not mine – hers. It was her decision that she didn’t want any more treatment. She has her own mind and she asked me. She wasn’t just my wife – she was my best friend.
“I didn’t just decide to kill her. I loved her so much. I still love her. You don’t know what we went through.”
David said he had stood up in their retirement home in Tremithousa and walked to the kettle to make a coffee, with Janice sobbing as she sat.
He said he found himself gripping a bench: “I turned to my wife and she was still crying. The next thing I knew I put my hands here...and when it finished she was a grey colour.”
David – on trial for pre-meditated murder – then tried to take his life.
He told the court the couple’s “perfect” life was blighted by ill-health in later years, with Janice becoming more ill and lacking any quality of life.
David added, via a translator: “She cried and begged me to help her. For five or six weeks before she died she was asking me to help her.
“She was sleeping in the leather chair downstairs and for the last week we slept down on those chairs together. I felt so helpless and hopeless that I couldn’t do anything for her.
“Every day she asked me a bit more intensely to do it. I really didn’t want to do it. I said ‘No’.
“She said, ‘I can’t go on, this isn’t life for me’. She started becoming hysterical, so I told her, ‘Yes, I’m going to help you. I won’t tell you how.’ I didn’t intend to do it. I just told her that to calm her down.” He told prosecutor Andreas Hadjikyrou: “I would never kill my wife. You haven’t seen the six years of strain she’s gone through. She passed her pain barrier.”
Asked by defence lawyer Ritsa Pekri about his wife’s last days, David said: “She was crying, crying, crying, begging, begging, begging. She lost so much weight that there was no flesh to put her injections in.”
Finally, he put his hands on her face: “She did not attempt to stop me.”
The trial, which was adjourned until next Tuesday, continues.