We had a fight, I lost it – husband confesses to stabbing wife to death
DETECTIVES filmed a husband confessing to the frenzied killing of his estranged wife as her battered body lay a few yards away.
Minutes after stabbing British beauty therapist Victoria Comrie Cullen 18 times and slitting her throat, Christopher Cullen admitted the attack and blamed her for taunting him with details of her sex sessions with her new lover.
The footage, captured on a mobile phone, shows the 51-year-old Australian explain to his arresting officer: ‘We had a row. We had a fight… she stabbed me and stabbed her.’
Asked by the policeman: ‘ Can you verify that the lady on the grass over there is your wife?’, he replied: ‘Yes’.
Mrs Cullen was found slumped face down in the car park of a south Sydney fishing club in January last year. Her throat was cut, her nose was broken, her face was badly beaten and her clothes were soaked in blood.
The recording of Cullen’s scene-of-the-crime confession was made public yesterday after an Austral--
Iian court found Cullen guilty of murdering his wife, from Bangor in Northern Ireland. It shows swollen- eyed Cullen wrapped in a tinfoil blanket in the grounds of the club, held by a policeman wearing blue forensic
‘Taunting me with her sex life’
gloves. Detective Senior Constable Richard McNally can be heard questioning Cullen as he sits leaning against a pole by the roadside waiting for an ambulance in the afternoon sunshine.
The officer asks: ‘Do you under-
stand you are under arrest for the murder of your wife?’ ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘Do you understand you don’t have to say or do anything if you don’t want to?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can you tell us what happened today, Christopher?’
Cullen explains how they had stabbed each other before adding: ‘We went to court today regarding a civil matter and we were talking and she started taunting me with her sex life and I lost control and we had a fight. That’s it.’
The officer asks about the knives in the car, one of which was the murder weapon.
Cullen answers: ‘ I’m a fisherman.’
He tells police he didn’t know what injuries he inflicted on his wife, before admitting to using the knife to stab her ‘on her body’.
He starts to shake violently and moan before the officers end the video recording.
Medical experts told the court that stabs to Cullen’s chest punctured his lung, forcing air under his skin and making his face puffy.
Cullen had claimed that he had acted in self-defence and was provoked into attacking his 39-year-old wife. But the Supreme Court of New South Wales heard the couple had separated months earlier and Cullen had threatened to kill his wife after accusing her of having an affair.
The stabbing was the culmination of years of domestic abuse, the court heard. The pair married in 2002 and had three children together.
Cullen, who showed no emotion when the guilty verdict was delivered, is due back in court for sentencing submissions next week.