Don’t leave me, Daddy
Daughter’s video call plea to suicidal pensioner who killed terminally-ill wife
A DAUGHTER begged her father not to kill himself in a harrowing video call moments after he had suffocated her terminally-ill mother.
Lesley Hunter, 50, tells father David ‘you can’t leave me’ in a call from her home in Norwich – 2,500 miles away from the British pensioner’s villa in Cyprus.
She screams down the phone in a clip played to court yesterday: ‘Daddy remember how you walked me down the aisle and you said I was beautiful. I’m your girl. I’m your girl. You can’t leave me. Daddy please, please daddy I beg you.’
Hunter, 75, is seen slumped in a chair and barely conscious as his daughter says: ‘Daddy, daddy, just concentrate on me. Daddy concentrate on me.
‘Daddy, forget about everybody else. Forget about everything else. Concentrate on me. Not on her.’ Hunter is accused of murdering wife Janice, 74, who had been suffering from terminal leukaemia at their retirement home in Cyprus. He is being tried in the city of Paphos.
After suffocating her, he called his brother, William, in the UK to confess to killing his wife – before saying he was going to take his own life with a drugs and alcohol overdose.
William told police who went to Lesley’s home and advised her to video call her father on December 18, 2021. It is not clear from the footage whether Hunter had already ingested the concoction.
It shows a UK police officer say: ‘Have you taken something David, because we can get someone to help?’ Lesley adds: ‘We love you. We don’t care what you’ve done.’
Hunter appeared emotional as the footage was played in court yesterday. He gave evidence for the first time since he was arrested more than 12 months ago.
It had appeared that a plea bargain would be reached last month that would see the British grandfather released after admitting the lesser charge of manslaughter.
But in an apparent 11th-hour change, the prosecution pushed ahead with pre-meditated murder.
The defence, led by advocacy group Justice Abroad, argued that statements Hunter gave to police are inadmissible because he hadn’t been physiologically assessed or offered a lawyer.
The group played the video to demonstrate how Hunter was ‘in a state of shock’. The Briton said in court he ‘can’t remember’ telling officers he had killed his wife with his hands to stop her suffering.
The prosecutor read from one of Hunter’s police statements where he described suffocating his wife ‘for about ten or 15 minutes’.
It read: ‘While I was trying to save her by killing her, Janice was resisting and she was holding my hands.’ But the statement was written by a Greek officer on Hunter’s behalf, and the Briton insisted that his wife did not resist.
He told prosecutor Andreas Hadjikyrou that as he suffocated her, Mrs Hunter ‘was just lying there’. He said: ‘I know I would never hurt my wife.’
Asked what he recalled from when officers arrived, Hunter said it was ‘like a dream’.
He was assessed by a psychologist three days after the killing and later signed all the police statements. The case was adjourned until next Thursday.
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