KILLER WIFE ‘A VICTIM’
ACCUSED HAD ‘PROPERTY OF DAVID JACKSON’ TATTOOED ON BUM
A WIFE who was arrested while refusing to help her ‘abusive’ husband as he lay dying on their kitchen floor has told a jury their marriage was violent.
Penelope Jackson, 66, is accused of murdering husband David, 78, by stabbing him three times with a kitchen knife after claiming she could not put up with him anymore after 24 years.
She told Bristol crown court her husband was so jealous when they first met she got ‘property of David Jackson’ tattooed on her bottom.
‘He was so jealous. He was so secure in some parts but so insecure in others that he thought I would pack my bags any minute and rush off with another person,’ she said. Jackson said the retired colonel threw her down stairs during a Mother’s Day party at the officers’ mess.
‘On that day, he punched me and that was the only time he ever marked my face. I went to work the next week and said I had fallen up the cellar stairs.
‘I had bruises, cuts to my face and all down my side but I never reported any of it,’ she said.
‘He would get so angry for no reason. You could not see it coming. He walked in the door one day and out of the blue he headbutted me. I just cried. I am not good with violence.’ She also said he once held a knife to her throat and would force her to have sex.
‘When something happened he was always really sorry and would say “I didn’t mean to, I lost it”,’ she said.
Jurors have heard an 18-minute 999 call and bodycam footage of her arrest in Berrow, Somerset, on February 13.
In the call, Jackson said she thought she had stabbed him in the heart but ‘he doesn’t have one’. When police arrest her, bodycam footage shows her asking: ‘Can I get my coat on? He’s on the kitchen floor.’
Jackson denies murder but admits manslaughter. The trial continues.