MOTHER SPARED JAIL FOR HELPING HUSBAND TO DIE
Judge shows mercy to wife after she killed gravely ill partner
A PENSIONER who smothered her sick husband to death after he begged her to help him die was yesterday spared jail. Susanne Wilson suffocated her husband of 50 years with a cushion after enduring the ‘mental torment’ of watching his physical and mental health deteriorate.
The retired nurse, 72, had cared for housebound Henry Wilson – who suffered from chronic heart disease – and had previously admitted to killing him last September at the home they shared in Ayr.
But yesterday a judge spared her a prison sentence after expressing sympathy for the ‘unusual and complex circumstances’ leading up to Mr Wilson’s death.
Instead, sentencing was deferred until January for good behaviour and for her to continue to receive treatment from a psychiatrist.
The case is likely to reopen the debate into so-called mercy killings. In 2015, the Scottish parliament voted against an Assisted Suicide Bill which would have let the terminally ill seek the help of a doctor to end their life.
The High Court at Dumbarton yesterday
heard how Wilson had struggled to cope with watching her husband’s health deteriorate, and that he had previously attempted to take his own life.
The hearing was also told that she had found it difficult to come to terms with allegations of sexual abuse levelled against 70-year-old Mr Wilson.
When she returned one evening from a neighbour’s house to find him struggling to breathe and gasping ‘Sue, help me’, she decided to end her husband’s life.
Prosecutor Bill McVicar told the court: ‘She reports her husband said “help me” as his breathing worsened.
‘She took that as a request that she should help him to die. She describes feeling only compassion for him and thinking that this had to stop.
‘She then smothered him by placing a cushion over his face and holding it there with some degree of force, restricting his breathing until he died’.
The couple had three children together but their eldest son, Jonathan, died in 2001 after a battle with cancer.
In September 2015, Wilson first became aware of allegations her husband had abused children.
Mr McVicar said: ‘Mrs Wilson accepted the accusations were true but continued to live in the same house to provide constant care.’
On September 3 last year – the day of the killing – Mr Wilson asked his wife to contact one of the people who had accused him. The former Butlin’s shop manager spoke to the individual on the phone, causing Wilson ‘anxiety’.
The court was told that after the call she was ‘very angry’ and struck her husband with a plastic jug, leaving him bleeding.
Mr Wilson then spoke about ending his life with drugs.
The court heard his wife left out medication she had been prescribed but she did not give it to him, instead leaving the house to call on a neighbour.
Gordon Jackson, QC, defending, said that when Wilson returned home that evening her husband was in a ‘very, very bad way’ and she helped him to lie down.
Mr Jackson continued: ‘He said, “Sue, help me” and that’s what she distinctly remembers.’
He said his client told him: ‘At that point I know what he wanted me to do and I did that.’
Mr Jackson said: ‘She now finds it quite horrifying as she has got a bit better mentally.’
Wilson, a former Labour councillor in Troon, Ayrshire, in the late 90s, contacted police immediately
‘Complex circumstances’
after smothering her husband and made ‘full and frank admissions’ about what she had done.
After examining psychiatric evidence, the Crown accepted a reduced charge of culpable homicide due to diminished responsibility. It was found that Wilson suffered from depression and felt isolated – people found it ‘difficult’ to accept that she was supporting her husband despite the allegations against him.
Sentencing Wilson, Judge Lady Rae said: ‘It’s impossible to envisage the mental torment you must have been going through at the time when you killed your husband and which clearly distorted your decision-making.
‘Having considered the material before me, while recognising that in most cases such a crime would merit a very significant custodial sentence, I am prepared in the unusual and complex circumstances of this case to impose a non-custodial disposal.’
Lady Rae said she did not consider Wilson a risk to the public and that imposing a community payback order in place of a prison sentence was ‘not justified’.
In May 2015, plans to legalise assisted suicide in Scotland were rejected for the second time by MSPs.
The Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill proposed that those with terminal or life-shortening illnesses should be able to obtain help to end their suffering.
The controversial legislation would have made Scotland the first part of the UK to legalise assisted suicide if it had been successful.
It was brought before the Scottish parliament by independent MSP Margo MacDonald before her death from Parkinson’s disease in 2014.