Wife ‘tried for heart’ as she stabbed husband, court told
A 66-YEAR-OLD woman who stabbed her husband of 24 years three times told a 999 operator, “I thought I’d get his heart but he hasn’t got one”, a court heard.
Penelope Jackson knifed her husband David, 78, in the kitchen of their home in Berrow, Somerset, on Feb 13 this year. The defendant had worked in administration in the Army, where she met her husband, a lieutenant colonel.
On the first day of her murder trial at Bristol Crown Court yesterday, the jury heard Jackson told a 999 call handler her husband was “bleeding to death with any luck”.
He called emergency services, saying his wife had stabbed him. Jackson then took over the call, and told the call handler: “I’ve killed my husband, or tried to, because I’ve had enough.”
Christopher Quinlan QC, prosecuting, said: “(Jackson) was calm and resolute and perhaps in places resigned and, in her words, not mine, ‘compos mentis’.”
In an 18-minute phone call, she said: “I thought I’d got his heart but he hasn’t got one.” Mr Quinlan said: “(Jackson) will accept (Mr Jackson’s) unlawful killing or his manslaughter but she denies her guilt properly answers his murder.”
In the call, Jackson can be heard saying her husband is “moaning on the kitchen floor”, adding “he’s got some holes in him”. The defendant told officers she had locked her husband in their conservatory so he would “calm down” but that he had smashed his way out with a poker. She said he had been acting out of character after surgery on a brain implant used to manage a condition that caused his limbs to tremble. The trial continues.