‘Don’t die Dad’ begs daughter of pensioner charged with mercy killing
Cyprus court hears family’s plea for him not to take his own life after smothering his cancer-stricken wife
THE daughter of a British pensioner accused of suffocating his terminally ill wife begged him not to die in an emotional video call shown at his murder trial in Cyprus yesterday.
David Hunter, a former coal miner from Northumberland, is accused of smothering his wife of 52 years, Janice, in a mercy killing at their retirement home near Paphos in western Cyprus.
After killing his wife, Mr Hunter called his family in the UK to tell them what he had done and took pills and alcohol in a bid to end his own life.
His daughter, Lesley, made a desperate video call to him and pleaded with him to hang on. The video call was recorded on a second mobile phone by another family member.
Sobbing, she said: “Daddy, just concentrate on me, forget about everyone else. Daddy, you love me, I’m your girl, your little girl. Remember how you walked me down the aisle and you said I was beautiful? You can’t leave me. Please, Daddy, I beg you.
“We love you, we don’t care what you’ve done, Daddy,” his daughter told him. “We love you so much.”
Police had been notified of the drama unfolding and an officer can be heard on the video asking Mr Hunter if he had taken an overdose. There was no response.
Mr Hunter and his lawyers admit that he suffocated his wife to death but insist it was a mercy killing after she asked him to end her life because she was in unbearable pain from leukaemia. But the prosecution accuses Mr Hunter, 75, of murder. If convicted, he is likely to spend the rest of his life in jail.
Mr Hunter’s lawyers say that because he was in a state of shock and under the influence of pills and alcohol, his statements should be ruled inadmissible.
Defence lawyer Michael Polak, from the British legal assistance organisation Justice Abroad, said: “The reason why we played this video in court is that it shows David was in a state of shock and didn’t understand what was going on.
“There is no way that if this case was in the UK he would have been interviewed under those circumstances.”
Mr Hunter, from Ashington in Northumberland, did not undergo a psychological assessment until three days after his wife’s death on December 18, 2021.
Nor did he have a lawyer or interpreter when interviewed by police.
‘I wasn’t listening because my mind was elsewhere. It was like a dream, it was like I was in a tunnel’
Mr Hunter became teary when the court was shown a photograph of his wife slumped dead in an armchair at their home in the village of Tremithousa, in the hills above Paphos.
He told the court that when police arrived at his home, he was in a daze.
“I wasn’t listening because my mind was elsewhere. It was like a dream, it was like I was in a tunnel. I didn’t know what I was saying. I remember little.”
After killing his wife, he said he took “all the drugs that were in my house”. His life was saved when medics administered a stomach pump.
But the prosecution insisted Mr Hunter was clear-headed, lucid and rational when he made the statements.
Mr Hunter told the court that he “couldn’t remember” what he had told police about the death of his wife. The prosecution said in one statement that Mr Hunter told police that “Janice did resist” when he was suffocating her. The former miner disputed this.
Since the death of his wife in December 2021, Mr Hunter has already spent a year in custody in a prison in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus.
His family has set up a Crowdjustice fundraising page which has so far raised £28,000 to pay for legal costs.
Prosecutors had agreed to allow Mr Hunter to plead guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter, which could have led to a suspended sentence and release from prison, but last month they changed course and switched back to the original charge of murder.
The trial was adjourned until Jan 26.