A 72-year-old woman who fatally stabbed her “kind-hearted” husband of nearly three decades with a paring knife has been sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 12 years before she can seek parole.
Daryl Berman had claimed that 84-year-old retired businessman David Berman somehow “stumbled” while bringing her a lunch tray, causing the small blade to pierce his chest as he fell.
However, jurors rejected her account that the fatal wound was accidental and convicted her of murder following a trial.
Sentencing her today, Judge Tina Langdale imposed a life term at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court and said Berman must serve at least 12 years before she is eligible to be considered for release.
The judge said she accepted Berman had not set out to kill her husband, but concluded she had intentionally stabbed him and intended to cause serious harm, even though she “immediately regretted” her actions.
“I am satisfied that something must have happened that caused you to lose your patience or temper and caused you to attack David with a knife that you had earlier used for your lunch,” Judge Langdale said.
The court heard that Berman, Mr Berman’s third wife, appeared suspicious in the aftermath of his death and was described as “emotionless.”
While paramedics worked to save the dying great-grandfather, she asked a police officer: “You don’t think I’ve murdered him, do you?”
Custody image of Daryl Berman, 72, issued by police after she was convicted of murdering her husband David, 84
David Berman, 84, (pictured) had been married three times and was a grandfather and great-grandfather
Relatives were also struck by how ‘matter-of-fact’ she seemed afterwards, the court heard.
She wrote the words ‘bye, bye’ on a wall calendar on the date Mr Berman died and also seemed ‘untroubled’ about going into the kitchen of their £500,000 home in Prestwich, Greater Manchester, where he had bled to death.
It also emerged that she had complained to a neighbour about her husband’s recent dementia diagnosis, saying: ‘This is my life now.’
Police initially treated Mr Berman’s death as an accident and it was only after a pathologist raised concerns about his injuries, including a defensive wound to a finger, that a murder investigation was launched.
In a victim personal statement read to the court, Mr Berman’s son, also called Daryl, said his ‘life had changed dramatically’ since his father’s death.
He said he felt ‘cheated and deprived’ because he had ‘not been able to say goodbye to him properly (which) will always be hard to swallow’.
Mr Berman’s daughter Debbie Davis also said his death had left a ‘massive void.’
‘I feel like I am living in my own nightmare or a television programme because things like this are not normal,’ she said.
Police investigators at the Bermans’ £500,000 detached home in Prestwich, Manchester
David Berman, pictured at a family celebration, suffered a fatal chest wound near to his armpit
Daryl Berman was convicted of murdering her husband David after 27 years of marriage
Giving evidence at her trial, Berman, the daughter of a wealthy textile merchant, claimed that, at around 2pm on March 13, she heard her husband ‘stumble’ and rushed in to find him face down on the floor with ‘globules’ of blood spreading around him.
She said Mr Berman – who had only retired six months earlier from his job as a self-employed joiner – had been carrying her lunch tray back to the kitchen when he fell.
He must have fallen on the sharp 12cm paring knife which she had put with her meal to cut her salad so it didn’t ‘squish all over the place’, she claimed.
In a 999 call played to the court, Berman was heard telling the operator, who asked her what happened: ‘I don’t know.
‘I was in the other room. He’s carried a tray in.
‘And all I can see is the tray. I think there was a knife I don’t know whether the little knife that was there has gone into him and stabbed him.
‘I really don’t know what happened.’
During the same call, Berman said her husband ‘slipped’ and that ‘blood is coming from his mouth’.
When paramedics arrived, they found Mr Berman on the kitchen floor, with the tray, the paring knife and a broken plate next to him, the jury heard.
Attempts were made to resuscitate him but he was pronounced dead around 40 minutes later.
The court heard that Berman also called Ms Davis, who had seen her father earlier in the day when he accompanied her and his granddaughter to a soft play centre, and told her: ‘I don’t know if your dad’s dead or alive and there’s blood everywhere.’
Ms Davis recalled ‘screaming’ after seeing her stricken father being worked on by paramedics and seeing so much blood in the kitchen ‘it was like an abattoir’.
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A jury last year was unable to reach a verdict, but following a retrial last month Mrs Berman was convicted of his murder.
Mr Berman, whose father was killed in action in Egypt during the Second World War, had been married twice before.
He has a daughter and a son by his first marriage.
David Berman ran his own joinery business from when he was a teenager until he turned 84
He wed third wife Daryl Berman – also previously married – in 1997 after the pair met on a blind date, with the marriage described as seemingly ‘loving and mutually supportive’.
Berman had worked in a fine arts shop, then as a dental nurse before working in the fashion industry in a wholesale showroom, the trial heard.
Mr Berman retired aged 84 in September 2024, telling the Jewish Telegraph the decision was based on his health ‘and the fact that work was not coming in as it used to’.
He said joinery work ran in the family but was no longer seen as a job for a Jewish boy ‘as it is too manual’.
Neighbours in Butterstile Lane, a tree-lined street of 1930s detached and semi-detached houses, described him as ‘kind-hearted’, saying they would regularly see him going to buy a newspaper.
‘He was a gentleman, he was really lovely,’ said local Debora Strong, who has lived in the area for over 40 years.
By contrast his wife would ‘keep her distance’, one resident told the Daily Mail, and would ‘hide behind the front door while she was talking – you didn’t see her’.
They spoke of their ‘shock’ at seeing scenes of crime officers sealing off the couple’s detached home days after his sudden death.
Mr Berman was in good everyday health, the trial was told, although he had been diagnosed with dementia, used a walking stick and had been suffering with ‘shortness of breath’.
After being arrested on suspicion of murder, Mrs Berman told detectives they both had lunch in the lounge before her husband offered to take her tray into the kitchen.
‘And he obviously walked into the kitchen, and I heard what sounded like a stumble or a fall,’ she said.
‘And straight away I said, ‘Oh my God, David, what’s wrong?’.
‘He said: ‘It’s okay, I’ve slipped’.
‘And I sort of almost immediately heard another sort of bang, and a sort of groan.
‘So I got up. I screamed and I ran into the kitchen. And I found him face down.
‘He was making the most peculiar sound, I sort of looked down, moved his head a bit.
‘And I thought ‘What on earth is all this gravy? We don’t have gravy’.
‘And it was the amount of blood, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.
‘I got the shock of my life because I didn’t know where it was coming from. I just… I just couldn’t understand.
‘And I was screaming, I said ‘David, David’… I said ‘You can’t go like this’.’
Asked by her barrister Michael Hayton KC if she had ‘murdered your husband of 27 years’, Berman replied: ‘Why would I do that to the man I love? No.’
‘How do you explain how he came to die?’ he asked.
‘I have absolutely no idea, I wasn’t in the room,’ Berman said, before adding that his death was ‘the worst day of my life’.
She described her husband as ‘very kind, very stubborn, and a lovely guy’.
‘Nobody had a bad word to say about him,’ she added.
Mr Berman had suffered a single horizontal stab wound to the right side of the chest up to 12cm (one inch) deep.
Forensic pathologist Dr Philip Lumb told the court the force required to cause the injury would have been ‘severe’.
He said an ‘accidental fatal injury is rare’ and the blade would have needed to have been ‘fixed’ in place to have penetrated his chest.
He said the wound was ‘likely to be homicidal due to the injury to the chest’ as well as the ‘defensive’ injury to his right middle finger.’
‘Plainly, putting the two injuries together, I thought it was inconceivable that they were anything other than a homicide,’ Dr Lumb added.
Under cross-examination, the pathologist accepted it was ‘not impossible’ that either injury taken separately could have been sustained by accident.
Giving evidence for the defence, forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd – who told jurors he had worked on the investigation into the death of Princess Diana and the murder of Stephen Lawrence – said he ‘could not exclude accident or homicide’.
The finger injury was in the ‘wrong place’ to be ‘defensive’, he added.
Dr Shepherd said it was possible that Mr Berman had fallen to the floor whilst carrying the tray and the knife, before picking up the knife in his right hand and then falling again as he tried to get up.
Had Mrs Berman stabbed her husband it would be likely that this would be inflicted with ‘less force’ due to their height difference, he added.
However, under cross-examination he accepted the circumstances were ‘unusual and difficult’.
The court heard there was no history of domestic violence in the couple’s marriage.
