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A 66-year-old woman who stabbed her husband of 24 years to death told a 999 operator ‘I thought I’d get his heart but he hasn’t got one’, a court has heard.
Penelope Jackson knifed her husband David, 78, three times in the kitchen of their home on Parsonage Road, in Berrow, Somerset, on February 13 this year following a row over a row over an iPad charger.
The victim managed to call emergency services and told the operator his wife had stabbed him, and can be heard screaming in pain as Jackson allegedly drove the knife into him for the final time.
Retired accountant Penelope Jackson, 65, pictured right, has been charged with murdering her husband David, left, at their Somerset home in February this year
Jackson herself then took over the call, and calmly told the call handler: ‘I’ve killed my husband, or tried to, because I’ve had enough.’
When asked where he was, she replied: ‘He’s in the kitchen bleeding to death with any luck.’
Mrs Jackson’s son-in-law, Jeremy Mullins, said the couple had been in the kitchen when the argument initially began.
He said: ‘It was one of those petty rows, apparently over a phone charger for an iPad.
The couple are thought to have moved into their Somerset home eight years ago, and in December last year police were called to their address after a row about a remote control
‘They both wanted to charge up their devices and there was only one charger, so they started rowing about who could use it first.’
On the first day of her murder trial at Bristol Crown Court on Monday, the jury heard Jackson repeatedly refusing to help the victim when a 999 call handler asked her to take steps such as apply pressure to the wound or throw him a towel to try and stem the bleeding.
Prosecutor Christopher Quinlan QC said: ‘[Mrs Jackson] was calm and resolute and perhaps in places resigned and, in her words, not mine, “compos mentis”.’
In an 18-minute phone call while police and paramedics headed for the scene, she said: ‘I thought I’d got his heart but he hasn’t got one, then twice in the abdomen.’
She added: ‘His abdomen is buggered.’
Mrs Jackson told the 999 operator: ‘I’ve killed my husband, or tried to, because I’ve had enough’ and refused to help him when the call handler asked her to take steps to stem the bleeding
Mr Quinlan said: ‘[Mrs Jackson] will accept [Mr Jackson’s] unlawful killing or his manslaughter but she denies her guilt properly answers his murder.’
In the call, which was played in full to the jury, Jackson can be heard calmly telling the operator her husband is ‘moaning on the kitchen floor’, adding ‘he’s got some holes in him’.
The phone call of the tragic incident was shown to the jury at Bristol Crown Court in full, which hears retired chartered accountant Jackson tell the 999 operator ‘He deserves everything he gets’
When she is asked to pass him a clean dry cloth, she replies: ‘I’m not helping him, the paramedics can help him but I’m not.’
Jackson tells the call handler she stabbed him because ‘He thought I couldn’t go through with it’.
She adds: ‘He’s a total s***.’
The defendant then says ‘He deserves everything he gets’, adding ‘I’ll accept everything that’s coming my way’.
Following her arrest, as she was being led to the police car, she told officers: ‘I know what I’ve done and, if I’ve not done it properly, I’ll be really annoyed.’
The court heard that the victim was Jackson’s fourth husband and she was his third wife, and that they had married in 1996. The pair share a daughter together.
Victim: David Jackson served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force where he met his third and final wife Penelope, who was an administrator, also in the Force
The defendant had worked in administration and accounts in the Royal Air Force and later the army, where she met the victim who had worked his way up from private to lieutenant colonel.
Before settling in Somerset, the couple had lived in Germany and France and their friends had described them as ‘happy together’.
One friend told police their relationship was ‘nothing out of the ordinary’, while another said: ‘They would occasionally disagree and argue and bicker, but it never lasted long’.
David was Penelope’s fourth husband, who she married in 1996, and before settling in Somerset the pair had lived in Germany and France together
But in late December 2020, police were called to their address following a row over a TV remote control.
After the tragic attack in February, shocked neighbours of the Jacksons said they had ‘never heard a cross word’ exchanged between the couple.
Locals from the couple’s home town of Berrow, near Weston-super-Mare, told of the couple’s love of gardening at the £300,000 detached bungalow they shared in a cul-de-sac.
The £300,000 cul-de-sac bungalow was home to the Jackson’s, who had been married for 24 years before wife Penelope stabbed her husband David to death
One neighbour, who asked to remain anonymous, said: ‘They were the perfect neighbours.
‘They were always friendly, didn’t make a lot of noise and I literally never heard a raised voice or cross word between them.
‘They loved gardening and were out there night and day, working away.
‘I don’t know what has happened. The first I heard was when the police and an ambulance arrived on Saturday. It is such a shame.’
Officers were called to Berrow in Somerset at 9.15pm on February 13 this year after paramedics reported a male had been seriously injured
One neighbour described the pair as the ‘perfect’ neighbours: ‘They were always friendly, didn’t make a lot of noise and I literally never heard a raised voice or cross word between them’
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 the poker from their wood burning stove.
She claimed he had been acting out of character following an operation to replace the battery in a deep brain implant used to manage a condition that caused his hands and limbs to tremble.
The trial, which is expected to last three weeks, continues.
Source: DailyMail
