The trial of a woman accused of the murder and attempted murder of her young sons came to a halt on Friday after she admitted to the crimes.
At Antrim Crown Court, defence counsel Kieran Mallon QC had been set to begin calling defence evidence but he instead told Judge Patricia Smyth he was not in a position to “present evidence of diminished responsibility” and was therefore asking for the two charges to be put to the defendant again.
Sitting in the dock beside her solicitor, the 41-year-old accused pleaded guilty to murdering her son (2½) and the attempted murder of his brother (11 months).
Judge Smyth thanks the jury of seven men and five women for their service in the “harrowing and particularly distressing trial” and instructed the foreman to record a verdict of “guilty by confession”.
“You have pleaded guilty to the murder of your son and also to the attempted murder of your other son and the only sentence that I can impose is one of life imprisonment,” she told the accused.
The judge explained that once various reports have been compiled she would set the minimum period that the mother-of-four must spend in jail before she can even be considered for release on licence by the Parole Commission.
The 10-day trial heard that March 2nd, 2020 began like any other Monday in the home with members of the family up early and having left for school and work by 9am.
The boys’ father said he “kissed the boys and told them I loved them” before going work but would soon receive a call from the defendant asking if they “could talk” and when he suggested leaving the issue until after he finished work, she sent him a text message saying “f*** you”.
Within 20 minutes of that, she sent had a series of messages saying she had killed the children and was dying too.
Calling for an ambulance as a work colleague drove him home, the man forced open the locked front door and with paramedics following close behind, ran upstairs to his bedroom to find his fiancé and his two sons on a bloodied bed with a 6-inch vegetable paring knife lying close by.
“I think once I seen my son was lifeless and his little brother started making noises, I just collapsed on the floor,” he told the jury.
The jury heard that the accused, a nurse, stabbed the 2½-year-old and severed an artery and a vein which led to a “fairly rapid death”. His younger brother was millimetres from suffering the same fate and that the accused was taken to hospital by the air ambulance as she had stabbed herself and taken a drug overdose, the trial heard.
She had written a series of notes that morning, declaring: “I’m doing this to hurt the ones who have hurt me and the one who is continuing to hurt me.”
Another said: “I’m taking my kids with me because I can’t leave them with their dad...please understand I LOVE my kids; I REALLY don’t want to do this; I don’t want to do this but I feel I have no choice.”
The jury were told at the start of the trial there was no dispute about who caused the injuries but rather their job would be to determine whether or not the defendant was suffering from such a significant abnormality of mind that her decision-making, judgement and appreciation of the consequences were significantly impaired.
In relation to that issue, the jury heard background evidence from the boys’ father and the defendant’s ex-husband as well as her two teenage children, who all said the defendant could be violent and aggressive.
During the police interviews, the woman claimed her last memory before waking up in a hospital intensive care unit was being in the playroom with the two boys “their wee faces playing happily,” repeatedly claiming she could not remember anything in between.
The detectives put to her that she had planned to drug the two little boys, drug herself, text her fiancée, pen several notes, take the boys and a knife upstairs to the bedroom and stab them in their necks and abdomen in a “calculated way,” knowing from her nursing training where to inflict the wounds.
“No, no, I would not even have dreamt of it,” she told police.