Hairdresser who said she stabbed husband in heart by accident guilty of murder
Hull Crown Court heard Teresa Hanson lashed out after he shouted: ‘I didn’t f***ing want tea. Chuck it in the f***ing bin.’
A hairdresser who claimed she accidentally stabbed her husband through the heart during a kitchen row sobbed in the dock as she was found guilty of his murder.
Teresa Hanson, 54, was making a Mediterranean tart when she fatally wounded Paul Hanson, also 54, at their home in West Cowick, East Yorkshire, three days after Christmas last year.
Hull Crown Court heard she lashed out after Mr Hanson called her a ‘bitch’ and shouted: ‘I didn’t f***ing want tea. Chuck it in the f***ing bin.’
Hanson told jurors she forgot she was still holding a knife when she pushed him away and went straight back to slicing the onions ready to be caramelised before spotting a trail of blood.
Giving evidence, the mum-of-two admitted feeling ‘angry’ and ‘upset’, but insisted: ‘I didn’t know I had [stabbed him].
‘I attempted to push him away from me when he was walking in because I didn’t want him to shout at me.
‘He was coming towards me and I just wanted him to go away. I just turned and pushed him. I don’t even know how it happened.’
Alistair MacDonald KC rubbished Hanson’s account as a ‘lie’, telling jurors: ‘Injuries like that simply don’t happen.’
He added: ‘Probably of what he said to her she lost her temper with him and stabbed him in the chest in anger as a result.’
Mr MacDonald asked: ‘Does she really expect you to believe that she failed completely to notice that her husband, who must have been just a few paces away, was bent double moving away from her?
‘She didn’t notice any of that. She just went on calmly cooking onions with the same knife.
‘Is it credible that in his death agony as he moved out of that kitchen that she said absolutely nothing? He didn’t sigh, groan or gasp – didn’t say “Teresa, what have you done to me?”
‘He just walked out of the kitchen, she said, she didn’t realise anything was wrong.’
Mr MacDonald said it was also difficult to understand how this happened in the way Hanson described when she is 155cm tall and the knife entered her husband’s body 129cm above the ground.
The prosecutor said the pathologist who examined the body concluded that it was ‘highly unlikely that Mr Hanson simply walked on to a weakly grasped knife blade so as to cause a fatal stab wound of the type found in this case’.
Mr MacDonald said Hanson told the police that her husband could be bad-tempered when he had had a drink but she was clear that she did not stab her husband because he had been abusive to her.
‘Her case was quite clearly put on the basis that this was a terrible accident,’ he said.
On Thursday, Hanson sobbed in the dock as the jury foreman said she was guilty of murder after less than three hours’ deliberations.
This was the second time Hanson had gone on trial. A different jury failed to reach a verdict earlier this year.
Judge John Thackray KC told Hanson she will be sentenced on October 3 and remanded her in custody.
The defendant continued to sob as the judge said to her: ‘There’s only one sentence, which is life imprisonment.
‘I have to calculate the minimum term which I will do having heard submissions from prosecution and defence counsel.’
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