I Didn't Mean To Kill My Wife, Says Murder Accused - Crime - Nairaland
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| I Didn't Mean To Kill My Wife, Says Murder Accused by Recognise: 12:10am On Mar 29, 2009 |
Driven to kill wife by outrageous provocation By Jason O'Brien Saturday March 28 2009 A HUSBAND who stabbed his wife in front of their three children was driven to it by the "most outrageous act of provocation" in the family home, his defence counsel maintained yesterday. The jury in the murder trial of David Bourke will resume its deliberations on Monday morning after failing to reach a verdict at the Dublin Central Criminal Court yesterday. Earlier, in closing arguments, the jury had been told that Mr Bourke (49) admitted he stabbed Jean Gilbert (46) to death in August 2007, but that he did so under severe provocation because she was going to leave him for another man. Mr Bourke has pleaded not guilty to murder. After three hours of deliberations, Mr Justice Barry White told the jury yesterday evening that he would accept a majority verdict of 10-2 or 11-1. However, the jury still had not reached a verdict following another hour of deliberations and was called back in at 7.30pm. Defending counsel Colm Smyth had earlier said that Mr Bourke, an administrator for Hibernian Aviva Insurance, had been "transformed" from a decent family man into "a broken man" when he first found out, in June 2007, that his wife was going to leave him for Robert Campion, whom she had first met on a Buddhist retreat almost two decades earlier. Mr Smyth said that letters and emails from Mr Campion to Ms Gilbert -- which were left easily accessible to Mr Bourke in the family home -- made Mr Campion out to be a "classless, ageing, half-Italian gigolo". Preying He was preying on Jean Gilbert, and eager to access her finances, said Mr Smyth, adding that the correspondence had a "devastating" effect on Mr Bourke. The final straw was a meal which Ms Gilbert had with her lover in the kitchen of the family home at Laverna Dale in Castleknock, Dublin, on August 26, 2007, two nights before she was killed. Their dirty plates were found by Mr Bourke. "This has to be the most outrageous act of provocation that one could possibly imagine," Mr Smyth said. "It was an act of defiance." Mr Bourke, sitting in the dock with some of his siblings behind him, began audibly sobbing at this point. Mr Smyth continued, saying that "whatever saplings of recovery were emerging" in Mr Bourke's life at that time -- he had been in counselling and been prescribed anti-depressants which made him ill -- they were "crushed by that callous, reckless act". Two days later, Mrs Gilbert was killed in that same house, after returning from an early morning meeting with Mr Campion. She was stabbed four times with a knife as her three young children looked on. "He will be punished severely," Mr Smyth said. "But David Bourke did not murder his wife. He is guilty of manslaughter." In her closing statement, prosecuting counsel Isobel Kennedy argued that in order for a defence of provocation, there had to be a total loss of self-control. Mr Bourke had known for 10 weeks before Ms Gilbert's death that his wife was going to leave him, she said. He had told gardai that he had wanted to hurt her as she had hurt him, and had sent a text to a colleague on the night before her death saying that he hated her and would have killed her had he not left the house. Mr Justice Barry White said that finding Mr Bourke guilty of manslaughter or guilty of murder were the only two realistic options open to the jury. After one hour and 40 minutes of deliberations, the jury returned and asked to hear the transcripts of the 999 call made by Mr Bourke on the morning of the killing, and the statements given by two of the couple's three young children. SOURCE: Click here |
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