Twenty eight year old Staffordshire housewife Kate Knight has been found guilty of attempted murder after a botched attempt to poison her husband Lee left him partially paralysed, deaf and blind.
Cold-hearted Knight administered anti-freeze to her husband’s wine on their seventh wedding anniversary. He became unwell shortly after drinking the wine and spent 16 weeks in a coma and hospitalised for a total of six months. He is now registered deaf and blind, has some paralysis and has permanent damage to his kidneys requiring dialysis three times a week. He has also recently had cochlear implants installed to help him communicate more easily.
Knight planned the attempted murder for some months before she poisoned her husband and used the internet to research the best substance to use to kill him. Initially, she thought of using crushed ecstacy or iron tablets, but it was anti-freeze, containing the lethal chemical ethylene glycol, that became her preferred murder method.
She first added the anti-freeze to his takeaway curry but 37-year-old husband Lee complained that it tasted “tinny” so she then poured it into his red wine. The unsuspecting husband couldn’t detect the poison in his drink and the next thing he remembers is waking up 16 weeks later in hospital to be told by his mum what had happened.
What prompted the murder attempt was that unbeknown to Lee Knight his wife had taken out bank loans totalling £17,000 and remortgaged the family home by forging his signature. As a result the couple were in severe financial difficulty without him knowing, and furthermore she was unhappy in her marriage.
But, rather than thinking of taking out a debt consolidation loan and working at making her marriage work, Knight decided that the murder of her husband would solve all her problems at once. A life insurance policy courtesy of Lee’s employer would pay out £250,000 leaving her to enjoy a new debt-free life.
However, her planning rather bizarrely included asking her neighbour if she knew any hit men and asking if she could smell anti-freeze in a glass of wine. Naturally, her neighbour thought she was joking but when Lee Knight was admitted to hospital she suspected Kate had actually been serious, and told the police. They searched the house and found a bottle of anti-freeze in the kitchen from which 160mls had been used. Knight later admitted that she read on the internet that 140mls of anti-freeze had been enough to kill someone and when added to wine could not be tasted.
Kate Knight has been told by her trial judge that she “will inevitably go to prison for a long time.” even though she wasn’t successful in her attempt to kill her husband. And as a post script, in a recent case from the USA, Georgia resident Julia Lynn Turner was recently convicted of murdering TWO husbands by using the ‘anti-freeze in the wine’ method. Gruesome!
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