A world-renowned dog breeder who smothered his wife to death with a pillow has told a jury she asked him to kill her because she thought she was dying of cancer, writes Ted Davenport.

Stephen Parsons says he had a suicide pact with his wife Erica, who had run their English Pointer breeding business with him for 50 years.

Parsons killed his wife with a pillow, cut his arms with a craft knife and sent messages to friends telling them that they would be dead by the end of the day on February 11 last year.

He told a jury that Erica had pleaded with him to kill her and that he had let her down by not completing his side of the pact. He said he still wants to die and added: “She is at peace and I am in hell.”

He was found semi-conscious by a neighbour who he had asked to come and look after his four horses and 21 dogs at their £1.5 million thatched farmhouse on the edge of Dartmoor.

Parsons, aged 71, and his wife Erica, aged 69, were in serious debt and he told Exeter Crown Court that his wife was convinced that she was dying of cancer and only had a short time to live.

He is on trial for murder because a post mortem examination showed she did not have cancer, although she was found to have a prolapsed rectum.

The jury have been told that the suicide pact was ‘a façade’ and there is only Parson’s own account that she intended to take her own life. She had been making plans for the 2023 Crufts Show the following month just hours earlier.

Giving evidence, Parsons said: “She had been saying how awful her life was and she could not go on and we should go together. She was not able to take pills because she could not swallow. She kept asking me and pleading with me to help her.

 “When I cut my arms I thought I would bleed out with the help of the tablets I had taken. I wanted to die, the same as I do now. 

 “I promised to go with her and I let her down. I have been a failure. I did not achieve my side of it. The decision had been our decision for both of us to go together.

 “It was not a case of overprotecting her. It was because she kept on about wanting help. She went on and on and on. She had no will to live. She had lost the will to live. She kept on about wanting to die until I agreed we would both go.

 “There is no way I want to be here without her. That was not my decision. In the end I failed her by not doing it. She is at peace and I am in hell.”

Under cross examination, he said his wife had not agreed an exact time when he would initiate the suicide pact by killing her but believed she was drunk and in deep sleep when he did so.

He denied breaking three of her ribs by kneeling on her as he pushed a pillow down onto her face and said that he hugged her after she died.

 Asked if he regretted his actions, he said: “I do not regret that she is at peace but I regret 24 hours a day that I failed to go with her. I failed her because I promised we would go together.”

  Parsons, aged 71, of Cadditon Farm at Bondleigh, near Okehampton, denies murder but has admitted manslaughter, either by reason of a failed suicide pact or through diminished responsibility.

The trial continues