By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A 57 year-old UK woman is on trial for killing her 22 year-old disabled son while out on bail after an earlier attempt on his life.
According to the London Telegraph, Frances Inglis first tried to kill her son Tom two months after the July 2007 accident that left him brain damaged. At the time, she injected him with enough heroin to cause a cardiac arrest, but he survived. While out on bail for his attempted murder, Mrs. Inglis snuck into the nursing home on Nov. 21, 2008 and injected him with a lethal dose of heroin.
During the trial, which is taking place now in London, her younger son, Alexander, said that his mother seemed to be driven insane by the thought that Tom was in constant pain.
“She was constantly frantic and crying and just in a crazy state. You couldn’t speak to her,” he told jurors. “She almost seemed to be insane. Her wish was that Tom would be dead, and at peace.”
He said his mother believed Tom would be in “constant pain 24 hours a day” for the rest of his life and thought he should have been left to die after the accident.
“She said that he shouldn’t have been resuscitated, that he should have died naturally, that they shouldn’t have been messing around with his brain to keep him alive,” he told the court.
He also claimed that she often spoke about wanting to “do something” to end Tom’s life and had used the internet to research euthanasia. His father suspected that she might try to kill Tom and warned hospital staff about it just two days before the first failed attempt.
Shortly before the second attempt on his life, the family was considering applying for a court order to be allowed to withdraw Tom’s feeding tube and allow him to die naturally.
The court was told that Mrs. Inglis thought this approach was “horrific” and “sick.”
A few days later, she went to the nursing home and gained access to Tom by pretending to be his aunt. While there, she injected him with a lethal dose of street heroin.
Mrs. Inglis claims she is not guilty of murder or attempted murder.
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