From: Rusty�Bullethole, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Times 20.9.00
Old soldier shot his wife dead as final act of love
BY MICHAEL HORSNELL
AN OLD soldier who could no longer bear to watch
his wife's health decline shot her twice through the head
as she slept, a court heard yesterday.
Leslie Parsons, 83, then turned the revolver on
himself but amazingly survived three shots to the temples.
So he lay on the bed, next to his wife of 62 years, and
fell asleep, not expecting to wake again.
Parsons, a former sergeant, and his wife Dorothy,
88, who was suffering from senile dementia, had been due
to move from their elder daughter's house to a care home.
On his way to hospital, Parsons told ambulancemen
that his wife was "out of her misery" and added: "I
thought it was the best thing for her and me. I thought
it was the only way out."
He then told police: "I loved her dearly. She had
dementia and has got worse. We have to leave here shortly,
and I don't fancy that much. I have this gun. I put two
bullets in her head . . . I am sorry."
Parsons, who had a stroke in 1997 and leant heavily
on a stick to enter the dock at Chelmsford Crown Court,
was put on probation for three years after pleading
guilty to manslaughter on the ground of diminished
responsibility.
Judge Brian Watling, QC, told him: "You loved her
dearly, you did everything for her, you were devoted to
her but your declining health made it clear you could no
longer - either of you - cope.
"That evening you saw the course you took as being
the only possible way out for you both." The couple, from
Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex, met in 1933 when she was 20 and
he was 16.
They married in 1938, shortly before he joined the
Army and later fought in the war. Martyn Levett, for the
defence, said that what Parsons did is "perhaps the very
definition of the word love from beginning to end".
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