Man! I Feel Like A Murder
Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 11:46 am
Ooer.
Husband killed as wife danced to Shania Twain song holding shotgun
A woman yesterday told a jury how she had accidentally shot her husband dead while dancing to a CD by the country and pop music singer Shania Twain as the couple prepared to have sex.
Linda West, 49, denies murdering her husband of nine weeks, Gregory West, 45, as he sat in a chair at their flat in Southampton last May. The blast hit Mr West in the heart, killing him instantly.
The crown alleges she killed him after a row, which was overheard by neighbours. But at Winchester crown court yesterday, Mrs West used a wooden replica of a shotgun to show jurors how the weapon had "accidentally" gone off while she danced to the Shania Twain song, Man! I Feel Like a Woman.
Mrs West told the court that she and her husband, whom she had married nine weeks earlier, had both been drunk, and she had been trying to sexually arouse him. She said she put the song on, picked up the shotgun, and began dancing.
Grabbing hold of the wooden replica, Mrs West explained that she banged the gun on the floor at the end of the song so as to "take a bow", but the weapon went off, killing her husband.
Tearfully, she told the jury: "I had the gun in front of me and I was dancing with the gun to that CD. When the CD ended I went like that, [she motioned that she banged the gun on to the floor], like to take a bow, and the gun went off.
"I tried to wake him. He would not wake up. I was saying, 'Gregory, please wake up'. I was hitting him around the face trying to move him, shouting, 'Wake up, wake up'."
Asked by her defence counsel, Nigel Pascoe QC, how the gun came to be loaded, Mrs West said she did not know.
The court had heard earlier that Mrs West had deliberately loaded the double- barrelled weapon belonging to her husband and shot him at close range after a heated row throughout the evening of May 9, which was overheard by several neighbours.
After the shot was fired she called 999 and said: "Oh my God, I've shot him," Michael Vere-Hodge QC told the jury.
Mr Vere-Hodge, for the crown, said: "She was hysterical. She said, 'What have I done? We have only been married nine weeks. It was just a game'."
But Mr Vere-Hodge said that Mr West had several facial injuries consistent with him being attacked and that his wife had taken the gun from the bedroom and shot him, and that she had immediately regretted it.
He told the jury she knew how to use the gun and had shown her children how it had worked.
The court also heard that when the gun was examined by an expert he had found that the safety catch did not work, and if the gun was dropped, it could go off.
The mother of three, who works as a carer, said the couple had had a nice time that evening and that their sex life became "less inhibited" when her husband was drunk.
She denies murder and an alternative count of manslaughter.
The case was adjourned until today.