A woman who says she “snapped” after spending 40 years as a “sex slave” to her abusive father has been jailed for nine years for killing him with a shovel.
Barbara Coombes, 63, of Reddish, Stockport, plead guilty to manslaughter, preventing a lawful burial and fraud over her father Kenneth’s death in 2006, but denied murder.
She told court psychiatrists that she had been raped “hundreds of times” by her father over a “lifetime” of sexual, mental and physical abuse which began when she was five.
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Martin Heslop QC, representing Coombes, even indicated that her son David, who died as an infant, might have been the product of these incestuous rapes.
Her defence team painted a picture of a lifetime spent under the control of her domineering father, claiming the “timid” defendant had “no friends, no hobbies, had never worked and only rarely left Reddish her whole life”, The Guardian reports.
Coombes told Manchester Crown Court that she “snapped” in January 2006 when she came across a stash of explicit images of children, including photographs of herself, at her father’s Stockport home.
Picking up a shovel she had been using in the garden, she walked into the living room and struck her unsuspecting father on the head with the tool, the court heard.
“When the dazed 87-year-old turned towards her, she struck him a second time, before using the blade of the shovel to slit his throat,” the Manchester Evening News reports.
Coombes wrapped her father’s body in a rug and later buried him in the garden. She told relatives that her father had died of a heart attack and been cremated privately, saying he “wouldn’t have wanted a fuss” to explain the lack of funeral or public announcement.
For the next 12 years, she quietly continued to claim a variety of benefits in her father’s name, amounting to more than £180,000 of fraudulent payments.
However, in January “the scheme unravelled when a welfare officer insisted on seeing Mr Coombes, who by that time would have been 99 years old”, The Independent reports.
The day before the officer’s visit, Coombes walked into Cheadle Heath police station in Stockport and told detectives: “I murdered my father 12 years ago”.
Handing down the sentence, Mr Justice Timothy King said that the alleged history of abuse against the defendant was “devastating”, but said that it could not justify taking a life.
Acknowledging the strength of feeling generated by the case, he said that some members of the public would find a nine-year term “wholly inadequate”, while others may say it was “far too much” in light of the circumstances. “I have no doubt it is an appropriate sentence,” he said.
Speaking outside the court, Greater Manchester Police senior investigating officer Duncan Thorpe, said that Coombes “showed absolutely no concern for what she had done”.
“Despite having years to tell someone what really happened, she only came forward when she had no other choice,” he said.
