Controlling husband guilty of attempting to kill Walsall dinner lady
A man who repeatedly stabbed his wife in the street after she left him has been found guilty of trying to kill her.
Dinner-lady Maureen Wedderburn, aged 66, suffered 10 stab wounds to her head and body after husband Hugh attacked her near a school, in West Bromwich Road, Fullbrook, in Walsall, as she walked to work on April 6. After 90 minutes deliberating, a jury at Wolverhampton Crown Court unanimously found Hugh Wedderburn, 67, of Delves, guilty of attempted murder on Thursday.
Giving evidence previously, Mrs Wedderburn who recovered from her injuries, described to the jury that she made a decision to leave her husband of 40 years due to his controlling and obsessive behaviour. She told the court he had wrongly accused her of having an affair with a man called ‘Vincent’.
She said she had had enough of his paranoid behaviour and moved in with their daughter. Wedderburn, of Newbolt Street, Delves, had been waiting for her in West Bromwich Road at 7.50am and asked her to come back to him.
When she refused he stabbed her with a kitchen knife in front of horrified passers-by on their way to work and children on their way to school. Wedderburn claimed he had intended to injured his ex.
Mrs Wedderburn told the court: “When he was stabbing me I just kept on thinking ‘why, why, why would someone do this who has known me so long’. And I thought ‘he is going to kill me’ but I fought back, which he did not expect.”
The jury found him guilty of trying to kill her, agreeing with the prosecution’s case that the fact he was able to cause her grave injury with a modest weapon spoke “very powerfully” to his state of mind at the time of the stabbing.
And that he was an obsessive controlling man who could not accept that his wife had her life to lead and could no longer be subjected to his abuse.
He will be sentenced next week.
