Woman stabbed husband to death day before 30th wedding anniversary after row over unmade bed

A woman stabbed her husband to death just a day before their 30th wedding anniversary after he complained to her about an unmade bed.

Lesley Culley, 58, had returned home after dropping off food for their anniversary party at the Old Bank Pub in Oldham.

Just hours later she stabbed Anthony Culley, 56, to death at the home they shared.

Prosecutors at Manchester Crown Court say she attacked Mr Culley with ‘severe force’ - against a backdrop of mental illness - after Mr Culley complained about the bed being unmade.

She has now admitted manslaughter and is expected to be sentenced on Tuesday morning, reports the Manchester Evening News.

The defence say Mrs Culley was ‘in fear’ of her husband after years of ‘domestic problems’.

On the afternoon of December 8, eleven days before they were due to celebrate thirty years of marriage, Lesley Culley dropped off a bag of food at the Old Bank pub for the landlady to put aside for the party.

Anthony Culley turned up shortly afterwards, and they spent a couple of hours drinking, during which time Mrs Culley sang some karaoke, apparently in a good mood.

Mrs Culley would later tell police they left after she drank a bottle of wine, by which time Mr Culley had had ten pints.

At 7.15pm neighbours heard an argument. Minutes later Mrs Culley had called 999, saying her husband had ‘collapsed bleeding from his shoulder’, but she didn’t know what he had done to injure himself.

Arriving officers heard Mrs Culley screaming from behind a door. They found Mr Culley motionless, face down in a pool of blood on the living room floor. He had been stabbed to the chest, with a wound to his forearm suggesting he had tried to defend himself. Mrs Culley was found ‘curled up in a ball’ on a downstairs bedroom floor.

Mrs Culley has since said she and her husband argued on the way home from the pub, and that he was ‘abusive’ to her over the bed being unmade when they got back. She said she had ‘smacked him in the face’ in the past, but asked further whether Mr Culley had been abusive that night or made any threats towards her, she gave a ‘no comment’ answer.

Psychiatric opinion is that she was in the midst of a ‘manic episode’ – which limited her ability to exercise self-control, when she attacked Mr Culley - the court heard.

John Harrison, defending, said Anthony Culley had been Mrs Culley’s second husband, and that in 2004, they moved to Cyprus where she worked as a cleaner and he worked as a printer.

Mr Harrison said their problems began seven years later, when Mrs Culley’s son Anthony suffered life-changing injury in a car accident – nine months after his brother Stephen died in ‘tragic circumstances’, forcing the couple to return to the UK.

Mr Harrison said: “The domestic problems had been over a long period – years rather than months. They do appear to have changed in character, becoming progressively more violent over the course of the year preceding the fatal incident.

“It isn’t a short period of provocation, we say it’s much longer”, he said. Speaking of the stabbing, he added: “We say the defendant’s reaction is motivated by fear, and that fear can only be understood in the context of the history of the relationship. We submit there’s an instant reaction to the situation she found herself in, she perceived a repetition of earlier aggression, and she acted to stop it. It’s tragic – a tragic family history.”