82-YEAR-OLD HUSBAND JAILED FOR STABBING HIS WIFE AFTER SAYING HE 'COULDN'T GO ON ANYMORE'
An 82-year-old husband was suffering from a stress-related condition when he stabbed his wife and attempted to take his own life, a court has heard.Nottingham Crown Court heard while suffering from "adjustment disorder" he stabbed her in the chest twice with a kitchen knife and injured himself.
She phoned emergency services and said "I'm going to be dead before you come" and "I'm bleeding to death".
The woman, 83, survived the attack, and her husband was sentenced to two years after he pleaded guilty to trying to kill her.
Judge Gregory Dickinson QC, the Recorder of Nottingham, told Hodgkinson, who listened through a hearing loop in the dock: "This case is, in equal measure, very serious and sad".
He said fortunately the knife did not reach her heart, "but your aim was to kill her".
Hodgkinson, a retired forester, lived with his wife on the Thoresby Estate and they "loved each other and still do", said the judge.
The couple had been offered a bungalow on the estate - a move that would see them downsizing - but the upheaval troubled Mr Hodgkinson.
At the same time, his wife had been in hospital.
When she returned home, there was a greater responsibility on him.
One of his daughters said he could not see a way forward and did not like the fact he was old.
The judge said: "Your wife was shouting at you and you snapped.
You told the doctor you stabbed as hard as you could.
Your wife was screaming and pushing away and she was fighting for her life".
The woman said in a statement "he was not right and should not have done it" and "I still love John, as I have in all our years together, and I don't want to take any particular side".
Hodgkinson has served in the RAF, had been on the estate for 39 years, and was a proud man and is "bitterly sorry for what he has done".
