Husband let wife starve to death

Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 8:05 am Post subject: Husband let wife starve to death

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/7318610.stm

Husband let wife starve to death

William Pottinger admitted the manslaughter of his wife
A 71-year-old man has been jailed for allowing his mentally ill wife to starve to death while he went to the pub and visited the bookmakers.

William Pottinger's wife Gillian, 61, died on a flea-ridden couch in June 2006 weighing four-and-a-half stone.

Pottinger, of Newtown, Berkshire, had pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Jailing him for 18 months, the judge said it was "extraordinary" that an incident such as this could have happened in 21st Century Britain.

Judge Christopher Tyrer described it as an "horrific" case, and said: "You allowed your wife to starve to death.

"She began to significantly deteriorate from about the year 2000.

"She last went outside in about 2003, she totally lost the ability to look after herself and she lay on a sofa and wasted away. Her suffering must have lasted months.

"Her death was in squalid and degrading circumstances and the pain and the stress that she suffered for the months before she actually died doesn't bear thinking about."

Extreme self-neglect

Reading Crown Court heard Mrs Pottinger, who lived in Beecham Road with her husband, had been suffering from a condition known as Senile Squalor Syndrome, a behavioural disorder characterised by extreme self-neglect.