10:32am Monday 8th February 2010
By Andy Carswell
A 41-YEAR-OLD who slashed his ex-partner's wrist before twice trying to strangle her has been jailed for 14 years.
Mark Messenger attacked Jane Andrews at their former home in Rugwood Road, Flackwell Heath, after going there with the intention of killing himself.
He asked Miss Andrews to write a suicide note for him – but Reading Crown Court heard on Friday Messenger turned on his ex-partner when she confronted him about the contents of the note.
Describing the attack, which took place in the early hours of September 16 after Messenger entered the property through a window, prosecutor Alan Blake told the court: “She was asleep on the sofa in her living room. She was woken by her ex-partner.
“With his hand over her mouth, he told her 'I have come here to kill myself. I didn't realise you were here'.
“He pulled her up and directed her to the bathroom upstairs. There, he gave her some paper and a pen and asked her to help write a suicide note.
“As he dictated the message, which included an allegation of her telling so many lies, she formed the view he was trying to make her write her own suicide note and confronted him about it.
“He produced a blade and grabbed her left hand and made a deep cut across her left wrist. It was so deep it exposed the tendons.”
Messenger then pushed Miss Andrews into the shower unit and held her injured arm under the hot water, which Mr Blake said could have caused the injury to become infected.
Mr Blake continued: “He grabbed her and pulled her towards the light pull cord, which he wrapped twice around her neck. She managed to get two fingers into the noose so she could breathe.
“He told her to stop struggling and he would release the cord. He retained his grip with the cord around her neck and continued to pull until it broke and fell to the floor. He tried to strangle her with his hands and Miss Andrews believed he was going to kill her.”
Messenger, who admitted attempted murder at an earlier hearing, was “unnervingly calm throughout” the attack, Mr Blake told the court, adding it was a “relatively protracted affair”.
Messenger left the property at around 9am and was arrested later the same day, but Miss Andrews did not seek medical attention for a few hours afterwards.
The couple had been in a relationship for sixteen years and had three children together.
Messenger was on bail after being accused of an assault occasioning actual bodily harm against Miss Andrews, with the conditions forbidding him to contact her and from going to Rugwood Road.
A pre-sentence report said Messenger posed a “significant risk of serious harm” to members of the public and a “very high risk” to Miss Andrews.
He has ten convictions for 15 offences, including assault occasioning actual bodily harm against Miss Andrews in 1992 and common assault against her sister in 2006.
Daren Samat, defending, said: “No words can truly express quite how sorry he is for what he has done, and it is not just the clang of a prison gate that has made him say that.
“Whatever he did on that night – and what he did wasn't pleasant – it takes a great deal of courage to accept and plead guilty to almost the most serious offence in the criminal calendar.
“He didn't intend to go and find her. He intended to go and kill himself. It wasn't a deliberate flout of a court order not to see her.”
Jailing Messenger for 14 years, Judge Zoe Smith said: “This was a sustained assault. During it, at various times Miss Andrews thought that she was going to die.
“I take the view you pose a significant risk to the public of your committing further offences which would cause injury.”
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