A woman from Milton Keynes called the police on her mother after she heard her stab her husband over the phone, a murder trial has heard.

Christine Rawle, 70, asked her husband Ian, 72, to help her muck out the horses at their home in North Devon before knifing him between the shoulder blades on August 21, 2022, prosecutors say.

Rawle, who had picked up the knife to cut some cord to tie up the gates, as her husband had asked her to, was on the phone to her adult daughter who lives in Milton Keynes, when she attacked him.

Prosecutor Sean Brunton KC said Rawle’s daughter heard the couple arguing during a 10-minute phone call leading up to the incident.

Exeter Crown Court heard yesterday, Tuesday, February 27, that Rawle told her daughter over the phone: “I’ve stabbed him.”

Jurors were told Rawles’ daughter hung up the call and immediately phoned Thames Valley Police and the South Central Ambulance Service. The emergency services then tried to make contact with Rawles, but she did not initially answer their calls.

The 70-year-old went on to make a 28-second phone call to one of her best friends, asking her to ‘sort her dogs out’.

Mr Brunton told the jury she then ran away shouting, ‘Help me help me’ while her husband followed her, asking her to remove the knife.

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He said: “At some point, he collapses in the garden, and she doesn’t take the knife out straight away. She puts the dogs away, calls her friend, then takes the knife out and puts it under the stable door.

“She stabbed her husband between the shoulder blades. It punctured between the ribs, and he bled into his chest cavity, which caused cardiac arrest. The knife was 10 cm into his back, which caused a collapsed lung.”

When police arrived at the scene, Rawle told officers: “I took his life because he was horrible to me. It was continuous. I wanted out.”

She also said: “He wasn’t sexually capable, he had a prostate issue, he used to blame me and tell me I’m not attractive. He didn’t want children, he made me get sterilised.”

Mr Brunton alleged that the claims were the defendant “trying to justify to the police – and maybe to herself – what she had done.

“She was 42 when they got together, and she already had three children from a previous relationship. Did she sound like she wanted to have children with him? Could he have made her get sterilised?”

When asked by police if she stabbed her husband, she said: “I suppose I must have done, but I can’t remember. I thought I’d cut his shirt, I thought I’d thrown down the knife. I didn’t realise (I’d stabbed him). He was my world.”

Rawle denies murder and the case continues.