Karen Palmer, 47, mouthed ‘sorry’ and made a love heart gesture in court towards her husband, who was subjected to a ‘sadistic’ campaign of domestic abuse for 20 years
A woman who repeatedly stabbed her husband during a “sadistic” 20-year long campaign of abuse has been jailed.
Karen Palmer, 47, mouthed “sorry” and made a love heart gesture towards her victim in court as the horrific details of her abuse were laid bare.
Palmer, believed to have a personality disorder, attacked her husband by punching, kicking or slashing him a blade while calling him “useless and pathetic”. He was forced to superglue and tape his wounds closed to prevent the outside world from finding out.
In March this year, Palmer repeatedly stabbed him with a knife before making him clean up his own blood. She then threatened to finish the job if the mess wasn’t clean by the time she awoke.
Addressing Palmer at Liverpool Crown Court today, a judge said: “This was undoubtedly a case of an appalling history of violence that escalated in seriousness as time progressed. If you continued in this vein this would have resulted in the death of your husband.”
The Palmers had been married since 2006, but the relationship had led the victim to fall out with his family, including his parents and brother, the court heard.
The victim provided for her financially and images taken by the police following Palmer’s arrest showed collections of “high value fashion items” packed into cupboards and “obsessively” arranged, reports the Liverpool Echo.
Christopher Hopkins, prosecuting, described incidents where the victim would go shopping, show Palmer the item through the window of the shop, and then she would transfer him the appropriate amount of money.
The court heard Palmer was jealous of any interaction her husband had with other woman, particularly those he worked with. He told the police it reached the point where he would walk around and look at the floor.
Palmer’s violence came after incidents where she believed her husband had not done something right, the court was told. This could be something as trivial as waking her up when he came to bed.
The victim told how he would treat his own wounds with Gorilla Glue and clingfilm to avoid any outside attention.
Mr Hopkins told the court that during the attack on March 31 this year, the victim tried to shield himself behind a chair, prompting Palmer to mock him.
Palmer sliced her husband’s ear with the knife forcing him to stagger over the chair, before launching into a “flurry of blows” with the handle of the knife and the blade itself.
She then sliced the back of his hand, resulting in blood spurting over the ground. Palmer called her husband a “wimp” and told him: “If this place isn’t clean by the time I get downstairs I will finish the job.”
The court heard she then went to bed, while her victim left the house and called 999.
Reading his own statement to the court, the victim said Palmer had “systematically destroyed” him over the past two decades and he was now “forever broken as a person”.
“Part of me will never recover from this. Some wounds I can hide, others I can’t,” he said.
He added that he suffers from constant headaches as a result of the attacks and had lost partial control of his right hand following a particularly deep wound that sliced down to his tendons.
He said: “Every time I touch my head I feel the divots and grooves from the many knife wounds. I am ashamed of my arms. It looks like I self harm because of the amount of scars.” He added: “Some of them scare me, if that knife had gone deeper I would be blind or dead.”
The husband described Palmer’s actions as “callous, controlling and calculated” and said the “vicious way of attacking me makes me think you wanted to see me in pain and fear”. He said Palmer smiled and appeared satisfied when she saw him bleeding.
He told the court that he feared Sundays the most because that was when the abuse was at its worst. When eventually reporting what happened to him, he initially told paramedics it was an accident, he said.
Palmer admitted a single count of section 18 wounding with intent at a plea and trial preparation hearing on April 29.
In mitigation, Peter White, defending, said Palmer disputed controlling or coercive behaviour in the relationship.
Mr White said a doctor’s report had determined that Palmer had a personality disorder and had demonstrated mood swings and impulsiveness.
He said his client had underlying mental health issues including obsessive compulsive disorder, some form of agoraphobia and in recent years had gone through the menopause.
But he added: “There is no justification for this level of offending.” He told Palmer had a traumatic childhood which included her dad’s alcoholism, violence perpetrated by her mum towards her dad and the death of a sibling.
Sentencing, Recorder Mark Cooper told the defendant that she thought her husband was “weak and useless”. He told her that was “far from it” and the victim’s eloquent description of the violence would live long in his memory.
“You are going to have a long time to think about them while you are in prison,” the recorder added.
Palmer was jailed for seven-and-a-half years and handed an indefinite restraining order, which prevents her from contacting her victim and entering Wirral.
