Cyprus Mail 15 May 2023 - by Andria Kades
David Hunter told Paphos criminal court on Monday he regretted what he “had to do”, meaning the killing of his wife in their Tremithousa home, after she begged him incessantly for weeks to take her life.
“I regret what I had to do. What I did.”
Hunter, 75, was barely audible during Monday’s hearing, at times his eyes filling with tears as he recounted his wife Janice Hunter’s deteriorating state in the last few years of her life.
Janice was diagnosed with a type of blood cancer (myelodysplastic syndrome) in 2016, and had to receive injections and blood transfusions, along with a slew of other surgeries.
Hunter told court Janice was housebound for the last three to four years telling him “I’m sick of being alive. This is not a life. It’s just leaving the hospital and sitting at home. This is what we’ve been doing for last three to four years. It’s no way to live.”
Hunter recounted that Janice cried and begged repeatedly in the last six weeks of her life for him to “help her” alluding to taking her life.
Hunter described a perfect loving marriage between the two. They met when he was 18 and she was 19 at a club, where she first accused him of stealing her seat and then asked him to dance together.
Ever since then, their life together was “perfect”, Hunter said.
In the last few weeks of her life, Hunter said he would “constantly witness how much pain she was in and felt helpless to do anything.
“Every day she asked me all the more and I always said no. I didn’t want to do it.”
In her last week, Janice just cried, Hunter recounted. “She just cried and begged me to help her. I didn’t answer. She told me she was sick of being alive.”
Hunter eventually told her he would do it but didn’t tell her how or when. “I had no intention to do it. It was just to calm her down.”
On the day he killed her, he had gone to the supermarket with a shopping list but came back empty handed. “For 24 hours all I could think of was what to do. This was killing me because I couldn’t help my wife. I couldn’t do anything.”
Hunter told the court he had no idea how he even thought of killing her but he put his hands over her mouth and nose and kept it there.
“I don’t know for how long. She didn’t move her legs, her hands, she never resisted. In my statement, I think I said she fought. What I meant she just moved her face. She never made any effort to stop me. I don’t think she even opened her eyes.”
