A MAN who was briefly arrested for murder after the carbon monoxide death of his girlfriend is backing a new campaign that warns the deadly gas can seep through neighbours’ walls.
Roland Wessling is supporting a campaign by “Carbon Monoxide – Be Alarmed!” about the dangers of the deadly gas.
Girlfriend Hazel Woodhams, 30, died from fumes from an extinguished barbecue they had placed in the porch of their four-person tent on a 2011 camping trip.
Mr Wessling, 44, was seriously injured but survived after crawling from the tent during the July 2011 trip to Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
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During his hospital stay, police arrested him on suspicion of murder but he was released without charge as what happened became clear.
The Iffley Road, Oxford, resident pointed to findings from a survey of 142 Oxford people, where 66 per cent did not know the gas could come through walls. He said: “The only thing that could have saved her life would have been a carbon monoxide alarm. We had one at home.”
The couple of four years moved the barbecue at about 11pm the previous night.
Roland with his girlfriend Hazel Woodhams.
He said: “In the morning when I woke up I was extremely dehydrated, disorientated, I felt extremely sick. As soon as I regained enough consciousness I found Hazel dead next to me.”
Mr Wessling had worked on atrocity crime investigations in the Balkans, Cyprus and Iraq as a consultant forensic archaeologist. He said: “I have seen death on a scale that is totally alien to most people. I think that helped me that day.
“When it is someone you have lived with for four-and-a-half years and you plan to spend the rest of your life with, it is a lot harder.
“Without my forensic background I would have found it more difficult to deal with.”
He shouted for help and managed to phone the emergency services but was unable to remember where the campsite was because of his state.
Police arrested him on suspicion of murder for eight hours while in hospital – a stay that included two weeks in intensive care, eight operations and five months of rehabilitation.
He said: “It was one of the most traumatic things that had happened to me.”
The couple – who met at a conference in 2006 – lived in Huddersfield at the time and police scene-of-crime officer Miss Woodhams, from Bradford, had attended a suicide from carbon monoxide the week before, he said.
The campaign’s survey found 59 per cent of respondents live in a property that shared a wall with another and 64 per cent who rent did not have an audible carbon monoxide alarm.
The 2011 census recorded 91 per cent of city homes were semi-detached or flats.
Carbon Monoxide – Be Alarmed! spokesman Lawrence Slade, said: “With more and more people renting, it’s worrying that millions of people are not aware of the symptoms or that carbon monoxide can travel through walls.”
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