Jurors have retired to consider their verdicts in the murder trial of Daniel O’Hara Wright.
The 24-year-old denies murdering his mother, Carole, during a walk at Watlington Hill, near Christmas Common, on October 23 last year.
His lawyers accept that he killed the 62-year-old, but say he was suffering from a psychotic episode at the time and believed his mother was a demon called Lilith.
The former PC World employee removed his mother’s eyes during the ferocious attack then fled cross-country. He drank from a pond then threw himself in front of a car and told the terrified driver he’d ‘fallen from the sky’. He bit the head off a chicken and climbed an electricity pylon, electrocuting himself so badly his arm had to be amputated. He finally broke into a house and slashed at himself in a shower.
Summarising the case to the jury this morning, Judge Ian Pringle QC said: "This is a very sad case indeed. On October 23 last year, Carole Wright, a married lady of 62 years of age, left her home in Uxbridge with her younger son Daniel to go for a walk in the country, something they did quite often. She was never to return home.
"The extraordinarily violent nature of her death and extraordinary state of mind of her son at the time he carried out his attack upon her is what you are being asked to consider in this case in order to come to the correct verdict."
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He explained that, in order to find the defendant not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, the jury had to be satisfied it was more likely than not that when he killed his mother he ‘did not know the nature and quality of the acts he was carrying out or if he did so he did not know what he was doing was against the law’.
Closing his case, defence advocate Mark Graffius QC compared his client’s unusual behaviour in years running up to his mother’s death to the 'rumbles of the earthquake' before the explosion of a volcano.
“At the time of the killing, because of his mental illness, Daniel believed with absolute conviction that the person he was attack was not human at all,” he said.
“You may feel with each building block of the evidence that we have covered and the evidence - clear evidence - of the psychiatrists, each building block fitting into the next, that on that evidence you are overwhelmingly driven to one obvious conclusion: that at the time of this terrible and truly tragic killing, Daniel O'Hara Wright was insane.”
Earlier, prosecutor Alan Blake described the case as exceptional. “Not only are the facts grotesque, disturbing and almost to a degree unspeakable, but there has also been no clashing between the two cases.”
He added: "If you accept the psychiatric evidence you may think it [leads you] inexorably to the conclusion that he doesn't bear a criminal responsibility for the tragic events of October 23 last year."
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