TWO days after being discharged from hospital, depressed Michael Horner throttled his wife, Hazel, by wrapping a coat belt around her neck.

Then after telephoning the hospital to tell staff what he had done, he hanged himself.

Details of the double tragedy at a semi-detached house in Highercroft Road, Lower Darwen, on March 28, were revealed at an inquest in Burnley.

East Lancashire Coroner, David Smith, heard of an unhappy marriage and that Mr Horner, 52, had failed to come to terms with a role reversal situation in which he had become a house husband.

A motor mechanic who at one time had his own business, Mr Horner had retired because of ill health. At about the same time his wife, an accountant, was doing well at work and her career was said to be taking off.

One of his daughters, Mrs Michelle Wilkins, who lives in Pontefract, described her father as being dictatorial with a Victorian attitude. His family was important to him only if he was in control. She told how when she was a little girl she would sit on the stairs and hear him hitting her mother. When she was older she would wait until he left the house and then go to hug her mother after such incidents.

She spoke of his mood swings and of his morbid jealously.

Mrs Wilkins said the situation got worse after he retired and earlier this year her mother had decided she could not take any more. She was arranging a legal separation and intended moving out of the family home the day after the tragedy.

She said she was concerned that her mother had not been told the date of her husband's discharge from Queen's Park Hospital.

Mr Smith heard that Mr Horner had gone into hospital as a voluntary patient for assessment and could have left at any time.

He heard evidence from a consultant, senior registrar, two registered mental nurses, a nursing assistant and a community psychiatric nurse who all said they regarded Mr Horner as not being a risk to anyone else although he could have been a risk to himself at some future date having made two previous apparent suicide attempts. He was suffering from reactive depression as a result of his unhappy marriage situation.

In hospital he felt more relaxed, was co-operative with staff and on good social terms with the other patients.

Nursing assistant, Annie Yates, told how she was so shocked that she dropped the telephone when Mr Horner rang and said he had killed his wife. "I never dreamt he would do anything like that,'' she said.

The Coroner recorded verdicts that Mrs Horner was unlawfully killed and that Mr Horner killed himself while depressed.

"I don't think it was envisaged for a moment by anyone that he would go and end his wife's life as well as his own. It was a terrible and horrifying situation."

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