Life for wife killer (From Western Telegraph)

Life for wife killer

A Milford Haven man who slashed his wife's throat after discovering she was having an affair has been jailed for life for her murder.

Paul Steers attacked the mother-of-three with a modelling knife in the family home. Amanda Steers, aged 30, died of blood loss.

Steers, of 52 Howarth Close, denied murder but admitted manslaughter on the grounds of provocation.

The jury at Swansea Crown Court, failed to reach a verdict on Monday. But yesterday (Tuesday) they unanimously decided that Steers was guilty of murder. Sentencing him to life, the Judge, Mr Justice Moorland, described Steers' attack on his wife as 'horrific'.

The court heard how the couple's 15-month-old son was left spattered with his mother's blood during the fatal attack.

Baby Kairon Steers was standing only inches away from his mother as she was brutally slashed across the shoulders and throat with a craft knife. As his mother's blood flowed across the floor, Kairon slipped and hit his head on the cooker.

Father Paul Steers then tried to carry out a make-shift tracheotomy on Amanda with a Biro pen in a last-ditch attempt to save her.

"I got the idea from an emergency tracheotomy I had myself when I was seven," he said. "I pushed the outside part of a Biro pen into the slit in her throat to try and help her breath.

"I was asking: 'Amanda, Amanda, are you with me?' and she nodded at me. Then I said: 'I'm going to save you, I'm going to save you. God I'm a bastard.'" The attack happened on May 5th after Steers, an accounts clerk with CIT Brace Harvatt, Haverfordwest, believed his wife was having an affair with oil worker Mark James, whom he knew 'casually'.

He had been told by neighbour Joyce Powell, and received an anonymous telephone call the night before confirming his suspicions, the jury heard. Amanda had packed up and left him five days earlier.

For the prosecution, Christopher Vosper, QC, said: "He was a desperate man; completely besotted with the idea that Amanda had left him for another man. "He was completely beside himself with jealousy and his anger had been simmering for at least 12 hours. There was no sudden loss of control - this was cold and calculating."

Barmaid Amanda suffered cuts that began on one shoulder, ran across her neck and onto the opposite shoulder. Both her neck veins and her windpipe were severed.

Paramedics were unable to save her because she had lost too much blood. A hospital consultant said that she "had been effectively drained of her blood." The court heard that after finding out about his wife's affair Steers wrote a suicide note to his father that said: "I've never adored anyone like her - if I can't be with her no-one will."

For the prosecution, Christopher Vosper, QC said, "You wanted to kill yourself after you killed Amanda. Let's make this clear; you wanted your father to bring up your son Kairon and you wanted Amanda to have no part of it."

The couple, originally from Arbroath, Scotland, had come to Wales four years ago in a tenancy swap agreement to escape barmaid Amanda's former husband, the father of two of her three children.

"I thought she was going to take the children away," said Steers. "She had done exactly the same thing to her previous husband in Scotland.

"In fact she had moved hundreds of miles away just to stop him seeing them." One of the couple's neighbours in Howarth Close told the Western Telegraph: "I never saw him very often, just her and the kids. She was okay, friendly. I didn't know her very well."

She added: "I never spoke to him. I never saw them together. He always seemed to be working. He was out during the day and that was the only time I ever saw her.

"But I was devastated at what happened. I didn't know her that well, but to know something like that could happen round here is a big shock."