I adored her. She said she adored me. So why did my wife try to kill me with anti-freeze?

By HELEN WEATHERS
Last updated at 11:00 08 February 2008

The murderous intentions of Kate Knight are all too visible in the terrible injuries she inflicted on her husband, Lee. His piercing blue eyes stare sightlessly into the distance, and over each ear are the new cochlear implants - put in two weeks ago - which have restored some of his hearing. Even so, the only way to converse with him is to shout.

Three times a week he goes into hospital for four hourly sessions of dialysis, because the anti-freeze his wife poisoned him with has destroyed his kidneys.

The lower left half of his face is paralysed, from the brain damage he also suffered. He is 38, but looks much older. He will never work again, never live independently again, never see the face of his nine-year-old son, Jack, again.

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His younger brother Michael, 35, has offered him one of his own kidneys for transplant in a desperate bid to improve the quality of Lee's existence.

When Lee says that Kate ruined his life, it is impossible to doubt him. "I try not to think about her too much," says Lee, a former £36,000-a-year team leader at the JCB plant in Rocester in Staffordshire.

"If I do, I get too upset and I start to hate her for what she did to me. She has completely devastated my life. I don't think I will ever come to terms with it. How can I? She was my wife. I adored her and I thought she adored me, too. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me how much she loved me."

Last week Kate Knight, 28, was found guilty of attempted murder after Stafford Crown Court heard she laced her husband's food and drink with anti-freeze.

After running up thousands of pounds in secret debts, her deadly solution was to poison her husband in the hope of cashing in on insurance policies on his life which she thought would pay out £250,000. She spent months on the internet researching the best way to kill him, before choosing anti-freeze, which contains ethylene glycol that can kill in small doses. She also considered giving her husband Ecstasy and iron tablets.

Lee was rushed to hospital with kidney failure on April 9, 2005, five days after she had laced their seventh wedding anniversary Chinese meal with the chemical, having already lovingly accepted his gift of an eternity ring.

Lee suffered perforated stomach ulcers and fell into a coma which lasted 16 weeks. At one point, doctors advised his family to say their goodbyes because he was so gravely ill. Kate was the only one not to turn up.

Against all odds, Lee survived and was in court when Kate was found guilty, even though he could neither see nor hear her reaction to the jury's verdict.

"I don't know how she feels when she sees what she did to me," says Lee, who now lives with his parents Annette, 58, and Maurice, 64, in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs.

"I'm told that throughout the trial she sat there looking bored, chewing gum and doodling on bits of paper, so I can only assume she doesn't care.

"She doesn't even call me by my name any more. She calls me 'Jack's father'. It's as though I'm the one who did something wrong.

"She would have preferred it if I had died. Even while I was lying in hospital in a coma, she cleaned me out. She moved out of our house with our son and took everything with her except my clothes, which she dumped in a back bedroom. She even took my wedding ring and wallet.

"She put my dog in kennels and told the owners that they wouldn't be seeing me again because I was brain dead and she was moving to France to be with relatives. She doesn't have a single relative in France.

"Instead she moved to the Wirral. Five months later, she was living with a new guy, and by the Christmas they were engaged. I don't know how they met or when. That's how much she cared about me."

Lee doesn't know if he will be in court on February 28 to see Kate sentenced, but he hopes that she will be locked up for a very long time.

"She tried to make out in court that I was violent, but in all our married life I never raised a hand to her," he says. "She said I'd brought on my medical problems by drinking too much, which is nonsense.

"It was just one of her many lies. She's a fantasist. I think she's ill and doesn't know the difference between right and wrong any more. She's somehow managed to convince herself that she didn't do it."

When Lee surveys his marriage to Kate, he still finds it hard to believe that she was capable of such evil.

The Kate he prefers to remember is the bubbly, outgoing teenager he met when she was waitressing at the pub run by her mother, Kath, and stepfather, Derek. Lee used to go drinking there with a friend.

She had just turned 18 and he was a 27-year-old car mechanic, and although Lee's family thought she was too young for him, the couple fell in love, moved in together and were engaged within months of meeting.

When Kate fell pregnant with Jack, they decided to bring forward their wedding, and they were married on April 4, 1998, at Hanley register office.

"We were really happy together and when Jack was born we were just ecstatic," says Lee, "I was the one who'd get up in the night to give him his feeds, and we formed a really strong bond.

"My happiest memories are of going for a walk with my wife, my son and my dog. Listening to my family laughing. Kate and I were always telling each other that we loved each other and holding hands. I trusted her completely. We shared everything, or so I thought."

Lee's parents, however, had a few niggling doubts about their daughter-in-law. Annette, who looked after Jack when Kate went back to work in a call centre, thought she lived in a fantasy world.

"She was always talking about things she had done, which you later found out had never actually happened," says Annette. "If a friend announced she was pregnant, Kate would say 'I'm pregnant too', then a few weeks later she'd say casually: 'Oh, I had a miscarriage.'

"She worked in a call centre, then as a waitress, then as a barmaid, then as a receptionist, but none of her jobs lasted more than three months.

"Whenever you asked her what had gone wrong, she'd say: 'I left because they didn't make me manageress.'

"She hankered after the better things in life and spent all her money on Jack, buying him expensive things which I considered a waste of money.

"I never said anything because I knew Lee adored her and I thought her fantasies were harmless."

Lee worked 54 hours a week to support his young family, earning £500 a week in take-home pay, but crucially he left all the household finances to Kate. She knew his employers would pay death benefits (at £130,000 it was much less than she'd expected to receive) if Lee died, and that he had insurance covering unemployment and illness.

It would be much later that Lee would discover that Kate's new job as a call centre trainer, earning £200 a week, did not exist and that household bills, including the mortgage, hadn't been paid.

He had no idea that she'd taken out loans, credit cards and re-mortgaged their £55,000 house without his knowledge, a home which was on the verge of being repossessed when Kate hatched her plan to wipe out those debts.

He still has no clue where all the money went, because apart from buying things for Jack she was not obviously extravagant.

"I first started to feel ill in February 2005. We were due to go to a cousin's christening, but we missed the ceremony because I felt so awful," recalls Lee. "I was so cold, but sweating and being sick. We went to the party afterwards, but I felt so terrible we couldn't stay very long.

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"I'm the kind of guy who hates to take a single sick day, so I thought there must be something wrong with me. I just didn't feel like myself. But because it was winter, I convinced myself it was 'flu.

"Then, not long after I'd recovered from that I started to feel really strange again. I felt nervous and detached and went completely off my food. I kept saying to Kate: 'There's something wrong with me; I don't feel well.'

"All the time, Kate acted like the concerned wife, saying it must be the 'flu again. I went to bed, but the next day I felt even worse. I couldn't stop grinding my teeth and my mind was filled with worry.

"I felt so strange that I actually said to Kate: 'You haven't given me any drugs have you?' And she started crying and said: 'Why would I give you drugs? I love you. I would never give you drugs.'

"Then I developed a rash all over my chin, which was really painful."

Lee's family, worried about the change in him, urged Kate to take him to the doctor, but she batted away their concerns saying that the physical changes he'd noticed were due to their eating more fruit and vegetables.

One night Lee woke up to find the marital bed empty and the carpet next to him on fire. He ran out of the room and found Kate sleeping in Jack's room.

"When I told her the bedroom was on fire, she calmly walked in and threw a duvet over the flames to put them out," says Lee. "There was no panic at all. She simply said that she was used to things like that from working in a pub kitchen.

"When you love your wife and your wife says she loves you, you don't think: 'Oh she's trying to kill me.' You try to find rational explanations. I still don't know how that fire started."

Then on April 9, Lee, by now very ill, was rushed to hospital suffering from breathing problems. He'd lost control of his left foot, which kept shaking, and his chin kept lolling onto his chest. He had been diagnosed with kidney failure after a biopsy, when he started haemorrhaging from internal ulcers caused by the anti-freeze he had unwittingly ingested.

He underwent an emergency operation, which doctors said he had only a 40 per cent chance of surviving, and was placed on a ventilator in intensive care. All the while, Kate was by his bedside, apparently beside herself with worry.

It was a chance encounter, however, which uncovered her murderous plan and brought the police to her door.

One of Lee's cousins bumped into the Knights' neighbour, Sarah Johnson, shortly after he was admitted to hospital and told her that Lee was in intensive care.

It emerged that Kate Knight had told Ms Johnson after Lee was taken to hospital: "It's worked. Nothing has shown up on the biopsy." She then showed her the bottle of wine and a container of anti-freeze under the kitchen sink that had 160ml missing - enough to kill someone by causing kidney failure or heart attack.

Kate had also previously confided in Ms Johnson that Lee's employers would pay out a six-figure sum if he died, and had even asked her neighbour if she knew a hitman, so she could finish him off.

Until her shocking discovery that Lee was in intensive care, Miss Johnson had not taken Kate Knight seriously - thinking, as many of her friends and in-laws did, that she was a bit of a fantasist and had only been joking. "We called the hospital and arranged to meet Lee's doctors. When we told them what the neighbour had said, they told us: 'We suggest you contact the police and do it immediately,'" says Annette.

"The worst thing is that if they had known sooner what had caused Lee's illness, they could have done something to reverse it and could have saved his sight and hearing."

Even after Kate was arrested, she continued to visit Lee in hospital with Jack, pretending nothing had happened, and it took a superhuman effort for Lee's family not to show their hatred for what she'd done.

"Of course we didn't want her there, but we were determined to remain calm and dignified for Jack's sake," says Annette. "We wanted to protect him and knew that if we said or did anything, she would stop Lee seeing his son, which would have been even more devastating for him."

But when Lee started to recover, his eyesight started to go and then his hearing. The truth started to dawn on him. One day he asked his mother "Did Kate do this to me, Mum?" and Annette wept when she told him that it looked as though she had.

"I was devastated," says Lee. "I didn't want to believe it. Even now I think: 'How could she do this to me?'"

Since Kate's conviction, Jack has been living full-time with his father and grandparents. Understandably, he is a very confused little boy and their priority is to protect and give him a secure, loving home.

"I've told Jack that Mummy did something very naughty and put something in Daddy's drink, and that she will have to go away for a while because of what she did," says Lee.

"We had a very strong bond before, and we are rebuilding it now. He's by nature a very happy, easy-going lad, but sometimes he gets upset.

"He's lost his mum; his dad has these injuries and he doesn't know who to blame, but we are going to make sure he receives all the help and counselling he needs.

"I asked him once if his mum ever talked about me to him and he said: 'No, never.' I just ceased to exist for her. I may have survived but I'm dead in her eyes.

"Jack says he doesn't want to see his mum at the moment, but if he changes his mind I would put my own feelings aside and we would take him. His needs come first."

It is perhaps more than Kate Knight deserves.

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