The alleged Watlington Hill killer was ‘one of the most psychotic people’ a consultant psychiatrist had seen in 30 years of medical practice, an Oxford jury heard.
Daniel O’Hara Wright, 24, is accused of killing his 62-year-old mum, Carole, while they were out on a walk in the National Trust woodland near Christmas Common last October. He denies murder.
Dr Nicholas Kennedy, the consultant psychiatrist instructed by O’Hara Wright’s lawyers, told jurors at Oxford Crown Court this morning that the defendant told him he’d seen his mother as a demon ‘and believed she was an evil witch’ who was trying to harm him.
He’d assaulted his mother believing her to be a demon, the court heard.
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After killing her and removing her eyes, O’Hara Wright said he had drunk pond water, bitten the head off a chicken then thrown himself in front of a car as he was a ‘God’ and had to die ‘with the devil’.
Psychiatrist Dr Kennedy said O’Hara Wright was ‘one of the more if not the most psychotic people I have seen in 30 years’.
Asked by Mark Graffius QC, for the defendant, how he knew the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia were not being faked, Dr Kennedy replied: “He has been saying the same things consistently since the time of the offence. He's in hospital, he's in a strange environment recovering from very serious injuries. He's talking about the same stuff. He's observed constantly.”
During interviews with O’Hara Wright, who was being treated at Broadmoor secure psychiatric hospital, the young man told the doctor had had suicidal feelings in earlier years and had self-harmed.
In the months leading up to Mrs Wright’s death, the son had also heard voices telling him to kill family members and himself. Around a month before her violent death, he claimed to have been walking with her in woods when he resisted the urge to hurt her with a rock.
In late 2019, he had not joined his parents and brother on a ski trip to Austria, telling Dr Kennedy there was ‘spiritual work for him to do’ at home in Uxbridge. “He was meditating and taking drugs,” the psychiatrist added.
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The defendant struggled during lockdown. Dr Kennedy told the jury: "He said he became increasingly distressed. He said he increasingly experienced suicidal thoughts and that his distress was increased because his sister had moved to Australia."
On the day of the alleged murder, on October 23, 2020, he woke at around 10 or 11, smoked a small amount of cannabis ‘through a hollowed out potato’ and left for Christmas Common with his mother.
He ‘felt weird and had a weird energy’, he told the psychiatrist.
His perception of his mother changed, the jury was told. Dr Kennedy reported from his conversation with the defendant: “He thought she was a demon. He said he realised she was a demon called Lilith, which he said was a figure in English mythology. He realised she was called Lilith because her hair suddenly turned from grey to red while they were walking.
“Did he tell you about his mother's eyes?” Mr Graffius asked.
Dr Kennedy replied: “He said that his mother's eyes changed and this meant to him that she was not the same woman. She wanted to go to a place and he thought she was luring him to it to hurt him.”
He told the psychiatrist that he had removed his mother's eyes so the demon could not observe him.
During his interview with Dr Kennedy, the defendant described himself as an alien and an ‘ambassador for nature’.
Jurors were told that O’Hara Wright had become interested in the QAnon conspiracy theory, centred on the claims of a mysterious ‘Q’ that former US president Donald Trump must rid the world of a powerful paedophile ring.
“He said that he saw Donald Trump as the saviour of the world and the 'Trump Card',” Dr Kennedy said. It was not a political belief, he confirmed. “He saw it as knowledge that he and only he had been granted.”
O’Hara Wright, of Regent Avenue, Uxbridge, denies murder. The trial continues.
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