Trial starts for Wallingford man accused of murdering wife

Mihiai Hurmuz-Irimia, 29, told the call handler shortly before 2am on August 30 last year that he had used two knives to stab his wife Katie ‘all over’.

He said ‘I need to be locked up. I’m crazy’ before saying he ‘blacked out’ and his head ‘went boom’.

Opening the case at Oxford Crown Court on Monday (July 17), prosecutor John Price KC said 40-year-old mum Katie had suffered a large number of stab wounds. A pathologist found she received 171 separate wounds.

The majority of the wounds were to her chest, neck and back; she was stabbed in both major blood vessels in her neck.

Blood staining suggested the attack began in the bedroom, although her body was found in the hallway of their flat in Blue Mountains, Wallingford. There was blood on the sofa and TV remote, indicating someone may have watched television while they were bloodstained, it was suggested to the jury.

READ MORE: Live updates from first day of Wallingford 'murder' trial

Her husband confessed to the 999 call handler that he had taken a shower after the stabbing. During the attack he had worn a pair of boxer shorts, although was dressed only in a towel when he made the call.

The defendant denies murder.

Oxford Crown Court, where the trial is being heard Picture: Ed Nix

"This trial, as I believe will already be apparent to you is not about who killed Katie Hurmuz-Irimia. This defendant killed her,” prosecutor Mr Price said as he opened the Crown's case yesterday.

“This trial is about what offence he committed when he killed her.”

The prosecution would say it was a ‘clear case’ of murder, while the defendant’s case was that his responsibility for killing his wife was ‘diminished’, the jury was told.

Mr Price challenged the defendant’s account, presenting his arguments under three headings.

He questioned the defendant’s apparent depression, his claimed suicide attempts and the defendant’s claim he had consumed a large quantity – two grammes – of cocaine prior to his arrest.

Hurmuz-Irimia’s claim on the 999 call that he had ‘mental problems’ that were ‘really bad’ was characterised by the prosecutor as a ‘gross exaggeration’.

“There is a difference between being depressed and of low mood and suffering from a recognised medical condition amounting to a mental illness,” Mr Price said.

Only the latter might amount to a defence to the charge of murder and allow the jury to convict him of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility.

Neither a doctor who assessed the defendant in custody nor two psychiatrists asked to see him before the trial believed he was suffering from a serious mental illness, it was said.

The jury was given more detail about two apparent suicide attempts referred to in the 999 call.

The first, in July 2020, was an overdose of paracetamol for which his wife had called NHS non-emergency line 111, Mr Price said.

READ MORE: Family of 'murder' victim say they have 'lost their star'

The second came less than 48 hours before the alleged murder. The Hurmuz-Irimia family was in Bournemouth for the August Bank Holiday weekend.

His wife’s texts revealed her apparent discontent with her husband, who Mr Price said had got very drunk, was going out to try and buy drugs and had left the hotel to go to a nightclub.

In a series of messages sent late on Saturday evening into the early hours of Sunday, she was said to have accused him of ‘ruining our holiday’.

“As far as I’m concerned we are over,” Mrs Hurmuz-Irimia wrote. "The minute we get to Wallingford our marriage is well and truly over."

Katie Hurmuz-Irimia Picture: TVP

The defendant stripped and walked from Bournemouth beach into the sea at around 3.30am on the Sunday morning and started shouting ‘help’, the jury was told. He was rescued by a member of the public.

Mr Price said it would be for the jury to decide whether it was a suicide attempt, as he had told the 999 operator, or was ‘better and more accurately described in some other way’.

A bag containing cocaine residue was found in the flat by police officers. But the prosecutor questioned whether the defendant had taken two grammes of cocaine as he told some of the first police officers called to the flat.

Levels of cocaine in his blood would have been consistent with his taking the drug ‘earlier in the evening’, the jury was told.

But Mr Price said there were ‘important questions’ about why the evidence from the forensics and the accounts of health professionals who had seen him after the killing was apparently inconsistent with his having taken a large dose of cocaine.

Hurmuz-Irimia, of Blue Mountains, Wallingford, denies murder.

Dressed in blue jeans and a grey t-shirt, he spent much of the first day of the trial with eyes fixed on the floor in the dock and spoke only to confirm his name.

The trial continues.

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