Wallingford murder victim's mum's heartbreaking letter

Hazel Chalk said in a statement that was read to the judge sentencing her daughter’s killer, Mihai Hurmuz-Irimia, that ‘every day seemed empty’ after Katie was murdered by her 29-year-old husband in a cocaine-fuelled frenzy.

Seeing her in the mortuary following her murder, Ms Chalk said: “All I could think was that she must have gone through hell.”

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She added of her daughter, who is survived by her teenage son: “Katie did not deserve this.”

Mihai Hurmuz-Irimia returns home after walking his dog on the night he murdered his wife Picture: TVP (Image: Thames Valley Police)

The victim’s husband, Mihai Hurmuz-Irimia, claimed to have no memory of the attack that left Katie with 171 knife wounds.

He even suggested to psychiatrists that he had gone to bed and woke up in the early hours of August 30 last year to find that his wife was dead. Hurmuz-Irimia, who was found guilty on Tuesday of his wife’s murder, was claimed to have been suffering from a personality disorder.

Blood staining in the flat suggested that the defendant, a Romanian national who as a teenager was convicted of rape in his home country, had sat on the sofa following the attack and handled a TV remote. He took a shower, leaving his heavily blood-stained boxer shorts on the bathroom floor.

The murderer called 999, telling the operator: “Hello, I think I killed my wife.” In that call, he claimed to have struggled with his ‘head’.

Sentencing him to life imprisonment with a 21 year tariff, Judge Ian Pringle KC said of the call: “I find as a fact that this was yet another example of you wallowing in your own self-pity.”

Killer Mihai Hurmuz-Irimia (Image: Thames Valley Police)

In the days before the murder, the couple had gone to Bournemouth to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary.

He ignored his wife’s requests that he return to their hotel room and instead chose to go out drinking with off-duty bar staff he had never previously met. Katie told him via text message that their relationship was over.

Stripping off his clothes on Bournemouth beach, he walked into the sea then made piteous calls for help as he ‘flopped’ around in the surf.

Judge Ian Pringle KC, who sentenced Mihai Hurmuz-Irimia

He claimed that it was an attempt to take his own life. Dismissing that claim, Judge Pringle said on Thursday: “It was not. It was yet another example of you pitying yourself and not those that you had hurt.”

The judge noted that the defendant had previously threatened his wife and her family, although no action was taken by the police at the time.

“Despite all of this, your wife always forgave you, always had you back, because she continued to love you,” Judge Pringle said.

In mitigation, defence counsel Bernard Tetlow KC said his client wanted to express his ‘remorse and regret’ for what he did.

Sitting in the centre of the dock in courtroom one, Hurmuz-Irimia kept his head bowed and his eyes fixed firmly on the ground throughout the sentencing hearing.

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