PEERING anxiously through an outside window, a young boy witnessed the horrific last seconds of his mother's life, smothered with a pillow by his equally drunken father - the tragic culmination of two lives wrecked by illness and the bottle.

John Crow, 45, and his wife, Eliza, had been married for 12 years, and for the greater part happily, but their lives were to irrevocably change when she succumbed to a severe bout of rheumatic fever which devastated her health, reducing her to little more than an invalid. Frustrated, she sought solace in drink.

For all his sterling qualities, Crow, who worked as a rent and debt collector as well as an insurance agent, was however weak in failing to tackle the evil. Worse, he also succumbed to it, so much so that by breakfast time, they were invariably intoxicated. Gradually, she became weaker and weaker and seldom left her bed in a converted downstairs room, but in the fleeting time he was sober, Crow did realise she urgently needed assistance and hired a young nurse in Hannah Hitchcock.

Opening the front door one morning, she heard the distinct sound of groans coming from the bedroom, first loud, then slowly becoming softer until they were hardly distinguishable. To her horror, she saw Eliza lying on her back with her husband kneeling over her, stifling her with pillows.

"What are you doing?" she screamed. "You are trying to smother your wife."

A distraught Crow slurred: "I can't bear her, she is awful. She is always pulling me about."

Hitchcock frantically called out to the couple's 12-year-old son, Dudley, and they dragged him off Eliza who gasped she was so frightened of her husband, she begged her: "For God's sake, take me away."

The nurse took her to the kitchen where she remained for some two hours. Satisfied Eliza had recovered from the ordeal and felt safe, Hitchcock led her back to bed where for the next 48 hours, the couple virtually drank from dawn to dusk, though there was no repeat of violence.

Hitchcock returned early the following day to prevent Crow leaving to get more drink but he left on the pretext of seeing a client. However, she followed him to the adjacent Blue Anchor where he purchased some ale and strangely Hitchcock bought gin for his wife.

Crow soon became so drunk he fell asleep on the bed with his clothes and boots on. Hitchcock was then preparing lunch in the kitchen when Eliza suddenly cried out. Hitchcock ushered their son outside and rushed to Eliza.

But the boy desperately wanted to know what was happening and peering through a window, helplessly watched his father suffocate his mother. He suddenly stopped and paced up about the room as Hitchcock attended her, but all in vain.

A passing police officer detained Crow who made no reply when charged but afterwards was heard to comment: "I don't see how they can make out murder against me."

But the police did and nine week later on April 20, 1880, Crow appeared at Hampshire Assizes to deny he had murdered his wife at their flat in Kingston Road, Portsmouth, with the prosecutor Mr Ticknell describing the case as "very extraordinary, one of the most painful I have ever had to bring."

Crow did not give evidence, his barrister Mr Matthews submitting in his closing speech he had not formed the intention to murder because he was so drunk, reminding jurors it was the victim who first gave way to drink which her husband had failed to check. "On the contrary, he joined her in it and rolled with her down that precipice which brought her to death's door."

Jurors retired for 75 minutes before convicting him of manslaughter.

"Do I understand from that you say you found that he had not intended to do any grievous bodily harm?" Mr Justice Hawkins asked the foreman who replied: "That is our view."

The judge wanted clarification. "I understand that you found it was not done from any feeling of animosity or ill-will to the woman?" The foreman confirmed it was such.

The judge then commented: "I have a duty to perform and I want to get at your opinion as a guide. I accept your verdict that the prisoner acted from no ill-will or animosity but I don't whether you thought he did it for the purpose of keeping her quiet?"

The foreman confirmed: " Something of that kind."

The judge accepted their view: "At all events, you found, as I understand, he caused her death by suffocation but you don't think he had any desire to put her to death or that he acted from all personal ill will towards her."

Passing a sentence of eight years penal servitude, he told Crow: "This is a most distressing case as you had a highly respectable position until you gave way to the filthy habit of intoxication which has resulted in imperilling your life. There are no palliating circumstances in this case. The jury has taken a merciful view of it as they think you were not influenced by any personal animosity but that her death had been caused by reckless and wanton conduct."