George Kibuuka denies killing wife Margaret with a sledgehammer in Southampton home

George Kibuuka delivered “two deliberate and very hard blows” to the mother of his children’s skull, as she lay asleep in a bed next to their young daughter – and just yards from their baby son in his cot, the court was told.

When Kibuuka carried out the alleged murder of his 40-year-old wife Margaret the little girl and her two elder brothers were all deeply asleep, having been drugged with sleeping tablets crumbled into their food.

When the youngsters woke the following morning they found their mother dead in a bed soaked in blood in their home in Richville Road, Shirley, and their father seriously ill.

He was in another bedroom, wrapped in a sheet, with a knife coated in blood on top. He had stabbed himself in the abdomen before drinking poison mixed with water.

The court was told how the children “wandered out to the street” and one of the boys called at a neighbour’s house telling them “somebody had killed his mummy”. They thought that their parents had been killed by an intruder, the court heard.

Winchester Crown Court heard how Kibuuka, 48, had crushed up sleeping tablets and hidden them in their bottles of fizzy drink and a trifle they were sharing after dinner.

Earlier that day he had taken the children with him to a pharmacy in WestQuay, Southampton, where he bought the sedatives and Bursledon’s Tesco store where he purchased more, as well as a kitchen knife which he later used to cut Margaret’s throat.

Opening the case against Kibuuka, prosecutor Nigel Lickley said: “They were not random purchases but important parts of what the defendant was planning to do later – a sweet pudding for the children to hide the drug, a knife to kill with.”

Jurors were told how the children had enjoyed pizza and watched a film before going to bed on the night of Saturday, November 7 last year, leaving their mother downstairs studying for an exam on her business course she had not long started at Southampton Solent University.

Mr Lickley said the children’s bottles of fizzy drinks were both found to have traces of the drugs in them – up to ten tablets in a Coke bottle and seven or eight in a half drunk bottle of Fanta.

Jurors were told how neighbours and a passer-by came to help the children and went inside the Kibuuka house, where the youngest child had got out of his bed. The little girl was found to have her mother’s blood on her pyjamas.

The court was told how emergency services were called, Kibuuka was taken to hospital where he was initially treated as “a chemical hazard” but once he had recovered he was arrested.

Mr Lickley described how during interview Kibuuka told officers he had woken and gone into the bedroom where Margaret was sleeping and delivered the blows with the hammer in the dark – believing he had struck her legs because he intended to break them so she would be dependent on him.

He went on to tell police how when he turned on the lights he realised his “mistake” as Margaret was lying a different way around.

Mr Lickley said: “He told the police he thought she was dead at the time but in order to minimise her pain he went to the bedroom, took the knife and slit his wife’s throat in one movement.”

The court was told how Kibuuka went on to tell officers how he removed their daughter from the bed, took the knife and then went and mixed poison with water which he drank. He then stabbed himself and retired to bed.

But Mr Lickley told jurors that Kibuuka’s version of events was in fact “an invention” and the killing of Margaret was “focused” with the “severe and hard blow to her head and the deliberate cutting of her throat”

that left “no prospect of survival”.

Kibuuka, who the court heard was moved from prison to a secure mental health unit, denies one charge of murder and three charges of drugging his children.

Proceeding