A man is to be sentenced for stabbing and strangling his mother to death after a jury found that he was responsible.
Rick Parker, 40, stabbed Helen Harrison, 59, in the chest with a 20-inch kitchen knife, strangled her and struck her on the head during the gruesome murder in the hallway of their home in Market Weighton.
Parker rang the ambulance service and told an operator it was “definitely a body-bag job” and when police and paramedics arrived at the rural property and asked him where the weapon was, he told them: “In her shoulder.”
murder occurred just over two after weeks after Parker had beaten up his stepfather Roy Thompson, then aged 72, who suffered cuts and bruises to his head and black eyes after being punched and headbutted.
He was charged with murdering his mother and assaulting Mr Thompson, causing actual bodily harm, but was deemed unfit to plead or stand trial due to his mental state so a jury at Hull Crown Court was tasked with deciding if he did the acts alleged.
Today, following a three-day finding-of-fact hearing, the jury found that he did do the acts, albeit with the caveat that he was labouring under a mental disability at the time.
During the finding-of-fact hearing, which is different to a trial in that there is no defendant in the dock, prosecutor Geraldine Kelly said that Parker had called the emergency services as his mother was lying battered, bloodied and lifeless in the vestibule at their three-bedroom home in Aspen Close.
In a calm and measured tone, he told them there was a woman lying dead in the hallway and that it must have been an accident.
Blunt force injuries
It’s believed that Parker, who developed mental-health problems following a road accident, killed his mother because she wanted him to leave the house and get help for his problems.
A post-mortem revealed Mrs Harrison died of a stab wound to the chest combined with strangulation.
The pathologist said she had suffered a “significant neck injury typical of strangulation which would have led to an unconscious state”.
The stab wound had gone through her chest and penetrated her windpipe and main artery. There were also “blunt-force injuries to her head consistent with blows being struck”.
Ms Kelly said that Mrs Harrison, a mother-of-two, and Mr Thompson had been together for about 13 years.
In 2021, Parker moved in with them at the property in Aspen Close and the atmosphere inside the house was convivial for a while, but things changed after he was knocked off his bike and suffered spinal injuries in a road crash in Holme-on-Spalding-Moor in December of that year.
“Mr Thompson noticed towards the last couple of months before Helen Harrison’s death that (Parker) was pacing up and down, talking to himself and laughing.”
On the day of the murder, Mrs Harrison and her husband were at his friend’s house where she told him she was going to see her son at Aspen Close “to see if she could persuade him to get help for his mental-health issues”. “She called for an ambulance to try to get assistance for (Parker).”
Two paramedics arrived at about 4pm and Parker answered the door. He calmly asked them what they wanted and when they said they were there to get him help, he said he “didn’t need their help”.
One of the paramedics told her that her son appeared to have “full (mental) capacity” and that they “couldn’t force him to do anything he didn’t want to do without consent”.
She said it must have been “very soon after that…that Rick Parker…killed his mother” because two of her neighbours, a couple who were named in court, heard “loud screams” and “what appeared to be kicking at the (front) door” as they walked past the house moments later.
James Horne KC, for Parker, said that his client had never been able to give his own account of events in court due to his mental condition and had only ever said that there had been a “household accident”.
He said that Parker had “never before even shown a glimpse of physical hostility to his mum”.
He said that even Mrs Harrison’s husband attested that Parker had always been very protective towards his mother.
But the jury found in favour of the prosecution and judge John Thackray KC adjourned sentence to a date to be fixed.
There will be an intermediary hearing on 23 February when there will be an update on the case ahead of sentence.