A woman who overpowered her husband and attacked him before telling a 999 operator he had taken his own life has been found guilty of his murder.
Amy Pugh, 34, failed to convince a jury at Stafford Crown Court that she had found Kyle Pugh, 30, hanging when she opened the back door of the family home in Aston Drive, Newport, Shropshire, on the evening of March 22 2022.
Mr Pugh had suffered compression to the neck and fractures to the structure of the neck, as well as a fractured nose and eye socket and died at the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford surrounded by his family on March 23 2022.
Pugh, who wore a white top and black suit, put her hands to her mouth in the dock after the jury returned a verdict of guilty of murder on Thursday after more than 11 hours of deliberations.
The trial had been told Pugh had called her father before dialling 999 20 minutes after “gaining the upper hand” over her husband, from whom she was separated, in a fight in the kitchen and attacking him.
She told the emergency call handler her husband had taken his own life and could be heard saying: “Kyle, wake up, why have you done this.”
Mr Pugh had been in a new relationship with another woman but was at the family home in Aston Drive, Newport, to visit his children on the night of the incident.
While they were initially in the kitchen listening to music, Pugh told the court she had “lost composure” after finding out her estranged husband’s new partner may be pregnant and they had an argument.
She had claimed her husband had left the house and she later opened the back door to let the dog into the garden and found him hanging before dragging him inside.
But prosecutor Julian Evans KC told the trial that the story was a “complete fiction” and that Pugh had inflicted the injuries on her husband herself.
The court heard the two had a “volatile, turbulent and abusive” relationship which would involve physical violence to each other and was often fuelled by drink or drugs.
Mr Evans said Pugh was aware her husband had “vulnerabilities”, had a history of self-harm and had made previous suicide attempts and had “quite deliberately and quite callously sought to use them to her own advantage on March 22 2022”.
Pugh had told the court the two were like “lovestruck teenagers” when they first began a relationship in 2012 but the relationship became toxic, with Mr Pugh breaking her jaw and her arm in two separate incidents.
The defendant said she would initially push her husband away when he hit her, but as the years went on, the violence got worse so she started to fight back.
By the time of the incident, Pugh admitted they would both drink and smoke cannabis heavily.
When paramedics arrived at the scene, they managed to restore Mr Pugh’s pulse but he died in hospital the next day.
Judge Kristina Montgomery KC thanked the jury for their work on the trial and said Pugh, of Stafford Road, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, would be sentenced on September 5.
