According to the Telegraph, Malcolm Palmer, 62, used two knives to stab his long-term partner Carol Cannom, 46, twenty times in the chest because she had become addicted to playing Grand Theft Auto 4.
The couple, who hailed from Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, UK, had apparently been happy for most of the thirty years they had been together. Things started to go wrong when they bought a PlayStation for their ten-year-old son James. It turned out, however, that Carol Cannom quickly found herself hooked on gaming.
She bought a 37" plasma television, set it up in the bedroom she shared with her partner Malcolm Palmer, and would claim the console around midnight each night, after her son was finished with it.
She would then play non-stop until five or six in the morning. This was totally unacceptable to her partner, and so he found himself driven out of the couple's bedroom and forced to sleep in the conservatory.
John Pini, prosecuting QC, told the court that "Carol quickly became hooked. He [Palmer] was very unhappy about the amount of time she was playing on the PlayStation."
Palmer had also become convinced that she was having an affair with someone she'd met online. In November of last year, he confronted her, and she told him to move out of the family home and that she would stop him seeing their children again in future.
While he was busy stabbing her with the two knives, their ten-year-old son James was in an adjoining room. James called 999, but then, according to the Mirror, after Palmer had finished murdering his wife, he took the phone from his son and said, "She's been staying up with this PlayStation until five in the morning for two months. I'm sorry, I think I've killed her."
Timothy Spencer, QC for the defence, summed matters up by stating, "The genesis of this tragedy bizarrely lies with the purchase of the PlayStation."
Palmer has admitted murder and will be sentenced on 1 April.
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