A 'jealous' and controlling husband who killed his wife after she asked for a divorce has been jailed for 21 years.
Mark Barrott, 55, killed NHS nurse Eileen Barrott, 50, in August last year in a “final act of control” before fleeing to a monastery.
Nure Eileen's body was found at their family home in Leeds, West Yorkshire following the brutal attack.
Leeds Court heard how the dad of three had shockingly killed his wife by hitting her twice with a hammer, before “compressing her neck” with his hands until she died.
Craig Hassall, prosecuting, added that Barrott had gone "on the run" - taking a series of different trains, before he reached the border with Scotland.
Three hours after abandoning the family home, Mr Hassell said Barrott sent a text to a childhood friend and therapist, called Paula. The contents of the text read that he’d attacked Eileen after she'd got “really angry”.
The message eerily read: "‘Please Paula…get an ambulance and police to Eileen.
“‘I instinctively hit her with the hammer when she pushed me into the bedroom door, which I was pretending to fix as I was trying to delay things, and she got really angry, and I swung round.
“‘Then I put rope round her throat, which I got to hang myself with. I felt in a dazed trance and don’t remember doing that. But now I do, and I think she’s badly hurt.
“‘I don’t want her to die and I don’t want Joel to find her badly hurt. So please hurry, Paula, and call them. I left the front door unlocked for them. I’m going to go away to die now.”
In reality, the court was told how Barrott had not attempted to kill himself, and that no rope was either found at his home address.
Neither were any wounds found on Eileen’s body to suggest one was used to kill her.
Mr Hassall said: “That message, said to be seeking urgent help for his badly hurt wife, was sent three and a half hours after he had fled, leaving Eileen already dead, face down on the sofa in the living room.
“No rope was ever recovered at the scene or anywhere else, and there were no signs on Eileen’s body to suggest the defendant had used anything other than his bare hands to strangle her.
“The defendant did not 'go away to die'. In the following days, he made no attempt on his own life."
The message was just the beginning of Barrott's attempts to mislead and manipulate the truth, given that hid away under a false name and address, the court heard.
Addressing the jury, the prosecutor said: “That text message, we therefore say, contained the first few of many misleading, manipulative, and self-serving things that the defendant has said since he killed Eileen Barrott.
“The prosecution accepts that he has a history of mental health problems, principally depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“But…his decision to kill Eileen on August 15 last year was precisely that by a jealous controlling husband - to kill the wife who had recently told him that their marriage was over.”
In fact, sentencing Barrot to a 21-year-minimum life sentence, Judge Andrew Hatton said Barrot had a “long history” of domestic abuse and controlling behaviour.
He said the defendant regularly followed his wife through methods of subterfuge.
This included hiding a tracking device in her handbag, and turning up to an even unannounced when she was with her friends or at work.
Hatton spoke of how when Eileen told Barrot she was leaving him, he felt that he had had finally “exhausted” all his chances to exert control over her, saying: “This time you knew there were no more final chances, you knew you had exhausted them all.
“Your controlling and manipulation had come to an end and you killed her in a final act of control over her.”
Barrott's daughter, Carita Barrott, 23, told the jury how she lost both of her parents on the night of the murder, and was “completely devastated” by the incident.
She said: “My life was completely thrown upside down and changed so suddenly.
"In a flash, it changed my whole outlook on the world and shattered any hope I have left for life – any zest for life.
“I felt completely hollow and was plunged into a depression, walking around like a soulless, hollow, empty shell that no longer belonged in this world, without the biggest inspiration in my life.”
“The bittersweet side was that after 23 years of my life, of abuse and control, and 27 of my mum’s, I was now free, as well as my brother and my mum. No longer in pain, wherever she is.”
Completing his sentencing, Judge Hatton told the court that Barrot gave several accounts of what happened on the day of the murder - but all were “demonstrably false”.
In one version, the husband he thought she “had a demon inside her", so he threw the hammer at her and they began fighting.
But the judge dismissed that account as “nonsense” and said he had clearly carried out a “gratuitous attack” on his “defenceless wife”.
