Woman ‘attacked husband then told 999 operator he had taken his own life’

A woman “overpowered” her husband and attacked him, and then waited 20 minutes to call 999, telling the operator he had taken his own life, a court has heard.

Amy Pugh, 34, played the part of a “concerned” wife who had discovered her husband, Kyle Pugh, outside the back of the family home in Newport, Shropshire, when she made a “desperate” 999 call on the evening of March 22 2022.

But she had actually inflicted the wounds on him herself, prosecutors allege.

Mr Pugh, 30, had suffered compression to the neck and fractures to the structure of the neck, as well as a fractured nose and eye socket.

Paramedics were able to restore his pulse but he died in hospital the next day, a murder trial at Stafford Crown Court was told on Thursday.

Pugh, who was separated from her husband at the time of the alleged attack, was charged with his murder in November last year.

Prosecutor Julian Evans KC told a jury of seven women and five men that the couple had a “volatile, turbulent and abusive” relationship which would involve physical violence to each other and was often fuelled by drink or drugs.

In his opening speech, he said Mr Pugh had been in a new relationship with another woman at the time of the incident, but was at the family home in Aston Drive, Newport, to visit his children.

He said “all was well” with them initially, while they were in the kitchen listening to music, before they argued and the situation escalated into violence.

He said: “It was violence that involved Amy striking Kyle in the face and he struck her back, but it didn’t stop there.

“It involved Amy overpowering Kyle, she gained the upper hand over him, she was able to subdue him and deliberately compressed his neck by some means, whether that be a chokehold, strangulation or a ligature.

“It was violence directed at the neck and violence that was unlawful.”

Pugh called her father before eventually calling emergency services at 9.04pm, 20 minutes after the attack, telling the operator her husband had hanged himself.

Mr Evans said: “She was plainly heard shouting ‘Kyle, wake up, why have you done this’.

“The meaning of the 999 call is very much at the heart of this case – to the operator, the call no doubt sounded like a desperate call from a wife who found her husband in the most distressing of circumstances.

“The prosecution say that the scenario was a complete fiction. The account she gave to 999 was a series of lies, lies built one on top of another, and lies she told quite deliberately and with calculation.

“Lies told by her to conceal the fact it was she who had attacked Kyle, it was she who had compressed his neck. What she was doing was telling lies to try and cover up what happened.”

Mr Evans said that while Mr Pugh did have a history of self-harm and attempts to take his own life, he had sent messages to his girlfriend, his dad and his friends that evening making plans to see them that night.

He said Pugh had known about her husband’s “vulnerabilities” and had “quite deliberately and quite callously sought to use them to her own advantage on March 22 2022”.

He said: “Kyle was making plans to meet up with people that night – in other words, he was looking forward to events and not back.

“There is no suggestion he was contemplating taking his own life.

“A violent incident did take place, but the violence was not self-inflicted.

“It wasn’t an attempt to self-harm or take his own life. It was not violence that Kyle directed at his own body, it was violence at Amy Pugh’s hand, directed at him.”

The court was also told Pugh allegedly answered a phone call on her husband’s phone from his new girlfriend at 8.55pm, and told her: “He’s my husband, he is never coming back, this is where he is staying.”

Pugh, of Stafford Road, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, denies murder.

She said in police interview that she had gone into the kitchen to let the dog out of the back door when she saw her husband hanging outside.

She claimed she dragged him into the house and tried to wake him up by slapping him in the face, and denied ever speaking to Mr Pugh’s girlfriend on the phone.

The trial continues.