Man who killed his wife in ‘act of love’ calls for assisted dying law

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A man who cut his terminally ill wife’s throat in an “act of love” said he would do the same again to give her peace, as he called for a change in the law to allow assisted dying.

Graham Mansfield, 73, was cleared of murder by a jury this week. They found the retired baggage handler guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter after hearing how he and his wife, Dyanne, 71, agreed to die together after the pain of her terminal cancer became too much to bear.

He killed her and made a serious attempt on his own life but called police in desperation 12 hours later when he woke up still alive. He begged paramedics to let him die and admitted from the first 999 call that he had killed Dyanne.

Though he faced a maximum of life in prison, the judge, Mr Justice Goose, showed him mercy and imposed a two-year suspended sentence, saying the killing was “an act of love, of compassion, to end her suffering”.

Speaking from his living room in Hale in Greater Manchester 24 hours later, overlooking the garden where he killed Dyanne on 23 March last year, Mansfield said he would repeat what he admitted was a “horrible act” in order to end her suffering.

“I would only do it again if there wasn’t an alternative,” he said. “I remember when the judge was about to sentence me and I was looking up at the shield above his head and I was thinking, ‘Well, Dyanne, if I’d have to do it again, I’d do it.’ If I had to do it again and I knew the outcome and it was going to go on for eternity, I’d do it.”

But he said he should never have been forced to take such a “desperate” measure and wants to see the introduction of a euthanasia law.

“I don’t have all the answers, but I think if you have a terminal illness and you are in the latter stages, maybe in the last six months, and if you can get two independent doctors to talk to that person who wants to die, and to talk to their family and friends, and maybe get the police to do some sort of investigation, and they all come to the same conclusion: that they are fed up, that there’s no quality of life, then they should be allowed to die.”

“We would have much preferred to have, say, Dyanne lying in bed upstairs, me holding her hand and somebody administering it [a lethal injection]. That would have been a far more humane way of doing things.”

He thinks it is unfair that animals receive more dignified deaths than humans: “People say, ‘You can’t leave your dog like that, it’s not right, we’ll go and put the dog to sleep.’ But you can’t do that with humans.”

The couple would have looked into travelling to Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal, “but it was lockdown, we couldn’t travel”, said Mansfield.

He thinks the police officers who arrested him were “so kind” to him, because they could imagine themselves in his dreadful position.

His solicitor, Rachel Fletcher, said: “Greater Manchester police didn’t want to charge him. It went to the most senior prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service and they referred it to the director of public prosecutions … we couldn’t believe it when they came back and said they were charging him with murder.”

Police officers told Mansfield that part of the reason was “we’ve got no evidence Dyanne has been involved in this”, partly because she hadn’t signed either of the two suicide notes. “I didn’t want to put her under any more stress,” he said.

“I didn’t want to say: ‘Can you just sign this? It’s our death pact.’ If I was doing a good guide to a suicide pact now, I would say make sure you video it.”

In April this year, a month after Mansfield was charged, the CPS updated its guidance to prosecutors on the public interest factors to take into account in reaching decisions in cases of encouraging or assisting suicide. Fletcher said if Dyanne’s death had come a year later “he may never have been charged”.

From 1 April 2009 up to 31 March 2022, there were 174 cases referred to the CPS by the police that were recorded as assisted suicide. Of these 174 cases, 115 were not proceeded with by the CPS and 33 cases were withdrawn by the police.

The court heard evidence from a cancer expert, Prof Karol Sikora, who concluded after Dyanne’s death that she had between a week and four weeks to live when she died.

That did not change anything, Mansfield said. “It’s easy for us to say, ‘oh it’s only a few weeks’, but if your throat is closing and you can’t eat anything, you know. Dyanne knew. She said to me the weekend before, ‘Graham, it’s time.'”

He described in painful detail how the couple made the suicide pact in October 2020 when Dyanne, his wife of 41 years, was diagnosed with terminal cancer that had spread to her lung and lymph nodes.

Having been in and out of hospital a lot as a child, and suffering with bladder cancer in 1999, Dyanne was determined not to spend her final days in hospital, he explained. Dyanne, a retired import and export clerk, had gone downhill rapidly after her diagnosis, with the cancer spreading to her neck, making it hard to swallow.

“She asked me to kill her when things got too bad,” he remembered. “They were the saddest words I had ever heard. My immediate thought was, all right, Dyanne, but I’m going to die with you. She said: ‘But there’s no reason for you to die.’ And I said, ‘I can’t live without you, Dyanne.'”

In a statement read to the court, Dyanne’s brother Peter Higson said while he felt no malice towards Mansfield – the two men spent Christmas together last year when Mansfield was suicidal again, and Higson attended court each day in support of his brother-in-law – he was “shocked” by how Mansfield killed his sister.

“I agree that it was shocking,” said Mansfield. “But she was so weak. People have said to me, why didn’t you do it this way or that way, but we wanted a method we thought was certain.”

He said they often discussed how they would die, ruling out methods they felt were either too public or too unreliable. “In the end, I said to her, ‘The only thing I can think of that’s swift, even though it’s a horrible way of doing it, is to cut our throats, like I’ve seen on TV.'”

He described how the couple walked together to the bottom of their garden to a secluded section, shielded from the neighbours, and placed two garden chairs side by side.

He used a knife to cut her throat twice as she sat silently – the second time after she mouthed to him “I’m not dying quickly enough” – before hugging her and telling her he loved her. He then sat down next to her and tried to do the same to himself.

It never occurred to him he would end up on trial for murder 15 months later: “We were going to kill ourselves and that was the end of it.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.