I never meant to hurt my mother, woman tells jury

A civilian police worker accused of killing her mother by gross negligence has told a jury she “loved her dearly” and had never meant to hurt her.

Eileen Pearson, 82, was “dirty and severely emaciated” when her body was taken to Leeds General Infirmary last May by her daughter Angela, Preston Crown Court has heard.

It is alleged West Yorkshire Police employee Pearson, 53, failed to provide adequate food, nourishment and care to her mother and failed to summon timely medical help.

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Police were alerted following Mrs Pearson’s death and visited her home in Fairway, Guiseley, where her daughter was also living, and found the house was in “extreme squalor” and “uninhabitable”.

Before she took to the witness box to give evidence yesterday, her barrister Andrew Stubbs QC told the jury the two women “were very far from normal”.

“Whatever label you chose to put on it, these two women were ill,” he said. “There was clearly something wrong with them both.”

He said the jury would hear they both suffered from a syndrome called folie a deux which reduced Pearson’s capacity to appreciate the risk to her mother’s health or the conditions they lived in.

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“The particular syndrome is one that depends on a dominant person like Eileen Pearson and a secondary person, in this case the defendant,” he added. “You will hear that Angela Pearson was very badly affected.

“One of the characteristics of the condition is that when the dominant person is no longer there the behaviour of the second person will change. You will hear the defendant is a different person.”

The jury was told that she has now moved out of the second family home in Ghyll Royd, Guiseley, and is presently living in temporary accommodation.

As she began her evidence, Pearson, a prosecution team officer at West Yorkshire Police’s Leeds criminal justice support unit, was asked by Mr Stubbs: “Did you love your mother?”

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“I loved her dearly,” she replied. “She was my life, I just cannot believe this is happening. We were so close, we were like sisters. We would finish each other’s sentences off.”

“Did you ever mean to hurt her?” he asked.

She said: “Absolutely not.”

“Were you trying to look after her the best you could?” the barrister continued. “Absolutely,” she replied.

The court heard how Pearson took her dead mother to the hospital’s A&E department shortly after 10.30pm on May 10 last year. She told medical staff her mother, who weighed just 5st 7lb, was “unresponsive” but they immediately recognised she was dead.

The crown says she was the sole carer of her mother who died as a result of the combined effect of malnutrition, Parkinson’s disease and infected pressure sores, and that she did not seek help because she was “ashamed” at her condition and the state the house was in.

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Pearson denies manslaughter by gross negligence. She struggled to hold back tears as she swore the oath on entering the witness box where she told of a difficult childhood living as the only child of her mother and late father, Geoffrey, a former lecturer at Bradford University, whom she said had a violent temper and had, on occasions, hit her when she was young.

Her mother, who had a deep “mistrust” of the medical profession, had no friends and her social sphere contained only her husband, daughter, brother and father. She would close the curtains and tell Pearson as a young girl to hide if anyone came up the driveway of their house in an affluent part of Guiseley.

Pearson told the court the family would never go out on “normal family trips” and instead she would be taken to a local tip on Sunday afternoons to go scavenging.

She told the court her mother did not want her ever to leave home. “She did not want to lose me. She said the day I got married will be the worst day of her life.”

The case continues.