Stockton Man Jailed For Stabbing Wife

11 November 2015, 14:38 | Updated: 30 March 2016, 13:50

A controlling husband from Stockton who fitted a tracking device to his wife's car and stabbed her when she came home after visiting her lover has been jailed for 11 years.

A jury cleared Paul Temple, 48, of attempted murder but convicted him of wounding his 44-year-old wife Sharon with intent.

He knifed her in the chest in the kitchen of their home in Norfolk Street in May, causing a collapsed lung.

Judge Simon Bourne-Arton, sitting at Teesside Crown Court, said: ``I am satisfied you, throughout your relationship, sought to control her.''

Temple, a taxi driver, could not accept that the ``volatile'' marriage was over, the judge said, and on the afternoon that he attacked her, he had been tracking her movements, brooding and waiting for her to come home.

``You lay in wait for her, you were hell-bent on a confrontation, that is the clear, overwhelming conclusion to draw from the evidence,'' the judge said.

``When she told you she had a good time, you saw red.''

He caused a 6.5cm wound, puncturing her lung and causing it to collapse.

Temple kicked her and held the knife to her neck, saying: ``Die."

Judge Bourne-Arton said: ``She must have been truly terrified when you were doing that.''

The aftermath showed his true character, the judge said, as he did not help her in any way.

Two of Temple's supporters angrily left court after the judge said the husband had made his wife's life miserable, and that she was vulnerable because of the depression she suffered.

Other supporters of the father-of-three wept when the judge sentenced Temple to serve 11 years.

Temple had told the jury his wife attacked him, and must have stabbed herself during a struggle.

His claim he put a phone in her car to track her movements because he was concerned for her safety was rejected as ``frankly ludicrous'' by the judge.

Jo Kidd, mitigating, said Temple was a devoted family man who had tried to keep the unit together ``in what was clearly a very unhappy marriage''.