Wealthy retired accountant is found guilty of murder

102

View
comments

The pregnant daughter of a wealthy retired accountant who was today jailed for life after stabbing her husband to death has told the court of her heartbreak, saying: ‘I lost my dad but I’ve also lost my mum.’

Isabelle Potterton said on Friday that her mother Penelope Jackson – who murdered her retired colonel husband David, 78, on her 66th birthday and calmly told police ‘I should have stabbed him more’ as he lay dying – is ‘not the person I knew’.

Penelope was arrested in her pyjamas on the street outside the couple’s £450,000 luxury Somerset bungalow on February 13 while her fourth husband lay bleeding on the kitchen floor inside.

Isabelle said when she was informed of her father’s death and her mother’s arrest: ‘My world fell away from my feet. From the moment when the police knocked on our door and told us what had happened, I had not only lost my dad but I had lost my mum too. My life was changed forever.’ 

There were sobs from the public gallery – which was packed with members of David’s extended family – as a jury of eight women and four men returned a verdict of murder after 10 hours and 43 minutes of deliberations.

Judge Martin Picton sentenced her to life, with a minimum term of 18 years.

Watching on from the dock, Penny remained stony faced as the verdict was read, but later wept as her daughter Isabelle told Bristol Crown Court court she had ‘two fantastic parents’.

‘I always felt supported, loved and cared for by my parents. I was their baby. They were proud of me,’ she said. 

‘I have dealt with the looks of pity and people contacting for the gossip. I have dealt with people asking the most inappropriate questions. I have done all of this because I have had to. I have to be strong for dad. I have to be strong for mum,’ she said.

‘I have lost the man that I looked up to and loved. I have lost the man that was always there for me no matter what. The man that came and fixed things in my house which I didn’t know even needed fixing. The man that could make me laugh.

‘But I feel I have also lost my mum. I have lost the woman who always knew how to make me feel better. The woman who was my friend, my champion and my support. The woman who cared, cherished and loved me.’ 

The heartbroken daughter had to organise her father’s funeral as well as help her mother following her arrest and was only focused in justice taking its course. 

‘Yes, I know mum is here but she’s not the same person I knew. I don’t know what the future holds but I do know that the relationship I once cherished can never be built back to what it was.’

She added: ‘However, I love both of them. I always have and I always will.’  

Penny – who pleaded guilty to manslaughter but denied murder – insisted David had been violent and controlling and that the situation worsened during lockdown when she ‘couldn’t escape’ him.

She claimed she didn’t remember the 18-minute 999 call on the night of February 13. She told the operator he was ‘in the kitchen bleeding to death with any luck’ and added ‘I thought I’d got him in the heart but he hasn’t got one’. 

She repeatedly refused to help the victim when the operator asked her to take steps such as apply pressure to the wound or throw him a towel to try and stem the bleeding.

Jackson jotted down a confession on a notepad by the telephone, and when she was arrested on suspicion of murder, replied: ‘It’s murder now, not attempted murder? Oh good.’  

In the note – titled ‘confession’ – she wrote ‘I accept my punishment. May he rot in hell. 

The full note read: ‘To whom it may concern, I have taken so much abuse over the years. Look at my records in Germany, but he was a good daddy. However, the mask slipped tonight and that was unforgivable. I accept my punishment. May he rot in hell.’ The note had ‘sorry about my spelling’ written on the edge of the page. 

But she would later deny murder, pleading guilty to manslaughter and saying she had lost control following years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband. 

She told jurors she hadn’t intended to kill her husband, a Lt Col in the Royal Logistics Corps, but had ‘had enough and lost the plot’ after being worn down by his abuse. She claimed she had taken an eight-inch filleting knife with her to bed in case her husband was violent.   

Penelope Jackson’s son-in-law Tom Potterton said he could never forgive her for the pain she has caused his wife Isabelle. Mr Potterton said: ‘Isabelle has had to process the circumstances around (her father’s death), particularly the involvement of her mother.’

He continued: ‘As I tried to explain to you when I visited you in prison, you have no idea how much pain and suffering you have caused (Isabelle), you don’t see the hurt and anguish she goes through every day.’

Mr Potterton finished by saying: ‘This did not have to happen. It was a selfish act with no regard to how it may affect those who were close to yourself and David, you could have walked away but you chose not.’

He added: ‘I can honestly say I will never be able to forgive you for the pain and suffering you have caused (Isabelle).’ 

But jailing her today, Judge Martin Picton said her attempt to paint her former husband as a ‘monster’ had failed, as he criticised her for failing to ‘show a shred of remorse’ for killing him.  

Today, David’s grandson Adam told the killer in a statement read to court that he had thought about writing her a letter but she would have been ‘too selfish to read it.’ 

He said the murder ‘had changed my whole world forever’ and it was ‘unforgivable’. He added: ‘You tore the Jackson family apart. Grandad was a good man. He has been robbed of completing his natural his life. Shame on you.’  

Also addressing the court, David Jackson’s estranged daughter Jane Calverley accused the defendant of being the abuser in the relationship.

Ms Calverley said her father would never have sought help because he would have been too proud to admit to being bullied and abuse by his wife.

Ms Calverley said that despite being estranged she had always loved her father, adding: ‘By taking his life you have taken away all possibility of us re-establishing a relationship.’

She continued: ‘You have taken so much from us all. My father was a proud man, this probably cost him his life because he would he would never have sought help.’

Ms Calverley said the defendant had ‘ultimate power’ over the victim, adding: ‘You held on so tight to him and controlled him to prevent him from leaving.’

‘You’ve taken so much from a family that has already felt so much pain,’ she said. 

Jailing Penny, Judge Picton remarked she had shown ‘not a shred of remorse’ for the killing.

He said: ‘Despite professing to still love him, you sought to portray David Jackson as a monster.

‘Whilst there was no doubt, as in any marriage, points of friction that the lockdown would have exacerbated, I have no doubt that he was nothing like the person you have claimed.’

Judge Picton continued: ‘You took the life of another human being. That is a terrible thing to do and it represents a burden you and all the other family members will have to bear for the rest of their lives.

‘Their memories of (David Jackson) will always be tarnished by the manner of his death and by the way you sought to portray him.’

He added he had not seen ‘a shred of remorse’ from the defendant during the four days she gave evidence. 

Chilling footage viewed by jurors earlier in the trial showed Penny being arrested while refusing to help her husband as he lay dying in the kitchen floor.  

In a polite and understated manner, she talked police through what had happened after they arrived at their home in Berrow, Somerset.

She issued a series of horrifying remarks, including ‘If there’s any luck you’ll be too late’, ‘I should have stabbed him a bit more’ and ‘I might go and stab him again’.

But despite the horror of what had just happened, Penny appeared to be more concerned with retrieving her coat and slippers from her house, which she repeatedly asked officers for.

Jackson jotted down a confession on a notepad by the telephone, and when she was arrested on suspicion of murder, replied: ‘It’s murder now, not attempted murder? Oh good.’ 

The defendant told Bristol Crown Court she stabbed him after becoming ‘petrified’ by violence she was subjected to throughout their marriage.

She claimed she ‘walked on eggshells’ and ‘lived with a knot in my stomach’ and told the jury: ‘I didn’t know if I was waking up to nice David or nasty David.’ 

Over the course of a two-and-a-half week trial at Bristol Crown Court, various witnesses described Penny as ‘outgoing’ and ‘gregarious’ with a temper that was quick to flare up, but soon passed. 

The defendant had claimed her husband was often violent following arguments.

‘It would escalate, and he would shake me most of the time, he strangled me sometimes and I would go unconscious sometimes.’

She added: ‘Other times I would be semi-conscious, and I would be on the bed or the floor and if he was really angry he would kick me.’

Jackson claimed that on the night of the killing she had taken a kitchen knife to her bedroom intending to use it to take her own life, but instead walked into her husband’s bedroom to speak to him.

‘I wanted him to say: ‘I am sorry, Pen.’ He didn’t, he just said: ‘For God’s sake you are pathetic, get on with it and go back to bed’,’ she said.

‘It was just like, ‘Pass the sugar’. I was in utter despair. I looked at him and said: ‘I have done nothing wrong, admit you are sorry.’ He said: ‘For God’s sake shut up’. He literally couldn’t be bothered – it was utter contempt.’   

Describing the moment she stabbed the victim, Jackson said: ‘I lost all control.’

She continued: ‘If I had been the normal Penny, I wouldn’t have done it.

‘I am sorry, I lost the plot and lost control.’

Various witnesses described the victim and defendant as a couple that seemed happy together – who would bicker but with rows never lasting long.

Mrs Potterton recalled three instances of serious aggression by her father against her mother between 1997 and 1998, including pulling a knife on her and once giving her a bloody nose.

But she agreed this had taken place in the immediate aftermath of the suicide of Mr Jackson’s son, Gavin, from his previous marriage.

Mrs Potterton said she believed her father had sought counselling to cope with his grief, and agreed that her parents seemed to be enjoying a happy retirement together with lots of shared interests including cruise holidays and gardening. 

EXCLUSIVE: Black widow who stabbed fourth husband to death may have ‘coerced’ third spouse into gassing himself in his garage after she put down his two beloved Rottweilers while he was in Saudi Arabia on business and started an affair, his brother claims 

By Tom Bedford for MailOnline

A black widow may have coerced her third husband into gassing himself in the garage of their family home, his brother claims.

Stewart Warrender said Penny Jackson made his brother Alan’s life a misery before he uncovered her affair with retired army officer husband David Jackson in 1993 and took his own life.

She was today found guilty of murdering Mr Jackson, husband number four, who she stabbed to death at their home in February.

During the trial at Bristol Crown Court, Penny admitted that she had ‘driven’ her previous husband to suicide by cheating on him.

Alan Warrender quit the RAF to take a job in Saudi Arabia to pay off debts he built up.

He returned to their home in Grantham, Lincolnshire, to find the wife he was devoted to had started an affair with David Jackson and had his two healthy Rottweiler dogs put down while he was away.

The murder trial heard Alan discovered the pair together after days returning from the Middle East in April 1993. The two men started brawling over Penny. A few days later 43-year-old Alan was dead. 

Mr Warrender believes rather than just finding his brother unconscious in his car after he had gassed himself following a row, as she claimed to the jury, she may have actually persuaded him to do it.

He said that she was ‘strangely upbeat’ during his brother’s funeral and had been a controlling presence throughout their relationship, which started less than a year after the death of Alan’s first wife Beverley.

He even told how he believes Penny to have persuaded Alan to put the adopted son ‘he had always wanted’ back into care just after they had met.

Mr Warrender – who stepped in as best man at Penny and Alan’s wedding after the former one withdrew because he didn’t approve of his friend’s fiancée – said he had always ‘had suspicions’ about Alan’s suicide. 

He told MailOnline: ‘He took his life not long after finding out about her and David. As you can imagine he was distraught, it tore him to pieces inside.

‘But I never had any concerns over my brother’s rationality, even when he went through it after his first wife Bev died of cancer.

‘He could’ve lived a half decent life without Penny, who clearly didn’t love him anymore.

‘Did Penny really find him unconscious in his car after an argument or was she there when he gassed himself? Did she coerce him into doing it? I’ve always thought that was a possibility.’ 

Mr Warrender said his suspicions were first aroused when she did not appear to be overly upset at his brother’s funeral and have been reinforced following recent revelations that Pennymurdered David after taking a knife to bed with the original intention to kill herself until she went for him.

He said: ‘There was something definitely off about her behaviour during Alan’s funeral.

‘I know people grieve in different ways but she seemed strangely upbeat for someone whose husband had just committed suicide.

‘It wasn’t the case that Alan had been ill for some time and his death was expected. It was sudden and a shock but she didn’t appear to be too upset. There was a distinct lack of empathy with her that day.

‘It’s why I’ve always had the niggling thought in my head about the way Alan died.

‘And then to read how she took a knife to bed and killed David Jackson, having originally planned to end her own life, it kind of almost confirmed my fears.’

The inquest report from the Grantham Journal was headlined: ‘Man took his life after marital stress’.

It explained that the aviation specialist had recently returned home from a four-month contract in Saudi Arabia when his body was found in the fume-filled Ford Granada.

In her evidence, Penny told the court that her husband had come home to find domestic problems and she had told him their marriage was over.

The coroner ruled Mr Warrender had taken his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed. 

A former neighbour, who recalled the case, said: ‘It was said he had a lot of alcohol in his system and everyone was surprised that he had managed to reverse the car into the little garage.

‘He had been abroad working and the rumour was that his wife had started seeing someone from the Prince William of Gloucester barracks.

‘I remember he had two Rottweiler dogs which were his pride and joy but his wife had them put to sleep when he was away on one of these lengthy trips to the Middle East.’

Alan married first wife Beverley Alan in 1971 and the couple had two daughters, Samantha and Katherine.

While she was being treated for cancer, the pair made the decision to adopt a nine-year-old boy, the son Alan had always wanted. 

Beverley died in 1987 and Alan met Penny soon afterwards with the couple marrying the following year in South Wales where he was stationed as a chief technical officer with the RAF.

Early in the relationship, the boywas placed back into care, a decision Mr Warrender believes was made by Penny.

The couple later moved to Grantham after Alan had been transferred to RAF Stanton Morley in Norfolk. They had a daughter, Isabelle. 

Mr Warrander added: ‘I always had the impression that whatever Penny wanted, Penny got. She pulled the strings, it seemed to me, as an alpha-female.

‘Alan’s best friend, Brendan, who was quite a religious man and certainly someone with high morals, refused to be his best man at their wedding. Penny was a huge factor in that decision.

‘In Beverley, Alan had also met his soulmate and she was everything that Penny wasn’t, she was compassionate, she was a wife, a mother and had that caring nurturing side to her.

‘Before she passed away, Alan and Bev adopted a nine-year-old boy. Although blessed with two wonderful daughters at the time, my brother always wanted a son.

‘He had a tough start to life and I think he could be a challenge but he was a really nice lad. ‘He went out with me for the afternoon in my truck and loved it. You really get to know someone when you’re cooped up with them in a cab for hours on end.

‘But after Bev died and not long after meeting Penny, he put the boy back into care. I asked Alan about it and I could see it was a very tough and uncomfortable conversation.

‘He didn’t really want to answer the question and inferred that it wasn’t his decision. I didn’t press him too much.

‘I always thought that while Penny was bubbly, confident and very sociable she was quite empty inside. She was soulless and very narcissistic.’

Penny told the trial that she was determined to make her relationship and marriage to David work because it would ‘validate Alan’s death’. She admitted to the court that Alan would not have killed himself if she had not cheated on him. 

Like Alan, David had been in a solid and loving 10-year marriage before being lured away by home wrecker Penny.

After leaving his wife Sheila Taylor he later confided in her that he was scared of her, didn’t trust her and feared she would ruin his career.

Not just that, the jury was shocked to hear she had threatened to ‘do a Bobbit’ on him – a euphemism for cutting off his penis.

It referred to a notorious case in the United States when a woman sliced off her sleeping husband’s manhood.

Mrs Taylor told the trial: ‘He was very frightened and he believed she was capable of carrying out that threat.’

She told the court Penny loved to make her fourth husband squirm with embarrassment and had a reputation for baiting people and making them feel uncomfortable.

When her teenage grandson came to stay she would sit naked brushing her hair with the bedroom door open, the court heard. 

It was Jackson’s third marriage – the first, at the age of 17, was to Melvyn Porter whose family say he has ‘no happy memories’ of their time together.

They had two children together, Rebecca and Victoria. Jackson later donated one of her kidneys to Rebecca but the murder trial heard they are now estranged and haven’t spoken to each other in years.

Penny left Mr Porter to look after their two children after falling for RAF airman Anthony Rothwell. 

They were married for 10 years but she described their relationship as a ‘loving friendship’ but told the court he ‘preferred relationships with chaps’. 

Her next two husbands, both in the services, were Alan Warrender and David Jackson.

To the outside world the Jacksons seemed like a successful and content retired couple with so much money tucked away they went on several cruises a year and had a holiday home in Bergerac, South West France.

After they sold the property, the pair wintered in Spain because they ‘hated the cold weather’.

Outgoing and vivacious, Penny loved going to the gym, splashing out on shopping trips and gardening at their £450,000 luxury bungalow in the village of Berrow, Somerset.

But David had no hobbies or interests and, after beating prostate and bowel cancer, spent his days at home waiting for Penny to return from her many outings.

Penny told the murder trial ‘he loved me and I loved him’ but she tried to convince the jury the marriage wasn’t happy because of her husband’s abuse and violence.

The mother-of-three claimed she’d ‘had enough’ and hid an eight-inch filleting knife under her pillow with the intention of killing herself on the night of February 13 – her 66th birthday.

Instead she stabbed her husband in the abdomen and, as he desperately begged an emergency operator for help, she knifed him again.

People in the courtroom shuddered at his screams were heard during 999 call while Penny calmly said: ‘I should have stabbed him a bit more’. 

Penny was arrested in her Marks & Spencer pyjamas and continued confessing to police that she had killed her husband. 

At the top of her confession note found at the scene Penny scrubbed the words: ‘Self-defence or pre-meditated.’

The first stabbing in the bedroom of the couple’s smart bungalow could have been an instinctive reaction.

But the jury repeatedly heard a recording of the second stabbing in the kitchen – it was deliberate and cold-blooded. It was murder.

Wealthy retired accountant Penny had the words ‘Property of David John Jackson’ tattooed on her right buttock to tease and provoke her husband.

She even stifled a little giggle in the witness box when she referred to the tattoo which her husband of 24 years hated.

As she starts her life sentence for murder, she will have her victim’s name inked on her body for the rest of her days. 

‘Pyjama murderer’ Penny Jackson tried to paint herself as a victim, but she split from her first two husbands and the third gassed himself, leaving her relatives to label her just an unfaithful and narcissistic liar who slashed out in lockdown

A few days after the UK entered its third national lockdown, Penny Jackson logged on to Facebook to show her support for the restrictions.

‘Stay at home. Save lives’, proclaims the frame she added to her profile on January 17 this year. How painfully ironic that gesture now seems, given the horrors which took place at her own home less than a month later.

Cooped up with her retired Army officer husband David in their Somerset bungalow, tensions within their 24-year marriage soon reached boiling point. 

At the end of a furious row following a gourmet dinner to celebrate her 66th birthday, Jackson stabbed 78-year-old David three times with a kitchen knife; the final, fatal blow delivered after he had dialled 999, with the emergency services still on the line. When police arrived, they found Jackson’s handwritten confession.

The former Ministry of Defence accountant told Bristol Crown Court that she lost control after decades of verbal and physical abuse. Retired Lieutenant Colonel David Jackson, she claimed, was a bully who pushed her to her limits until she could take no more.

She hoped her testimony would persuade the jury to find her guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter, but their verdict was clear; Penny Jackson murdered her husband in cold blood and must now expect a lengthy prison sentence for her crime.

And yet troubling questions about this extraordinary case remain. For how on earth is it possible that petty rows about a remote control – not to mention an Aga-baked bubble and squeak side dish served on the night Mr Jackson died – escalated so rapidly into murder just weeks before their silver wedding anniversary? 

Or that Jackson could be so ruthless about attacking her husband with her new 8in ProCook filleting knife that she casually told the operator who took David’s 999 call, ‘his abdomen is buggered’ before adding: ‘I might go and stab him again’?

On the surface, the pair appeared to be the epitome of respectability; a retired Army officer and his bubbly civil servant wife who had lived and worked abroad in both Germany, France and Sierra Leone. 

To their friends they appeared to be enjoying a blissfully happy retirement, spending weeks at a time in their second home in the village of Queyssac just outside Bergerac in south-west France, or on Caribbean cruises, or throwing dinner parties in their bungalow in Berrow, Somerset.

Jackson even joked when police arrested her, in her nightwear, asking them: ‘Do you usually have murderers where they’re wearing Marks & Spencer pyjamas?’

But, as the Mail has discovered, the Jacksons’ turbulent marriage was founded on a legacy of infidelity, tragedy, and lies, all of which poisoned their relationship.

Both were opinionated, stubborn and heavy drinkers. Their rows, say friends and family members who have spoken exclusively to this newspaper, were fuelled by alcohol and sparked by the slightest thing.

And despite mother-of-three Jackson’s attempt to paint herself as a victim, she had left three marriages before she ended up with Mr Jackson, whom she married in 1996.

As one of her former brothers-in-law puts it: ‘I can’t honestly see Penny, especially the way she’s disposed of three other husbands, being someone who would take abuse for all those years.’

Stewart Warrender, whose brother Alan, Penny’s third husband, killed himself in 1993 after Penny left him, adds: ‘Narcissistic is probably the best word for the way she is. No empathy. For somebody to be like that there’s got to be something wrong with them.’

Indeed, it became clear throughout Jackson’s three-week trial that the marriage had been volatile to the point of explosive for decades. There were warning signs on both sides. In court, David’s daughter from his first marriage, Jane Calverley, described Penny as more than her husband’s equal, saying she would ‘bait him’.

‘He would squirm and look embarrassed, especially if we were out in company,’ she said.

Jackson’s friend, Veronica Statham, said of Penny: ‘She could become quite overwhelming after a few drinks.’

David’s own brother, Alan Jackson, told the Mail this week that he was an ‘arrogant bully’ and that ‘Penny learned not to answer back when there was an argument brewing and they’d been drinking.’

Jackson’s own daughter said that her mother ‘could get carried away and get a bit loud’.

Given the fractious state of their marriage, perhaps the most pertinent question of all, then, is why neither of them walked out?

But Birmingham-born David was Penny’s fourth husband. She, his third wife. Aside from their occasional furious rows, she placed a high value on her life as an army officer’s wife, enjoying all the middle-class trappings that came with it: Private school for her daughter, holidays abroad, coffee mornings and pilates classes with friends, as well as considerable savings and three pensions.

Further clues can be traced to her troubled early life. Her mother was married, but not to her father, when she was born in Woolwich, South London, in February 1955. 

Placed in foster care when she was ten days old, she didn’t see her parents again until she was 12. It wasn’t until 1974 that her birth was correctly re-registered after her mother and her real father finally married in 1973.

By then they were living in Somerset and Penny was already a wife, having married builder Melvyn Porter in Weston-super-Mare in November 1972, aged 17. Their first daughter, Rebecca, was born a year later; their second, Victoria, in 1977. When the youngest was two, Jackson walked out.

In court, she described her first husband as ‘violent’ and unfaithful and said ‘I decided I wanted more from the relationship’. While Melvyn Porter is unwell, his second wife Janet denied her claims. ‘That woman is utterly shameless,’ she said from her home in Highbridge, Somerset. ‘You can’t believe a single word that comes out of her mouth.

‘She will say whatever suits her at the time. She took everything from my husband. Everything.

‘He went off to work one morning and when he came home that evening, she had vanished with their two daughters and she had completely stripped the house of everything including the carpets.

‘She told the girls that their father had died. It took Melvyn years to track them down again.’

Penny’s daughter, 44-year-old Victoria Mullins, added: ‘I don’t believe dad abused my mother and I know he did not have an affair. So many lies have been told by so many people.’

In April 1981, 26-year-old Jackson married husband number two, fellow Ministry of Defence civil servant Tony Rothwell. In court she claimed that their ‘loving friendship’ ‘fizzled out’ and they divorced. Mr Rothwell, who is now living abroad, declined to comment when contacted by the Mail.

Jackson was 32 when she married her third husband, 39-year-old Alan Warrender, an RAF chief technician, in January 1988. His first wife had died 18 months earlier from cancer and while Penny’s own two daughters were not living with her, she became stepmother to Alan’s two daughters.

She gave birth to her third daughter, Isabelle, in October 1990 by which time the family were living in Grantham in Lincolnshire.

But two years later, this marriage was also over. While 43-year-old Alan was working in Saudi Arabia, Penny began an affair with the man who would become her ill-fated fourth husband. After Alan took his own life in April 1993, his inquest, which found he died by carbon monoxide poisoning, was reported beneath the headline: ‘Man took his life after marital stress’.

‘He was found in the garage. He was drunk apparently, emotional, because she’d been having an affair,’ says his brother, Stewart Warrender. ‘I was never fully satisfied with the inquest verdict. I was sceptical of a suicide. It could be more coercion. I feel strongly it wasn’t properly investigated. I’ve always thought that.’

He added that there was ill-feeling in the family because Penny ‘benefited enormously’ from Alan’s death. ‘Alan’s kids from his first marriage didn’t get a bean. Penny inherited everything and was entitled to his pension too.’

Mr Jackson was married to his second wife, Sheila, when he met Penny in the early 1990s. Having left school at 16, he joined the Royal Transport Corps aged 17 and worked his way up the ranks before working for the MoD. He married his first wife, Patricia, in 1964 and they had two daughters and a son. In the aftermath of Alan’s suicide, Penny changed her name by deed poll to Jackson.

She and David married in 1996, by which time they were living near an army base in Hampshire and raising Penny’s youngest daughter, Isabelle, to believe that David was her real father. She didn’t discover the truth until, as a teenager, she was contacted by one of her half-sisters from Alan Warrender’s first marriage.

Further tragedy followed. Two years after Penny and David’s wedding, David’s 28-year-old son Gavin, from his first marriage, took his own life, leaving a suicide note in which he is said to have written that he didn’t want to end up like his father.

In court, Penny alleged that David became aggressive in the wake of Gavin’s suicide. Her daughter Isabelle backed up her claims, recalling how, when she was eight, David held a knife to her mother’s throat. On another occasion, he pinned her mother against the wall. On yet another occasion, David smashed the mug Isabelle had bought for Mother’s Day. David’s own brother, Alan Jackson, told the Mail that he could be an ‘arrogant bully’.

‘No-one deserves to die the way he did but I can believe that Penny would have been pushed to her limits,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone will ever really know what kind of a life she had with David.’

This was the argument made by Jackson’s defence barrister Clare Wade, the same QC who represented Sally Challen, who served nine years in prison for murdering her husband Richard with a hammer before a ground-breaking appeal in 2019 saw her conviction reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

But while Challen was isolated, controlled and humiliated by her husband, Jackson was more than a match for hers. As she said in court: ‘I could have left quietly.’

In December 2020, she summoned police to the couple’s house after a row about the TV remote control ended up with Jackson locking her husband in the conservatory. He smashed his way out using a poker from the wood-burning stove.

He had just returned from hospital after an operation to replace the battery in an implant in his brain for tremors in his arms and hands. He had also undergone chemotherapy for prostate and bowel cancer and had a knee replacement. When asked if she wanted to take the matter further, Jackson told officers: ‘Part of me wants to make him pay for it, but that’s spite.’

She added: ‘It’s either we get through it or we get divorced.’ Divorce would have been the best thing but tragically they limped on. Christmas lay around the corner and then the nation was plunged back into lockdown and the pair hunkered down again at home.

Snippets of their life in lockdown emerged in court. David enjoyed long phone calls with his daughters while Penny listened to The Archers omnibus on Radio 4 or worked out in the home gym she’d set up in the garage.

But she hinted at her feelings towards her husband during the UK’s first lockdown in April 2020 when she posted a joke photograph of a woman knitting a noose for her husband.

On February 13, three days before Penny’s 66th birthday, the couple ate a Michelin-starred meal of crab, lobster and steak, bought by Penny’s daughter Isabelle who cooked the same at her own house with her husband, sharing the occasion via Zoom.

Their fateful row appears to have stemmed from David’s confusion about potatoes, believing they should have been served with the steak and not the lobster.

Penny said she’d prepare some bubble and squeak to have with the steak but when she took it from the Aga, David accused her of making it look as if he thought the gifted meal wasn’t good enough.

Towards the end of the four-and-a-half hour meal, they rowed again, this time over who had forgotten to charge the iPad they were using for the Zoom call.

In court, Isabelle’s husband, Tom Potterton recalled: ‘He said to Penny: ‘You can’t admit when you’re wrong’. He was relatively calm. ‘Penny was upset. You could see she had been crying. My wife thought it best to leave it there so we ended the call.’

Jackson murdered her husband just an hour later.    

EXCLUSIVE: First pictures of pyjama killer’s two-bed bungalow: Kitchen where wife, 66, stabbed ex-colonel husband, 78, to death in her nightwear after threatening to chop off his penis is revealed as home sells for £450,000

By Shekhar Bhatia for MailOnline 

These are the first pictures inside the bungalow where Penny Jackson stabbed her retired colonel husband husband to death.

The two-bedroom home in Berrow near Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset has been sold for just over £450,000, Mail Online can reveal.

Photos of the killer, however, and her husband were still visible to potential buyers online on the walls of the home.

The kitchen where 66-year-old Mrs Jackson fatally knifed David Jackson was also advertised to help sell the property.

One picture shows the Aga which was claimed in court to have been the centre of an argument over burnt bubble and squeak which led to the slaying. 

Mrs Jackson first slashed across the chest in a bedroom of the couple’s house, jurors heard. 

After knifing him she told police she had left him for dead on the kitchen floor.

Mrs Jackson, in a conversation recorded by police, told and emergency call handler: ‘He’s in the kitchen bleeding to death with any luck.

‘I thought I’d got his heart, but he hasn’t got one then twice in the abdomen. His abdomen is buggered.’

The paraphernalia used to help sell the property gives off an image of a happy family home, with photographs of a family wedding adorning the living room wall and stacks of books on shelves.

The garden has been neatly kept and the dining room table set for a convivial family meal.

One nearby resident said: ‘I’m not sure if the new owners are aware of what happened in there.

‘But I wish them all the best in their new home and that the neighbourhood can move on from this.’