TORONTO

She watched her husband writhing in excruciating pain in the torture chamber of their Toronto apartment and lifted not a finger. For three long months, she watched as her spouse was degraded, beaten and sexually abused by her new boyfriend and said not word.

Now she says she’s sorry. “I just feel horrible for what really happened to my husband,” the 32-year-old told the court. “I wish I would have said something.”

But she didn’t.

So John Siscoe had his sadistic fun. Lighter fluid was poured on her husband’s genitals and lit aflame, straight pins were pierced through his scrotum and penis and lips, cartilage was pulled from his ears. He was stomped on with steel toe boots, beaten with a hammer and sliced with razor blades, his gaping wounds either cauterized with a hot knife or sewn together crudely with needle and thread. Forced to sleep in a closet five by two feet, he lost 50 pounds and suffered a fractured skull, punctured lungs and five broken ribs.

The brutality was so horrific that Justice John McMahon noted when he revoked her bail that it was the worst case of physical abuse he had ever seen in his long career.

Siscoe and the woman have pleaded guilty to numerous charges including aggravated assault, sexual assault causing bodily harm and failing to provide the necessities of life.

In a downtown courtroom Thursday, the man’s lumpen wife — her name can’t be published by court order to protect the identity of her husband — sat in a prisoner’s box as the Crown attorney urged the judge to sentence her to a stiff 10 years behind bars.

“In a city not easily shocked, this is a case that stands out in unspeakable brutality,” Paul Leishman told the court. “And it continued again and again and again with (her) doing nothing to stop it.”

When Toronto Police were alerted by neighbours and finally rescued the beaten, naked man from the closet, they asked his wife if she knew what had happened to him.

“He’s got a big mouth,” she told them.

Leishman said the woman may only have an IQ of 59, but “she had the capacity to call the police and could have done so.” Instead, he accused her of wanting to getting rid of her husband so she could live happily with her new beau and the baby they were expecting.

She and her husband had met Siscoe in British Columbia and he quickly moved in and took over their lives, pocketing their disability cheques, bedding the wife and suggesting they move to Toronto in September 2009.

The trio moved into a small one bedroom apartment and Siscoe controlled the money. All was going fine until the boyfriend, a recovering alcoholic, started drinking again. On Oct. 31, he used her husband as a punching bag while she did nothing.

Less than two weeks later, Siscoe broke the man’s jaw and warned that he’d come after his elderly parents if he “ratted him out” to police. So his victim kept quiet and the violence escalated. Siscoe employed a torturer’s tool chest of pliers, pins, broom handles, a hot knife, tweezers, razor blades, cables, cords, a belt and flammable liquids, to the point where he was in danger of dying if he hadn’t been rescued Jan. 19, 2010.

“His days were numbered,” Leishman charged. “Over and over again she observed her husband being utterly brutalized and she does nothing.”

But defence lawyer Vivian Ropchan argued the wife should serve four and half years because she was physically and psychologically controlled by Siscoe and didn’t have the mental capacity to get her or her husband out of his clutches.

The judge didn’t buy it.

Even when she was alone with her husband, she didn’t let him escape, McMahon noted. And no one forced her to watch as he was brutally tortured. “I’m troubled by that, to be blunt,” he said. “Her lack of empathy is troubling. She was sitting in the bathroom watching him pour lighter fluid on this man’s head and set him on fire — and this is her husband.”

No, sorry doesn’t seem to cut it at all. McMahon will deliver his sentence May 30.