A mentally ill man who beheaded his wife after suffering a delusion while watching The X Factor has been sectioned indefinitely.



Timothy Allen killed Samantha Ho, 39, at their home in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, in August last year. Her head and body were discovered separately, and a postmortem examination concluded that she died from multiple cuts to the neck.

Southwark crown court heard that the couple, who met at university in 1995, were watching television on 29 August when Allen suffered a delusion and attempted to take his own life. He then attacked his wife and the couple’s pet dog.

Andrew Jackson, prosecuting, said: “They had been, it seems, watching X Factor together on television – that appears to have been the trigger for what happened.”

Allen told police he had seen the show’s dancers “as puppets being controlled by a puppet master”. He believed this figure was trying to get to him and his wife, and so decided he had to take her life and his own, Jackson said.

“When she asked him not to kill her, he carried on,” he said.

Samantha Ho. Photograph: PA

Allen, 40, denied murder, and prosecutors accepted his guilty plea to manslaughter by diminished responsibility.

Medical reports showed he had suffered a series of psychiatric problems, including paranoid schizophrenia, following a motorbike accident in 2004. Ho, a bioscientist, had been a “caring, loving and supportive partner”, Jackson said.

Mrs Justice McGowan said Allen posed a threat to the public, and ordered that he be detained under section 37 of the Mental Health Act 1983. She made a restriction order under section 41 of the same act that he not be released from a secure hospital until the secretary of state deems him not to be a threat.

The judge told Allen: “This was a terrible offence. You killed the woman that you loved and who I’m completely satisfied also loved you with a selfless commitment.

“This was a happy, loving couple, working well together and successfully until the events of 2004 and the road traffic accident. What happened that night was clearly a product of a severe and chronic mental illness. This is one of the sadder cases that this court has had to deal with.”