Kuntal Patel denies trying to murder her controlling mother using poison abrin that she bought online with bitcoin

A woman tried to kill her mother by lacing her Diet Coke with poison in a murder plot inspired partly by Breaking Bad, a court has heard.

Kuntal Patel, 37, allegedly slipped abrin to her “controlling and selfish” mother, Meena, 60, after she forbade her from marrying her boyfriend. Patel bought the deadly poison from a site based in the US using the virtual currency bitcoin.

She allegedly watched her mother, who sits on the bench at Thames magistrates court, drink the substance at her home in Stratford, east London, last December. The mother survived and Patel set about obtaining a stronger dose of the poison, the prosecution said.

The alleged plot was said to have been inspired partly by Breaking Bad, the US series that follows the story of a chemistry teacher, Walter White, who turns to cooking crystal meth with a former student after being diagnosed with cancer. White uses ricin in attempts to kill rivals; abrin is more poisonous than ricin, the court heard.

Patel, who works as a graphic designer for Barclays Bank in Canary Wharf, was arrested in January following an FBI investigation, jurors at London’s Southwark crown court heard.

Jonathan Polnay, prosecuting, said: “To the outside world, the Patels must have seemed a highly respectable and happy family.” But beneath this veneer lay a tale of discord, bullying and abuse. He said details of the case were “so extreme that if they were the plot of a Hollywood or Bollywood film, you would say they are far-fetched”.

“The evidence will show that in private, Meena Patel, the magistrate who worked in domestic violence and race relations, was not a nice woman at all. She would regularly use foul and abusive language, including highly racist language. She would, on occasions, be violent,” he said.

“She was highly manipulative and controlling. She would seek to control every aspect of her daughters’ lives, and worst of all she forbade Kuntal from marrying the man she loved, Niraj Kakad. Meena Patel was all of those things – manipulative, controlling and selfish. But she did not deserve to die.”

Polnay said Kuntal Patel concocted the murder plot so she could marry Kakad. “Inspired, in part, by the US television series Breaking Bad, she acquired a deadly toxin called abrin, a close relation to ricin, which you may have heard of. She acquired it over the dark web from a vendor in the USA. She paid using bitcoins, a virtual, electronic currency, and used layer upon layer of encryption to try to cover her tracks,” he told the jury.

Appearing in the dock dressed in black, Patel denied trying to murder her mother and acquiring a biological agent or toxin. She has pleaded guilty to two counts of attempting to acquire a biological agent or toxin last December.

The court heard that privately-educated Patel first met Kakad through Shaadi.com, an internet dating service for the Asian community. Her mother did not approve of their relationship and allegedly locked her daughter in her home, beat her and demanded she stop seeing him.

In a series of highly abusive messages she branded her daughter a “witch” and “fucked up brain girl who cannot be my blood” for falling for Kakad, who lived in America, the court heard.

In a desperate email to a friend, Kuntal branded her mother “evil” and said: “I told her how much I liked him and she started slapping me.”

She added: “He is the best man I have ever met. He said he was going to propose to me. I’ll never forgive her for what she has done to me. She has stolen my future away from me. I couldn’t care less about my life any more. I would prefer to be dead. My life is so worthless. She just shouts at me like a bulldog. There is no reason or logic with anything she does, apart from being a psycho bitch. I’m stuck with that miserable fucker until she dies.”

Meena was hell-bent on “wrecking” her daughter’s chance of marriage, hacked her phone and emails and seized her credit cards in an attempt to scupper the relationship, the court heard. Despite the abuse, the couple got engaged in November 2012 and Patel hatched a plan to kill her mother, jurors heard.

Polnay said: “She took the view that she was not going to let her mother and family arguments stand in the way of her happiness. Kuntal was firm in her desire to marry Niraj and have children. She had pointed out on a number of occasions that she did not have time on her side.

“Meena’s attitude was ‘over my dead body’. And she was quite obviously a manipulative and controlling person who would not hesitate to do everything she could to wreck the chance of a happy marriage. It was around this point, we say, that Kuntal Patel made the decision that the best way to ensure she got what she wanted, happiness for herself, was by killing her mother.”

Jurors heard that Patel used the fake name Headgear when she bought the poison for £900 over the internet from American Jesse Korff, who used the pseudonym Snowman. Unknown to the pair, the website Black Market Reloaded was under surveillance by the FBI after an advert posted on it in September 2013 offered a ricin poison.

Jurors were told that she was inspired by a plot in season 5 episode 16 of Breaking Bad, in which someone is killed using ricin. In messages she called Korff “Heisenberg”, the nickname of White, the main character in the show. And she wrote that “I’ve been watching too much Breaking Bad”.

Polnay said: “On 29 September [she downloads] season 5 episode 16 of Breaking Bad. In this episode ricin was used in the murder of one of the characters.”

It is alleged that Korff sent abrin to Patel. Abrin is highly toxic, and causes breathing difficulties, fever, coughing and sickness. Fluid builds in the lungs, eventually killing the person. There is no antidote. An advert for the drug on the website promised: “They will die a very horrible death.”

Polnay said Patel meticulously planned her murder and, anxious to keep her distance from the abrin, duped her friend Julie Wong into accepting the parcel containing it. But in a “stroke of very bad luck for him”, Julie’s next-door neighbour James Sutcliffe signed for the package.

In emails, Patel nicknamed her illicit purchase Candle in the Wind – which the prosecutor insisted was not a reference the Elton John song but to the candle that hid the poison.

When her mother survived the poisoning, an exasperated Patel confessed her plot to the American poison seller, the court heard. She wrote: “Something had definitely gone wrong somewhere as it is now early Saturday morning and still everything is normal. Yes target drank all of it. I made sure I watched her drink it all.

“I had to borrow money from friends to get this stuff from you because it’s my last option. I can’t be with the man I love because my mother doesn’t like him. She is a bitter, miserable old woman and has been physically mean to me and my sister.”

She went on: “I can only be with him if she is out of the way.” She asked for another drug that was “tasteless and untraceable in autopsy” and would “not cause suspicion by cops or doctors”.

Patel was arrested in January and told police she bought the abrin in order to kill herself because her mother had forbidden her from marrying her boyfriend. She claimed that when the parcel carrying the candle arrived, she became scared and threw it away.

Police combed through her computer and iPhone and discovered she had googled “how to murder using poison”, “how to create botulism” and “how to murder someone without getting caught”.

After she was remanded in custody, she allegedly confessed to her mother that she had tried to kill her, during a conversation in prison conducted in Gujarati to avoid prison staff understanding what she said.

She allegedly told her mother: “I was going to kill you and Amba Ma [a Hindu Goddess] saw it, that’s why she has punished me.”

In another conversation it is alleged her mother said: “You are in prison at present because of him.” But Patel allegedly replied: “Because of me – I did put that in your Coke.”

The case continues.