(WSVN) - A woman in the UK pleaded guilty to killing her father and burying him in the garden, saying she did it after she found child pornography photos that included images of herself.
The BBC reports 63-year-old Barbara Coombes was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of manslaughter, fraud and false representation, the BBC reports.
Coombes walked into a police station back in January and confessed to the murder, which happened in 2006. She told officers she snapped after discovering a box that contained explicit photos of naked infants and children, including herself, according to the Guardian.
Coombes said she felt “utterly disgusted and mortified” after finding the photos, so she grabbed a shovel and hit her 87-year-old father, Kenneth Coombes, on the back of the head. When he turned around, she said she slashed his throat with the edge of the spade.
She then wrapped him in a rug while he bled to death, and later buried him in the garden. Police found the World War II veteran’s body two days after her confession.
It was the culmination of a “lifetime” of physical and verbal abuse, as Coombes claimed her father used her as a “sex slave” since she was five years old. She told psychiatrists he raped her hundreds of times throughout her life.
But she waited 12 years to come clean, and had been claiming his pension payments ever since. It wasn’t until a housing official became suspicious and scheduled a welfare check that Coombes confessed to the crime.
Judge Timothy King sentenced her to nine years, saying he did not believe her argument that she acted in self-defense. But he told her he did believe she suffered “40 years of extreme mental, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of your father.”
However, the judge also said he didn’t think she would have ever confessed had “the net not started to close in around her.”
Duncan Thorpe, a senior investigating officer in the case, agreed that Coombes would not have come forward without the welfare check visit being scheduled.
“Despite having years to tell someone what really happened, she only came forward when she had no other choice,” Thorpe told the Guardian.
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