BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – BENTLEY ‘DANNY’ HUGGINS, a native of St. Kitts-Nevis, is facing life sentence after jurors at the Central Criminal Court in England, commonly known as the ‘Old Bailey’, found him guilty of murdering his wife.
According to BBC News (London), jurors had convicted the 41-year-old Huggins of murder, rejecting his claims that he was a battered husband.
The court was told that Huggins’ wife, 35-year-old Desirie Thomas, was found lying face down in a pool of blood with stab wounds to her neck and face at their Woolwich, south-east London home on Friday, December 23, 2011.
Huggins claimed his wife had attacked him with a knife but prosecutors said he killed her “in anger and cold blood”.
It was also revealed in court that the couple was married in Antigua some 22 months prior to the incident and the union had realised a daughter.
BBC News (London) noted that Zoe Johnson, QC, told the court that Thomas was a hard-working woman, holding down a demanding job as a British Airways supervisor, paying all the household bills and caring for her child.
“The defendant is a self-serving person who believes the world owes him a living and believes women should be subservient to his needs.
“On the day she was killed, Desirie Thomas had decided to divorce the defendant. That would have had the inevitable and devastating effect of making him homeless and being sent back to St Kitts,” the media house quoted Johnson as saying.
The court also heard that prior to the police’s visit to the couple’s home, Huggins went to them and claimed to have killed his wife in self-defence; but the prosecution said it was a “pre-emptive strike” because he feared she was about to complain about him, and he attacked her after she decided to divorce him.
Huggins, who had conducted his own defence after dismissing his counsel, was remanded to prison and will be sentenced at a date due to be set.
At the end of the trial, Huggins told His Lordship Justice Anthony Morris that he did not like the way he was treated, adding, “You have truly and utterly disgusted me.”
