Christchurch | Thursday
AN SA born psychiatrist accused of slowly murdering his wife with poison allegedly tried to get his secret mistress involved in her care, the High Court in Christchurch heard on Thursday.
Colin Bouwer’s alleged affair with fellow Dunedin psychiatrist Anne Walsh is claimed by the Crown to have been a reason why he decided to kill his wife Annette with a ”clever cocktail of chemicals” that replicated the symptoms of a pancreatic tumour but could not be detected by normal blood tests.
Patrick Manning, one of the doctors treating Mrs Bouwer, told the court that Bouwer had seemed concerned about his wife’s condition and rang him late one evening to discuss her care.
”He commented during this conversation that his wife seemed somewhat down and I agreed with him that if this should continue, I may request a psychiatric opinion. He asked who I’d suggest and I said (a male psychiatrist),” Dr Manning said.
”He requested that I didn’t ask him to see his wife and I asked who he’d be comfortable with and he suggested Dr Anne Walsh.”
Dr Manning said Mrs Bouwer was not referred to a psychiatrist because her attitude became more positive when she learned she would be home for Christmas.
He also said that when Mrs Bouwer was admitted to hospital after the first of three hypoglycaemic — low blood-sugar level — comas, he had ordered a blood test to check for the presence of a blood-sugar altering drug called sulphonylureas.
The test came back negative, which supported his feeling after talking with Mrs Bouwer and her husband that use of the drug was unlikely.
The Crown claims that sulphonylureas was among the cocktail of drugs the defendant had obtained with false prescriptions shortly before his wife began to get ill.
Dr Manning said during the conversation about Mrs Bouwer’s possible depression, her husband had questioned him about the doctors’ assessment of the cause of her illness.
”He was concerned that we might be thinking that she had been on on-going medication to produce her illness,” he said.
”He didn’t specify, as I recall, sulphonylureas, but he said that in his opinion she’d never take such a thing and that she was a strong and determined woman who had been through some difficult situations in the past.
”I told him that I was not thinking that medication was causing her illness. I thought we’d excluded sulphonylureas drugs as a cause.”
Dr Manning later learned that the result of the test was inconclusive because sulphonylureas could only be detected with sensitive testing methods.
He accepted under cross-examination by David More, defending, that the negative result might have been because she had not taken sulphonylureas.
When Mrs Bouwer was discharged on Christmas Eve, he told her and the defendant that they had to monitor her blood-sugar levels and bring her back to hospital if they fell below normal levels.
On the afternoon before she died, Mrs Bouwer had blood-sugar readings of one-third the normal minimum amount, but she was not taken back to hospital and died later that night from a hypoglycaemic coma.
At Mrs Bouwer’s funeral on January 12 last year, Bouwer was ”understandably upset and said he was feeling numb and guilty, I think he said, for not getting his wife help the day before she died”, Dr Manning said. – Sapa