Trial heard about a life of despair
Lucille Sarah Scollay wept in court – a model of loneliness, depression, grief – as her murder trial unfolded around her.
Her life had overtaken her slowly, over years, until she had simply come home one night and stabbed to death her husband of 20 years, Guy Christian Scollay.
She sat behind her defence counsel in court, weeping often, sometimes rocking gently, or shaking.
Sometimes she seemed to be covering her ears rather than hear what was going on. She did not want to hear the DVD recording of her own interview with the police.
She was dysfunctional in her relationship with her phobic, anxiety ridden husband.
But she was not alone at court.
Family and friends were there to support her at a trial where she was not hoping for much.
She accepted that there could be only two verdicts: guilty of murder or manslaughter. There was never any talk of an acquittal.
And after about three hours, the jury delivered its manslaughter verdict.
The trial had established a good deal of sympathy for her situation – where a marriage that had begun with hope and promise with a husband who had an honours degree in history, deteriorated into drug addiction and the hopelessness generated by depression and phobia of outdoor spaces.
Guy Christian Scollay, 48 when he died, had become a recluse in a home he shared with his wife and their 19-year-old son Louis.
It was no kind of life for the couple. Louis gave evidence of both parents being “pretty unmotivated”. They were in bed a lot. Dinner only happened if you cooked it yourself.
Lucille Scollay never denied stabbing Guy Scollay, killing him with a wound from a kitchen knife that penetrated his heart when she returned home after a night out drinking and talking with a man who was her friend and who said he had sometimes been her lover.
She told police that she had not wanted to kill her husband, but to make him listen and to change their lives because they were both miserable. She said: “I didn’t want to hurt him. I wanted him to get better.”
That may have been a forlorn hope, after years when he barely left the house. He spent much of his time drugged or on methadone, sometimes smoking cannabis, and reading. Reading was his escape, his son Louis said.
Lucille Scollay had had a drug problem herself, and depression. She was on anti-depressants and she had been on the methadone programme herself for a time.
She said she could not bring herself to leave her husband. She loved him. But the despondent life they shared was making them both miserable.
She described him to the police as “a bit nutty and frustrating.”
“He used to be so brilliant. He was a historian. He had a future but it never happened.”
She told them her husband suffered from anxiety and depression. “Apart from that he was just incredibly miserable.”
She had been crushed by the loneliness of her own life. Both families understood that, and supported her at the trial.
She could not understand what she had suddenly done.
Oddly, the manslaughter verdict she asked for at the trial was a brighter spot in a life that has had more than its share of despair.
Category: Focus
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