A hypnotist horse whisperer broke down and cried out “My doggies!” during her murder trial after hearing that her pet dogs had attacked each other after she is alleged to havefatally stabbed her husband in the back.
Christine Rawle, now 70, is accused of murdering her husband Ian, 72, as he walked away from a marital row at their isolated smallholding in north Devon.
During the trial, Chiez Bufton, Rawle’s daughter from a previous marriage, was asked about the dogs on the day of the attack and told her mother’s barrister: “I cannot say because it’s upsetting.”
Exeter crown court was then told that the dogs attacked each other in the house after Bufton claimed that she was denied access to the property after the killing. It was not made clear whether the dogs died.
Rawle cried out from the dock: “No one told me. Not my dogs. My doggies!” The judge halted proceedings for several minutes for Rawle to compose herself.
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Rawle is accused of stabbing her husband during a row about money and then walking away as he followed her for 100 yards, pleading for her to remove the knife, before he collapsed.
The court was told that the blade penetrated 10cm into his chest, causing his lung to collapse and blood to flow into the lung cavity. He suffered a cardiac arrest and died at the scene.
Bufton, 47, was on the phone to her mother when the attack took place. She told the court about the couple’s volatile relationship and how Rawle had been talking about getting divorced.
Bufton said that her mother was on the phone to her seconds after the attack and said: “Oh my God, what have I done, I loved him.” She told the court that her mother was “frantic” and “said to me that she had stabbed him”.
Bufton said that her mother was “very unwell” and frustrated about her husband going back on his word about selling some land to pay for an eye operation for her.
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She said her mother rang her and asked for her help, screaming: “Help me, help me” — “She was hysterical, shocked and had not intended to do it,” Bufton said.
She said she “got on really well” with Ian Rawle and he “became my dad”, adding: “Every couple has arguments.”
Before the couple married, Ian Rawle had his firearms taken away by police because of the unstable nature of their relationship, Bufton said. “They sometimes argued over money. They acquired different pockets of land and mum progressively made things better. She was not a social sponge, my mum contributed to everything there. She inherited some money and she paid for things.
“Ian often told her that she came with nothing and you will leave with nothing.”
Under cross-examination by Clare Wade KC, defending Rawle, Bufton said that she was “perplexed” about the “bickering” phone call that led to the killing, with her mother going from “zero to 100” in such a short space.
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“There are so many layers of a relationship over 30 years.” She said that she saw incidents of physical violence between them, including one row over horses in which Ian Rawle hit his wife with a shovel in 2000. She said he would call his wife “Fats” or sometimes “fat cow” if they were talking to each other in a derogatory way.
Bufton said that her mother suffered with her mental health as well as physical health, and recalled her trying to commit suicide on several occasions.
She said that Rawle was known as the “horse whisperer” because of the softer way she would treat horses that were brought to her.
The trial has previously been told the Rawles’s relationship compared to the characters in Roald Dahl’s The Twits, with Christine Rawle having put a hosepipe through the sunroof of her husband’s car and filled it up with water, while he had put sugar in her car’s fuel tank.
She had also previously put Viagra in her husband’s tea, itching powder in his underpants and wiped her backside with his ties, the court was told.
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Rawle denies murder, and the trial continues.
