A 92-year-old woman who is accused of bludgeoning and stabbing her wealthy 98-year-old husband to death has become the oldest person committed to stand trial for murder in Australia.
Clara Tang allegedly killed Ching Yung Tang, her husband of 70 years, in their plush apartment in central Sydney in March last year.
Mr Tang was found stabbed twice in the stomach and his head had been bludgeoned.
Mrs Tang, a small, frail woman who suffers from dementia, was wearing bloodstained clothes when she was arrested, according to police documents revealed in Sydney’s Sun Herald newspaper.
Detectives have alleged that Mrs Tang confessed to killing her husband, who could not walk without a cane, during a struggle in their apartment.
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Mrs Tang allegedly told police that the couple had begun to push and hit each other before she struck him with a jar on the back of his head after saying: “You hit me. I hit you.”
Police allege: “The accused states that she said: ‘I’m getting old. If you want to kill me let’s die together’. The accused states she grabbed an object similar to a jar and struck [him] as hard as she could to the back of the … head.”
She then allegedly threw items off the balcony and told neighbours a young man was trying to kill her.
Mrs Tang, who does not speak English, allegedly feared her husband was poisoning her food and used to swap plates with her niece, who was the couple’s carer.
The nonagenarian appeared in a Sydney local court last week and was ordered to stand trial in the Supreme Court at a later date. She has pleaded not guilty on the grounds of mental illness.
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Mrs Tang has been granted conditional bail and is awaiting her trial under strict supervision in a nursing home.
The case is a sad end in the life of the couple, who survived the Japanese invasion of China and Mao’s Cultural Revolution before moving from Shanghai to Sydney 30 years ago.
Mr Tang had been a highly educated and cultured man who was described by friends as a talented soccer player.
According to friends who would visit their apartment, which sits on the sixth floor of a building overlooking Sydney’s picturesque Hyde Park, Mr Tang would show off a painting of his ancestor, reportedly a high-ranking official in the Qing dynasty.
Lee Tsi Chen, a friend and fellow Shanghai University alumnus, told the Sun Herald newspaper last year that Mr Tang was a “respected gentleman, a man of great culture”.
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Mr Chen had visited the Tangs just weeks before the alleged murder.
He said Mr Tang had been nursing injuries from a fall in the bath at the time and he was being looked after by Mrs Tang who “was so loving”.
“When I saw him that last time she was touching him like a baby son. She always had one hand holding her husband’s hand, or around his shoulder,” Mr Chen said last year.
He described the Tangs as a “model couple” who hosted a lavish Christmas dinner every year.
“They were a model couple. It’s a tragic story; she has lost her lifetime companion,” he said.