A 63-year-old woman has been sentenced to nine years in prison for killing her father and burying his body in her back garden in Greater Manchester, after enduring a lifetime of abuse at his hands. Barbara Coombes pleaded guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility at Manchester Crown Court on Wednesday.
Coombes walked into a police station in Stockport on 7 January this year and confessed to killing her father, Kenneth Coombes, a Second World War veteran, 12 years earlier. Police discovered his body buried in her garden in Reddish, Stockport, two days later. She claimed he had sexually abused her for more than 40 years, starting when she was five, and had used her as a 'sex slave'.
Coombes told psychiatrists that her father raped her hundreds of times and may have fathered her first child, who died shortly after birth. She said the abuse continued until his death, and that she 'snapped' in January 2006 after finding naked photographs of herself and another child among his belongings. She hit him with a spade and cut his throat, then wrapped his body in a carpet and buried it the following day.
Sentencing her, Judge Timothy King said he accepted she killed while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression due to '40 years of extreme mental, physical and sexual abuse'. However, he noted that she had been fraudulently claiming her father's pension and carers' allowance, totalling £189,125, over 12 years, and only confessed when a housing association visit was imminent.
Coombes' daughter, Islay, said in a victim impact statement that her heart was broken but she would stand by her mother. The prosecution accepted the plea, acknowledging Coombes had suffered a lifetime of abuse, but questioned her remorse.
