A  69-year-old Australian woman, Judith Ann Venn, dosed her husband’s vegetable soup with a fatal 50 prescription pills because she believed it was the “only solution to an intolerable and hopeless situation”

After her husband Lance Hilton Venn died as a result, she was sentenced to jail on Friday and is eligible for parole after three years behind bars, out of the eight she was sentenced to. 

The Brisbane supreme court argued that Venn suffered physical violence and emotional abuse, alongside being chronically sleep deprived and increasingly isolated and desperate. 

The court further noted that her husband's bipolar disorder and manic-depressive illness worsened massively over the previous 18 months, which made him become agitated and aggressive. On top of that, on 12 August 2020, Lance Venn bought a boat from a neighbor for $20,000, which further caused financial strain.

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The next day, Judith Venn dissolved 50 of Lance's prescription pills in her vegetable soup and put it in containers in the freezer. On August 14, he had a psychologist appointment, but she canceled it when Lance ended up at their daughter’s house during one of his night walks.

“I think if he hadn’t taken off … and he had gone to the psychologist, whom he had seen before, there was still this glimmer of hope that maybe that would’ve changed things,” a psychiatrist report claims. 

However, upon finding out that he was outside their daughter's home at 4 am, she replied to her daughter: “Okay, that ends it.”

When he returned home, she served him the pill-laced soup, after which he cut his wrist while he was unconscious, but the cause of death was still found to be the overdose.

'Intolerable and hopeless'

In a letter afterward, she stated that she didn't want her family to go through what she was suffering, and she attempted to commit suicide. She told police that she did not want anyone, namely their daughters, to care for him. 

What's saddening is that the court found that she tried to hide her husband’s physical aggression towards her, as a result of shame, loyalty to him, and not wanting to worry her children. 

Justice Frances Williams argued that the deterioration of her cognitive abilities due to catastrophic thinking made it difficult for her to problem-solve or make rational decisions, adding: “It was in these circumstances that you were led to believe the only solution to an intolerable and hopeless situation was for you and the deceased to die.”

Williams argued that she was not a risk to society and took into consideration that she suffered physical, verbal, and emotional abuse and proved to take the initiative to start rehab. 

“The particular circumstances of the offending arose out of a tragic chain of events including the deceased’s mental illness, which led to your own mental illness,” Williams said, noting that one of her daughters requested in a statement that the court consider the full context of the case when determining the appropriate sentence.

“[She] states that you committed your life to being a loving wife, caring for the deceased while raising three daughters and never putting your needs before others". 

“It recognises your generous and caring nature across every aspect of your life, which illustrates a side to your character that is contrary to the events that transpired.”