A bizarre murder case involving a woman who stabbed her husband to death after he mocked her for serving bubble and squeak with steak is to feature in a two-part documentary.
The dish — a mix of cooked potatoes and cabbage usually left over from a previous day's meal and then fried — appears to have been the final straw that ended in David Jackson's murder after he pointed out the apparent conflict between a steak and what has been termed "a peasant dish".
It happened after a dinner to celebrate wife Penny Jackson's 66th birthday — an occasion that was initially being shared with her daughter and son-in-law via Zoom during lockdown. According to an article published in The Mirror, she "flipped" when her husband made the comment and stabbed the 78-year-old three times with a kitchen knife.
Mortally wounded, the retired Army lieutenant colonel called 999 for help before his wife took the phone off him. When asked by the operator where she was, Jackson said: “Well, I’m in the lounge and he’s in the kitchen, bleeding to death with any luck.”
Police bodycam footage shot at the Jacksons’ bungalow in Berrow, Somerset, on February 13, 2021, showed Jackson saying: “I stabbed him because he’s an aggressive bully and nasty. And I’ve had enough.”
Then, upon hearing police calling for help in resuscitating her husband, Jackson cried: “Oh, don’t! No, no, please don’t. Oh, I should have stabbed him a bit more.”
In October 2021 she was convicted of murder and jailed for a minimum of 18 years. The judge at Bristol crown court judge said she had shown “not a shred of remorse”. Now, in the documentary, relatives and professionals have spoken out.
Jenny Bliss, the dead man's sister, said she was happy the killer was sentenced to life, calling Jackson’s actions “callous and cruel”. Admitting she never liked his wife, she said: “She deserved everything she got.”
She said the couple began an affair in the 1990s after her brother moved to an RAF base in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Jackson was married to her third husband, Alan, and he was with his second wife, Sheila.
“When she came into our lives, none of us liked her,” said Ms Bliss, who lives with her husband Brian. But when Jackson became pregnant, Ms Bliss said her brother felt obliged to marry her. They married in 1996.
However, he later discovered that the child, Isabelle, was not his. Despite this, they remained married and he raised Isabelle as his own. Amazingly, Isabelle and her husband Ian joined the couple on a Zoom call during lockdown for the "gourmet" meal that fateful night.
Ms Bliss said she had detected cracks in the marriage for some time. “We had some good times, but sometimes she would start to be aggressive towards David," she said. "We sensed something then that’s not good. When she started to be like she was goading him or nasty, he’d just touch her hand and say, ‘Calm down. Leave it. Calm down, Penny’. But that was the drink.”
Despite seeing Jackson's personality allegedly change when she drank, Ms Bliss was still shocked when she heard about the murder. She said: “You can’t ever imagine that happening, can you? They were looking forward to their silver wedding and what they were planning to do.”
It also came as a shock when she discovered that Jackson's third husband, Alan Warrender, had killed himself.
Mr Warrender's brother Stewart said he last saw Jackson at the funeral. He had killed himself after discovering she was having an affair with the murder victim.
Mr Warrender said: “There was no external sign of any emotion at all. Penny was so blasé. Your husband just killed himself. The father of your child has just killed himself. Are you really not bothered?”
He added: “She was very cocksure of herself. What Penny wanted, Penny got. And I had the feeling she was the dominant part of the relationship, which really didn’t suit my brother.”
In a damning indictment of his former sister-in-law, speaking of his brother’s April 1993 suicide, Mr Warrender said: “She could have coerced him into going down that path, emotionally. I think she was clever enough to wind him up that way, to get rid of him and then carry on with this bloke that she’d already been seeing.”
According to Dr Soham Das, a forensic psychiatrist, there was nothing normal about the Jackson case. “People who generally commit murders tend to be far more calculated, more clever and try to hide their activities," he said. "Penelope was openly confessing to it all right from the beginning.
“It’s almost like she was just resigned to her own fate — that she’s reached a point of utter desperation and is so concerned with ending her husband’s life that she doesn’t even care about the future. She completely lacks remorse. He just made a little joke about her cooking — that suggests it was the final straw.
“So what happened that day, from her perspective, was years and years of abuse, which led her to snap and not care about anything any more. She didn’t want conciliation or to scare him, this was about annihilating him.”
Dr Das analysed Penny’s confession note, in which she stated: “To whom it may concern, I have taken so much abuse over the years. but he was a good Daddy! However, the mask slipped tonight. That is/was unforgivable. I accept my punishment – may he rot in hell. Self-defence, pre-med. You decide.”
The doctor added: “What she wrote in the note and said to the police and 999 operator is indifferent, callous.”
Mr Jackson had an estranged brother, David, who had not spoken for a decade. But he believed the murder was a crime “waiting to happen”.
He heard about the death six months after the event. “When we saw the video of the police going to arrest her and she said, ‘I’m glad I’ve done it’ and ‘He’s a bully’, I thought, ‘Listen, fellas, what she’s trying to say is the truth’,” he said.
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The brothers had a difficult relationship and he used to call the murder victim “Mr Bully Boy”. He said he actually warmed to his brother's wife when they were still in touch. He said: “She was always having a giggle and a laugh and a joke from the moment I met her.
“David was a very controlling person. He tried to push Penny down, make Penny something she’s not and Penny wouldn’t have that. I heard he tried to throttle her once. My mum told me that he got her on the bed and he tried to strangle her.”
Former DCI Paul Settle, a veteran detective, also took part in the documentary. He said that in the 400 homicide investigations involving him during his 30 years in the Met Police he had never seen such a case as this.
He said: “It’s kind of a thing you’d associate with Colombian drug cartels, not with Middle England.” He said he was particularly shocked by Jackson during the 999 call. He said: “She shows absolutely no contrition, no remorse. We were all gobsmacked. On a different day that could have been our mum or our grandma.
“That’s the lady in front of you in the queue in the supermarket you pass the basket to. And now, flip of a switch — she’s a homicidal maniac.”
Jackson has now launched an appeal against her sentence, with her lawyers arguing that "video and audio evidence released into the public domain midway through her trial impeded her right to a fair hearing". Referring to comments and subsequent abuse on social media, they said: "Inevitably, it went further than the responsible news outlets and attracted a lot of commentary. . .
"It was subject to mocking and mimicry and became the subject of memes and dark humour. "
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