Murder court told of rolling pin strangler

Stephen Barnsdale-Quean, 43, twisted the rolling pin six times to tighten the chain around his wife Chantelle’s neck until she was dead, claim the prosecution. He had earlier fastened together the ends of the chain with an elastic hair bobble to make a loop which he put over her neck.

“It was quite a sophisticated device in terms of its construction,” Michael Slater, prosecuting told a Sheffield Crown Court jury.

Barnsdale-Quean claims his 35-year-old wife, who was suffering from depression, frenziedly attacked him out of the blue with a kitchen knife which was still stuck in his abdomen when paramedics arrived. But the prosecution say he inflicted superficial injuries on his stomach, face and arms and then dripped his own blood over his wife’s body as she lay motionless on the bed. Her husband told police she had committed suicide.

Father-of-two Barnsdale-Quean denies murdering his wife at the flat they shared on Upperwood Road, Darfield, near Barnsley, on March 4.

The couple, who both worked for the Department of Work and Pensions, had been married for 10 years but had run into financial trouble and their previous home was repossessed. Mr Slater said once he had strangled his wife Barnsdale-Quean inflicted upon himself the injuries “to give the false impression that he had been attacked by the deceased who had then gone on to take her own life using that ligature arrangement.”

The trial continues.