Husband beat up man he found asleep on estranged wife’s sofa
AN ESTRANGED husband beat up a man in a jealous rage after he found him sleeping on his wife’s sofa in the middle of the night, a court heard.
Kenneth Murgatroyd, 53, yelled ‘What the f****** hell are you doing here?’ before punching businessman David Walling around the head.
Mr Walling, 37, had fallen asleep on the sofa at Caroline Murgatroyd’s home after the pair had spent the evening drinking wine and talking.
But her husband – from whom she was separated – arrived to find him there at 2am and launched a frenzied attack.
Mr Walling, who was punched in the head and face around 20 times, needed hospital treatment after suffering a hairline fracture of the skull and two black eyes.
Yesterday Murgatroyd, an aerospace engineer, was spared jail after he admitted inflicting grievous bodily harm.
He was instead handed a 12month suspended sentence.
Burnley Crown Court heard Murgatroyd and his wife, 40, a sales administrator, had split up in April after 11 years together. Despite their separation, he was free to come and go from the home they had shared in Helmshore, Lancashire, which they jointly owned.
He still had keys to the house, where his sons also lived, and he and his estranged wife maintained a fairly good relationship, the court was told.
But a month after the split, Mrs Murgatroyd invited Mr Walling to the house and the pair drank some wine together, before he dozed off on the sofa. Her husband later arrived unexpectedly, swore at Mr Walling and began hitting him.
Prosecutor Stephen Parker said: ‘He ended up on the floor with the defendant on top of him, punching him repeatedly to his head.’
He added that Mr Walling tried to cover his face to defend himself but Murgatroyd carried on throwing punches, ‘which he believed to be in the region of 20 times’. Mrs Murgatroyd heard the commotion and started screaming for her husband to stop, the court was told. The estranged couple’s two sons – aged 18 and 21 – then managed to pull their father away. Mr Walling, who runs a company that supplies agricultural machinery, spent the night in hospital undergoing a neurological assessment before being discharged with a badly swollen face.
In a victim impact statement, he said that for five or six weeks after the beating he did not want to see or speak to anyone – but as managing director of his own company he had to return to work.
Sentencing Murgatroyd – who had never been in trouble with the law before – Judge Beverley Lunt said that what he had done was ‘absolute madness’. She told him he had ruined his formerly good reputation, adding: ‘The red mist had descended and you had lost control. It’s a big thing for a perfectly respectable man like yourself at 53 to lose your good name and it should never be underestimated how serious that is.
‘You have worked all your life, been a good husband and been a good father.’ As well as the suspended sentetence, the judge ordered the defendent to pay £500 compensation and £250 costs.
The court was told Murgatroyd was in the process of reconciling with his wife.
‘Red mist had descended’