Obsessed man kills wife who refused to quit smoking

A MAN obsessed with the devil killed his wife and two children because she would not give up smoking, a court heard yesterday.

John Jarvis pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Patricia Jarvis, aged 38, Stuart Jarvis, aged eight, and 11-year-old John Jarvis Jnr on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Sitting at Preston Crown Court, Judge Peter Openshaw QC sentenced Jarvis to life imprisonment in a maximum security hospital.

Jarvis, aged 42, stabbed his wife and two children to death at the Winslow Hotel where the family lived in Blackpool.

Iain Goldrein QC, prosecuting, told the court that on March 27, 2003, Jarvis killed his wife telling her he was "going to fix" her smoking habit.

Jarvis stabbed her and cut out her heart "so she couldn't be resuscitated".

Their son Stuart entered his parents' bedroom after hearing screaming.

In an interview Jarvis admitted stabbing the eight-year-old boy to death so he would not have nightmares about the sight of his father killing his mother.

He then went upstairs to John Junior's room, where he cut his throat telling him he was going to join his mother. Jarvis then washed himself and the weapon before stabbing himself.

The court heard that a police officer later heard Jarvis saying: "I tried to stab my heart out, but my blade was too blunt." Jarvis then got back into the bloodstained bed with his dead wife.

When police arrived, they found the couple in bed and a Bible on a table open on the Book of Revelations, with a cigarette lighter on top.

Mr Goldrein said: "The passage related to the devil coming down to earth and the beast coming down and all receiving the mark of the beast and the number of the beast being 666."

The QC told the court that Jarvis had once told a friend: "If I have proof that Patricia is smoking I will kill her."

An e-mail Jarvis sent after the killings to a family friend was entitled "Smoking by my wife to all it may concern". In it Jarvis wrote he had "given her and the boys absolute freedom".

In another e-mail, he said he had fixed his wife's smoking problem.

Jarvis married his wife in 1986 when they were living in Africa. The couple moved to Kent in 2000 and then to Blackpool where Mrs Jarvis ran the Winslow Hotel.

Mr Goldrein said: "Throughout the marriage the defendant had expressed an obsessive dislike of smoking. He was a strict disciplinarian and she didn't smoke in front of him.

"But she had smoked and just prior to her death there had been arguments about the issue."

He said Jarvis also talked about the Book of Revelations and 666 being the number of the devil.

The QC added that Jarvis had "a highly abnormal mind" and the killings were "savage, brutal and without warning".