‘X Factor’ delusion led man to behead wife

A mentally ill man who beheaded his wife after he suffered a delusion while watching The X Factor has been sectioned indefinitely.

Timothy Allen, 40, killed Samantha Ho, 39, at their home in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, in August 2015.

Her head and body were discovered separately, and an autopsy ruled she died of multiple cuts to the neck.

Southwark Crown Court heard that the couple, who met at university in 1995, had been watching The X Factor on August 29 when Allen suffered a delusion and attempted suicide.

Andrew Jackson, prosecuting, said: “They had been, it seems, watching X Factor together on television — that appears to have been the trigger for what happened.”

Allen then turned the knives on his wife and their pet dog. He told police he had seen dancers on the show “as puppets being controlled by a puppet master”. He believed the puppet master was trying to get to him and his wife, and so decided he had to kill her and himself, Mr Jackson added.

“When she asked him not to kill her, he carried on and had meant to do so,” he said.

Allen denied murder and prosecutors accepted his guilty plea to manslaughter by diminished responsibility.