Husband ‘looked up murder tips’ on the internet
July 28, 2011 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
A HANDYMAN accused of murdering his wife asked a friend on Facebook if they could get him a gun to kill her and searched the internet to find ways to do it, a court heard.
Alfredo Merigo, 43, of Weelsby Street, Grimsby, is on trial at Sheffield Crown Court accused of murdering his estranged wife Linda Merigo, 40, by stabbing her more than 100 times in her driveway in Driffield.
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Scene: Police outside the Driffield home of Linda Merigo where she had been found stabbed to death.
Just two weeks before the killing he accepted he had searched websites on how to commit the perfect murder and researched where he could purchase shellfish toxin and Rohypnol.
His mobile phone and internet activities read to the jury showed that on August 13 last year he told his estranged wife he loved her in a text message but three hours later was accessing an Asian dating website and researching “Murder or manslaughter: What’s the difference?” on the internet.
In the hours that followed he also looked up “Top 10 tips for committing the perfect crime”, “Top 10 prison survival tips” and “25 methods of killing by hand”.
Four days later he looked up “What is the minimum sentence for manslaughter” and “daily life in prison”.
He then contacted his former Geest work colleague Keira Reed on the social networking site Facebook to tell her he wanted to kill his wife.
In a message he told her: “Feel like killing ex-wife. I’m being taken for a mug, been used. She’s acting very sly and a lot more. Anyone you know sells guns?
“Supposed to be going to Blackpool, getting feeling she may decide at last minute to cancel. If she does that then I will be in prison.”
In a statement read to the court, Miss Reed said: “I was shocked by what Alf had said especially when he asked about getting a gun.
“He had never said anything like this before. I was reading the Grimsby Telegraph and saw Alf had been charged so I contacted the police and told them I had some information.”
Detective Constable Brian Coates read to the court some of the websites Mr Merigo had been researching which had been retrieved from his computer.
He accepted that the day before he looked up “killing” websites he had also looked at a site to join the French Foreign Legion.
Merigo’s barrister, Peter Birkett, said: “My client’s case is he accepts he looked at these sites so the jury can be satisfied what you said is correct.
“There are a large number of other sites that he was also accessing which may be relevant as to why he was looking at these ones.”
Merigo, who worked as a handyman at the Anchorage Residential Nursing Home in Grimsby’s Rutland Street, accepts killing his wife on the grounds of manslaughter by provocation but denies murder on September 1 last year. The trial continues.
