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Shot In Drunken Sex Game

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By Victoria Raymond
Sun Online - UK
May 31, 2006

A woman who shot dead her husband during a drunken sex game today showed a jury how she did it.

Linda West, 49, used a wooden replica of a shotgun to demonstrate how the weapon had "accidentally" gone off as she danced to Shania Twain's hit song "Man! I Feel Like A Woman!".

Winchester Crown Court heard the blast hit husband Gregory West, 45, in the heart, killing him instantly as he sat in a chair at their flat in Southampton in May last year.

Giving evidence from the witness box, West said she and her husband of only nine weeks were drunk when he decided she should dance to the track with the shotgun as she had been "sexually arousing him".

Grabbing hold of the wooden gun, 4ft 11in West explained that she banged the gun on the floor at the abrupt end of the song so as to "take a bow" and it had gone off.

Tearfully she said: "I had the gun in front of me and I was dancing with the gun to that CD. When the CD ended I went like that, (she motioned that she banged the gun on to the floor), like to take a bow, and the gun went off.

"I tried to wake him. He would not wake up. I was saying Gregory 'please wake up'. I was hitting him around the face trying to move him, shouting, 'wake up, wake up'."

Asked by her defence counsel Nigel Pascoe QC how the gun became loaded, West said she did not know.

The mother-of three, who works as a carer, said the couple had had a nice time that evening and that their sex life became "less inhibited" when Mr West was drunk.

West denies murder and an alternative count of manslaughter.

Earlier the court was told that West deliberately loaded marine engineer Mr West's double barrelled weapon and blasted him at close range because of a heated row with her husband throughout the evening of May 9, which several neighbours heard.

Residents eventually heard the loud bang of the weapon firing and went to the door of the flat where they heard West say she had a gun.

In a hysterical state she also called 999 and said 'Oh my God, I've shot him', Michael Vere-Hodge QC told the jury.

He said that West told the operator it was an accident and the gun had gone off.

Mr Vere-Hodge said: "She was hysterical. She said: 'What have I done? We have only been married nine weeks. It was just a game'."

But Mr Vere-Hodge said that Mr West had several facial injuries consistent with him being attacked and that his wife had taken the gun from the bedroom and shot him and that she had immediately regretted it.

He told the jury she knew how to use the gun and had shown her children how it had worked.

The court also heard that when the gun was examined by an expert he found the safety catch did not work and if the gun was dropped it could go off.

The trial continues.

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