Woman tried to murder own mother with telephone cables and housecoat

A woman who tried to murder her mother in an attack as she looked after two small children has been jailed for seven years.

Angela Boyle launched her assault on Joan McGinley after she had agreed to let her daughter stay at her Glasgow flat.

During the attack Boyle, 47, throttled her victim with telephone cables and repeatedly struck her with a knife and asked a girl: “You want me to take her eye out?”

A judge told Boyle at the High Court in Edinburgh: “The attack on your mother was unprovoked and extremely violent.”

Lady Carmichael said: “You are a first offender. You have, however, been convicted of attempted murder and the offence is such a serious one that there is no alternative to a custodial sentence.”

“Your case is an unusual one in some respects. Although you did not plead guilty you did admit the course of conduct.” she said.

Boyle, of Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, had earlier denied attempting to murder her mother, maintaining she was not criminally responsible at the time because of a mental condition.

However a jury unanimously found her guilty of the offence following a trial at the High Court in Airdrie.

Lady Carmichael noted that Boyle had a history of repeated trauma and had become involved in substance misuse relatively late in life following personal tragedy.

She said that against that background she would impose a sentence that was “considerably more lenient” than otherwise would be the case.

The court heard the victim was feeding a baby in the living room of her flat in Tormusk Road, Glasgow, on the morning of February 15 in 2019 when Boyle came in.

She noticed Boyle had a knife and told her to put it in the kitchen.

Boyle kicked a coffee table pinning her mother’s legs to a couch and the victim tried to move the child. Boyle repeatedly struck her on the head with a TV remote control and mobile phone.

She grabbed her mother by the head and pushed her face down into the couch and repeatedly punched her. She picked up a dishcloth and tried to push it into her mouth.

Boyle pulled phone cables from a wall and put them around her mother’s neck and pulled them. Her mother thought she was going to kill her.

Boyle then put a housecoat around her mother’s neck and pulled it tight. The victim continued to struggle with her, but was becoming exhausted.

She repeatedly struck her mother with the knife to her head, face, neck, hands and arms and hit her with a bottle and pot.

McGinley shouted for help but Boyle told her to stick her tongue out. She tried to pull her tongue out, dislodging her denture and tried to force her to swallow the false teeth.

Police who arrived at the flat found Boyle and her mother in the living room covered in blood.

The victim was taken to hospital and found to have multiple injuries, including lacerations and stab wounds to her scalp and face and an open wound adjacent to a jugular vein in her neck.

The court heard that prior to the murder bid Boyle appeared to be being behaving in an erratic way and experiencing hallucinations. She was prescribed painkillers at the time.

Defence counsel Graham Robertson said Boyle had a difficult upbringing and married a second time to a man who is currently serving a sentence for murder.

Boyle had a baby by him but the child died which had “a traumatic effect on her”, said the defence counsel.

He said she was introduced to drugs, including heroin, in her bereavement and became addicted.

However she took steps to get off hard drugs and to a large extent succeeded, Mr Robertson said.

The defence counsel said she had no “meaningful recollection” of events and added: “There certainly seemed to be some degree, at least, of some transient episode that occurred.”

“She fully accepts she was responsible for what occurred to her mother. She also fully accepts that what she did she cannot herself explain,” he said.

Mr Robertson said: “She now fully understands the impact of what happened. She is deeply upset to put it mildly.”