‘Breaking Bad murder plot’: mother controlled my life 24/7, says accused

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/29/breaking-bad-murder-plot-accused-evidence

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A woman accused of a murder plot inspired by the TV drama Breaking Bad wept as she told how her “controlling” mother beat her.

Kuntal Patel, 37, allegedly tried to kill her magistrate mother, Meena, by spiking her Diet Coke with abrin after she forbade her to marry her boyfriend, Niraj Kakad.

Taking to the witness box for the first time on Monday, Patel dabbed tears away from her eyes with a handkerchief as she told how her mother slapped her and called her a “fucked-up-brain girl”.

Wearing a blue floral shirt and black trousers, and her voice barely above a whisper, she told Southwark crown court in London: “I couldn’t understand how or why my mother was behaving like this. It was not the mother I had always known who loved and cared for me. I just couldn’t understand her reaction to everything.”

Patel, a graphic designer, said that when she told her mother Kakad had described her as controlling, she erupted in fury and beat her. She said: “I think for her that was a sign of him being disrespectful to her.”

Patel said her mother “started slapping” her “on and off”.

She lived with her mother and younger sister, Poonam, in Plaistow, east London, where her mother kept tabs on her “24/7”, jurors heard.

Patel said she was unhappy about her looks, confiding in a friend that she felt like an “overweight buffalo”, and had never had a boyfriend.

She turned to the Asian dating website Shaadi.com to find a man she could marry and have children with – but her “manipulative” mother even wrote Patel’s online dating profile for her. When she struck up a relationship with Kakad, her mother quickly turned sour and tried to break them up, it is claimed.

When Kakad, who lived in Arizona in the US, flew out to see Patel in June 2012, her mother wanted to “check him out” before she met him in person herself, jurors heard.

Peter Rowlands, defending, asked Patel: “Did your mum always know where you were 24/7?”

Speaking in a quiet voice, Patel replied: “Yes.”

Rowlands added: “Every minute of every day?”

She replied: “Yes.”

She said that despite being a grown adult, her mother expected her to “abide by” her rules, and let her meet Kakad before she did.

Rowlands said: “Before you clapped eyes on him [Kakad] yourself, your mother wanted to check him out and see him first?”

Patel replied: “That’s right. I know the way Niraj was, he wasn’t too happy about that. I felt that was a bit awkward for him. He wanted to see me first and then my mother.”

She said she respected her mother’s views. “I knew she was just frightened and we didn’t have much family support and I knew that as a mother she was worried about me,” she said.

But she was left “devastated” at her mother’s interference in her relationship. As Kakad went back to the US, Patel said she slumped into depression. She said: “I was just crying. I wasn’t eating properly I wasn’t sleeping too well, just genuinely feeling more and more depressed.”

Last December, she allegedly bought a deadly dose of abrin off the “dark web” which she slipped into her mother’s drink to kill her. But her mother survived.

Patel denies trying to murder her mother, who sits on the bench at Thames magistrates court, and acquiring a biological agent or toxin.

She has pleaded guilty to two counts of attempting to acquire a biological agent or toxin last December.

In another fit of rage Patel’s mother beat and threw slippers at her two daughters, jurors heard.

But Patel said she was “too embarrassed” and “ashamed” to tell her Kakad about the violent abuse. At one point she told a friend in an email: “I wish I was dead or my mum dies I hate her so much”, the court heard.

The trial continues.