A TEENAGER has described hearing a bang “like a tonne bricks” in the bedroom of a Suffolk woman who died after she was allegedly hit on the side of the neck by her husband.

Jane Hunt

A TEENAGER has described hearing a bang “like a tonne bricks” in the bedroom of a Suffolk woman who died after she was allegedly hit on the side of the neck by her husband.

The girl said that she had immediately gone into a neighbouring bedroom and had seen Anthony Morley getting dressed and his wife Joanne lying on the bed.

The girl, who cannot be identified because of her age, said she asked Morley what the bang was and asked if it was Mrs Morley.

She said that Morley had moved to one side and she could see 42-year-old Mrs Morley lying across the bed with her feet dangling on the floor. Morley had then told her that his wife was asleep.

“I couldn't hear any sound and she wasn't moving,” she told a jury at Ipswich Crown Court yesterday.

The girl, who had gone to sleep in a bedroom at the house in Eagle Walk, Bury St Edmunds, following a barbeque at the premises, said when she was in bed she heard Mrs Morley say “Don't tempt me or I'll do it.”

She said she wasn't really shouting and they were the only words she heard.

“I didn't think anything about it until I heard a bang like a tonne of bricks,” she told the court.

“I knew straight away it was her,” she added.

She said that after seeing Mrs Morley apparently asleep on the bed she had gone to sleep and had not heard Morley leave the house.

The next day she heard someone say that Mrs Morley's legs were purple and she had gone upstairs and noticed that Mrs Morley was still in the same position she had been in the previous night.

The teenager said she had spoken to Mrs Morley's son Brian, who was staying at the house, and he had got his girlfriend to go upstairs to check on his mother.

“She said she looked cold so I put a duvet on her. I was scared,” said the girl.

She said that shortly afterwards Brian had come running down the stairs and said his mother hadn't got a pulse and someone should call the police.

Morley, 42, of Eagle Walk, Bury St Edmunds, has denied the manslaughter of his wife in June last year.

It has been alleged that Morley punched her on the side of the neck during a row causing an artery to rupture which led her to quickly lose consciousness and die.

Morley later told police that he had pushed his wife during an argument after she had come to bed drunk and in an aggressive mood.

He said she had fallen back on to the bed and had been snoring when he left to spend the night at his office.

He told police he had no reason to believe she was anything but asleep and wouldn't have left her if he had known she was seriously unwell.

The trial continues today (wed).