Wife, 92, kills husband, 98
In April 2011, a Sydney court ordered a 92-year-old woman to stand trial for murder — accused of killing her 98-year-old husband of nearly 70 years in their apartment overlooking Hyde Park.
Clara Tang faced the Downing Centre Local Court over the death of her husband, Ching Yung Tang, in the couple's sixth-floor unit on March 12, 2010. Prosecutors alleged she had bludgeoned, suffocated and stabbed him; police said she confessed to killing him after he refused to talk to her. Tang entered a plea of not guilty on the grounds of mental illness — her lawyers said she suffered from dementia, and that she had become convinced her husband was poisoning her food, even swapping the plates served by their carer.
The couple had survived the Japanese invasion of China and the Cultural Revolution before moving from Shanghai to Sydney some 30 years earlier.
Magistrate Janet Wahlquist committed Tang to stand trial in the NSW Supreme Court — making her, at 92, Australia's oldest woman committed to stand trial for murder. She was granted continuing bail under strict supervision in a nursing home.
Reporting: The Daily Telegraph, Sydney.
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