This is the moment a woman who killed her ‘kind-hearted’ husband of almost 30 years by stabbing him with a paring knife feigns shock and chillingly asks paramedics: ‘You don’t think I’ve murdered him, do you?’
Daryl Berman, 72, claimed retired businessman David Berman, 84, must have ‘stumbled’ while carrying her lunch tray, causing the ‘little’ blade to penetrate his chest as he fell.
But, following a trial, a jury dismissed her claims that his death was an accident and found her guilty of murder.
Today – as she was jailed for life and told she would spend at least 12 years behind bars before being eligible for parole – police released bodycam footage of Berman taken immediately afterwards.
When a paramedic asks is she is alright, the pensioner says: ‘I’m alright but I’m not.
‘I don’t think it’s hit me yet, but it will hit me because I can’t cry and I’m just covered in blood from doing his heart.’
Spotting a police officer, Berman then adds: ‘Why are the police here?
‘You don’t think I’ve murdered him, do you?’
The custody mugshot of Daryl Berman, 72, issued by police after she was convicted of murdering her husband 84-year-old husband David
David Berman, 84, (pictured) had been married three times and was a great-grandfather
Berman was captured on bodycam footage asking paramedics, ‘You don’t think I’ve murdered him, do you?’ They were called to the home she shared with her husband, David Berman, 84, after she stabbed him with a paring knife
She then gives an officer her name and asks herself: ‘Why am I so calm?’
Today Judge Tina Langdale handed Berman a life sentence and told her she would have to serve a minimum of 12 years before being considered for release.
The judge said she accepted Berman had not intended to kill her husband but had stabbed him deliberately and meant him serious harm – even though she ‘immediately regretted’ what she had done.
‘I am satisfied that something must have happened that caused you to lose your patience or temper and caused you to attack David with a knife that you had earlier used for your lunch,’ Judge Langdale said.
Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court heard that Berman, who was Mr Berman’s third wife, behaved suspiciously and was ’emotionless’ after her husband’s death.
Relatives were also struck by how ‘matter-of-fact’ she seemed afterwards, the court heard.
She wrote the words ‘bye, bye’ on a wall calendar on the date Mr Berman died and also seemed ‘untroubled’ about going into the kitchen of their £500,000 home in Prestwich, Greater Manchester, where he had bled to death.
Police investigators at the Bermans’ £500,000 detached home in Prestwich, Manchester
David Berman, pictured at a family celebration, suffered a fatal chest wound near to his armpit
Daryl Berman was convicted of murdering her husband David after 27 years of marriage
It also emerged that she had complained to a neighbour about her husband’s recent dementia diagnosis, saying: ‘This is my life now.’
Police initially treated Mr Berman’s death as an accident and it was only after a pathologist raised concerns about his injuries, including a defensive wound to a finger, that a murder investigation was launched.
In a victim personal statement read to the court, Mr Berman’s son, also called Daryl, said his ‘life had changed dramatically’ since his father’s death.
He said he felt ‘cheated and deprived’ because he had ‘not been able to say goodbye to him properly (which) will always be hard to swallow’.
Mr Berman’s daughter Debbie Davis also said his death had left a ‘massive void.’
‘I feel like I am living in my own nightmare or a television programme because things like this are not normal,’ she said.
Giving evidence at her trial, Berman, the daughter of a wealthy textile merchant, claimed that, at around 2pm on March 13, she heard her husband ‘stumble’ and rushed into the kitchen to find him face down on the floor with ‘globules’ of blood spreading around him.
She said Mr Berman – who had only retired six months earlier from his job as a self-employed joiner – had been carrying her lunch tray when he fell.
He must have fallen on the sharp 4.7ins-long paring knife which she had put with her meal to cut her salad so it didn’t ‘squish all over the place’, she claimed.
David Berman ran his own joinery business from when he was a teenager until he turned 84
In a 999 call played to the court, Berman was heard telling the operator, who asked her what happened: ‘I don’t know.
‘I was in the other room. He’s carried a tray in.
‘And all I can see is the tray. I think there was a knife, I don’t know whether the little knife that was there has gone into him and stabbed him.
‘I really don’t know what happened.’
During the same call, Berman said her husband ‘slipped’ and that ‘blood is coming from his mouth’.
When paramedics arrived, they found Mr Berman on the kitchen floor, with the tray, the paring knife and a broken plate next to him, the jury heard.
Attempts were made to resuscitate him but he was pronounced dead around 40 minutes later.
The court heard that Berman also called Ms Davis, who had seen her father earlier in the day when he accompanied her and his granddaughter to a soft play centre.
She told her: ‘I don’t know if your dad’s dead or alive and there’s blood everywhere.’
Ms Davis recalled ‘screaming’ after seeing her stricken father being worked on by paramedics and seeing so much blood in the kitchen ‘it was like an abattoir’.
Mr Berman, whose father was killed in action in Egypt during the Second World War, had been married twice before.
He has a daughter and a son by his first marriage.
He wed third wife Daryl Berman – also previously married – in 1997 after the pair met on a blind date, with the marriage described as seemingly ‘loving and mutually supportive’.
Berman had worked in a fine arts shop, then as a dental nurse before working in the fashion industry in a wholesale showroom, the trial heard.
Mr Berman retired aged 84 in September 2024, telling the Jewish Telegraph the decision was based on his health ‘and the fact that work was not coming in as it used to’.
He said joinery work ran in the family but was no longer seen as a job for a Jewish boy ‘as it is too manual’.
Neighbours in Butterstile Lane, a tree-lined street of 1930s detached and semi-detached houses, described him as ‘kind-hearted’, saying they would regularly see him going to buy a newspaper.
‘He was a gentleman, he was really lovely,’ said local Debora Strong, who has lived in the area for over 40 years.
By contrast his wife would ‘keep her distance’, one resident told the Daily Mail, and would ‘hide behind the front door while she was talking – you didn’t see her’.
They spoke of their ‘shock’ at seeing scenes of crime officers sealing off the couple’s detached home days after his sudden death.
Mr Berman was in good everyday health, the trial was told, although he had been diagnosed with dementia, used a walking stick and had been suffering with ‘shortness of breath’.
Berman was convicted following a re-trial last month after a previous jury failed to reach a verdict.
After being arrested on suspicion of murder, Berman told detectives she and her husband had both enjoyed lunch in the lounge before he offered to take her tray into the kitchen.
‘I heard what sounded like a stumble or a fall,’ she said. ‘Straight away I said, ”Oh my God, David, what’s wrong?”.
‘He said: ”It’s okay, I’ve slipped”.
‘And I sort of almost immediately heard another sort of bang, and a sort of groan.
‘So I got up. I screamed and I ran into the kitchen. And I found him face down.
‘He was making the most peculiar sound, I sort of looked down, moved his head a bit.
‘And I thought, ”What on earth is all this gravy? We don’t have gravy”.
‘And it was the amount of blood, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.
‘I got the shock of my life because I didn’t know where it was coming from. I just… I just couldn’t understand.
‘And I was screaming, I said, ”David, David”… I said, ”You can’t go like this”.’
Asked by her barrister Michael Hayton KC if she had ‘murdered your husband of 27 years’, Berman replied: ‘Why would I do that to the man I love? No.’
‘How do you explain how he came to die?’ Mr Hayton continued.
‘I have absolutely no idea, I wasn’t in the room,’ Berman said, before adding that his death was ‘the worst day of my life’.
She described her husband as ‘very kind, very stubborn, and a lovely guy’.
‘Nobody had a bad word to say about him,’ she added.
Mr Berman had suffered a single horizontal stab wound to the right side of his chest that was around an inch deep.
Forensic pathologist Dr Philip Lumb told the court the force required to cause the injury would have been ‘severe’.
He said an ‘accidental fatal injury is rare’ and the blade would have needed to have been ‘fixed’ in place to have penetrated his chest.
He said the wound was ‘likely to be homicidal due to the injury to the chest’ as well as the ‘defensive’ injury to his right middle finger.’
‘Plainly, putting the two injuries together, I thought it was inconceivable that they were anything other than a homicide,’ Dr Lumb added.
Under cross-examination, the pathologist accepted it was ‘not impossible’ that either injury taken separately could have been sustained by accident.
Giving evidence for the defence, forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd – who told jurors he had worked on the investigation into the death of Princess Diana and the murder of Stephen Lawrence – said he ‘could not exclude accident or homicide’.
The finger injury was in the ‘wrong place’ to be ‘defensive’, he added.
Dr Shepherd said it was possible that Mr Berman had fallen to the floor whilst carrying the tray and the knife, before picking up the knife in his right hand and then falling again as he tried to get up.
Had Mrs Berman stabbed her husband it would be likely that this would be inflicted with ‘less force’ due to their height difference, he added.
However, under cross-examination he accepted the circumstances were ‘unusual and difficult’.
The court heard there was no history of domestic violence in the couple’s marriage.
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