Man on trial for stabbing his wife

Injured woman's husband charged with attempted murder

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009

Delores Carter testified Monday that she expected to die as blood flowed from her chest last spring from a stab wound she said was inflicted by her husband, on trial this week on charges including attempted murder.

Francis Matthew Carter, 45, looked on as a doctor testified that the injured woman would have died if she had not received emergency surgery, because of extensive blood loss.

Testimony continued Tuesday in the trial, which a prosecutor told jurors would include Francis Carter's statements in phone calls he made to friends after his arrest. Carter was incarcerated after the incident until his release last July on bond, and pretrial hearings delved into the admissibility of information from the phone calls made from the county jail.

"You're going to hear the defendant's admission that he stabbed Delores Carter," St. Mary's Assistant State's Attorney Christina Taylor said during her opening argument to the jurors.

Delores Carter, 47, testified that she told her husband last year that she wanted to end their marriage, and that she told him two weeks before the assault that she was in a relationship with another man. She said that she and her husband went out on the night of April 18, and that she later was sitting in the living room of their Hermanville area apartment when he began asking her again about her extramarital relationship.

"He came around the corner with the knife and stuck me on my right side," she said. "I was bleeding real bad."

She was trying to defend herself as her husband cut her again, she testified, adding that while she was unable to yell for help, she tried to make noises that would alert her neighbors. She said she asked her husband to call for an ambulance.

"He said, ‘I told you if I couldn't have you, nobody could,'" the woman testified. "He told me to call that [other] person on the phone, and tell them what he had done to me."

Her husband at one point went outside to talk to a neighbor, she said, and he eventually agreed to take her to a hospital, but only if she would agree to say "something like" she fell on the knife.

She asked him to speed up as they traveled from their home to St. Mary's Hospital in Leonardtown, she testified, but he replied that "he didn't want to drive fast because he didn't want to get stopped by the police."

Delores Carter testified that when she was asked at the hospital how she had been injured, she pointed to the ring finger on her hand.

A helicopter crew flew her to the Washington Hospital Center, and Dr. Mark Bowyer testified that he operated on her injuries from a 10-inch wound that went through her right lung and her diaphragm to her liver.

She had lost her entire blood volume at that point," Bowyer said. "She probably would not have survived much longer."

The woman said she was in the hospital for at least a month. "My chest hurts all the time," she said.

Francis Carter testified Tuesday afternoon that he was intoxicated on the night his wife was injured. He contested the accuracy of a transcript of the comments he allegedly made during the phone conversations that occurred within a couple days after his arrest.

"I don't remember stabbing anybody," the defendant testified. "I just snapped. Something clicked."

Scriber admitted that he lied when he said at the hospital that his wife had fallen against some knives.

"I was scared," he said.

Jurors are expected to deliberate the case today, Wednesday, after hearing closing arguments from the prosecutor and a public defender.

jwharton@somdnews.com