Cowering dogs terrified as woman, 62, sets fire to clothes at Leigh Park home

Portsmouth Crown Court heard Helen Frisby, 62, was screaming out her husband Richard’s name as he slept - with him waking to find her ‘sitting on the toilet in the ensuite upset and shouting’.

Frisby had been drinking whisky in the evening on April 13 but seemed ‘quite mellow’ when they went to bed.

But Kaj Scarsbrook, for Frisby, said she was ‘disoriented’ and drunk when she awoke to find her husband of 22 years sleeping in their bed at home in Leigh Park.

Normally he would sleep on the sofa due to his wife’s alcoholism over 10 years.

Prosecutor Dawn Hyland said: ‘He got up to calm her down. She appeared to be drunk again, screaming at him she was going to burn the house down.’

In a statement he said: ‘Even my dogs were scared and cowering because of her behaviour.’

Frisby started using a cigarette lighter, leaving burn marks on the carpet and setting alight to a pile of clothes that went ‘up in flames’.

Her husband threw them outside and put them out with a hosepipe.

Ms Hyland added: ‘Mrs Frisby was grabbing his hair and pulling it and screaming she was going to kill him.’

Police were called and she confessed immediately, and said: ‘It’s the alcohol, I’m sorry.’

Frisby admitted arson and battery in relation to the incident in the early hours of April 14.

Judge Timothy Mousley QC, who heard Frisby had been on remand for the equivalent of a nine-week sentence, told her: ‘It looks like the short spell at (HMP) Bronzefield may have brought you to your senses.’

He added: ‘I find that you are somebody who can be rehabilitated, and put this behind you as a particularly long dark period of your life.’

He imposed a 12-month community order with £100 fine, an alcohol treatment programme and 20 rehabilitation activity days.

Earlier this year Frisby was handed community order after she admitted criminal damage and battery in relation to an incident at home involving assaulting her husband, setting fire to a jumper and putting CDs in the oven.

Frisby received an alcohol programme with that sentence in February but it was curtailed due to lockdown.

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