JEFFREY Warde, 59, is in police custody following the murder of his wife, Donnette Warde, called ‘Dolly’, at the First Street, Herstelling, East Bank Demerara home of her mother yesterday.
The 36-year-old mother of one was brutally attacked and stabbed to death by the man during an argument at about 10:30h.
Police say the deceased had only recently arrived in the country from abroad and was staying at her mother’s at Herstelling. Her husband, whose address has been given as D’Urban Street, Georgetown, is alleged to have gone there yesterday morning, and during the course of an argument which ensued between them, stabbed her about the body with a knife. He is also alleged to have attacked her niece, Stacy DeCambra, 21, but the young woman somehow managed to escape unhurt.
Donnette was taken to the Diamond Diagnostic Centre, but was pronounced dead on arrival. The knife believed to have been used to inflict the wounds has been recovered and is lodged with the police.
According to a neighbour, into whose shop Donette ran in a daring escape bid from her attacker, she called out to him and asked that he call the police. She was covered in blood, he said, and was barely able to stand. From where he stood, the man said, he could see the stab wounds that had been inflicted on her chest.
He said that after he and several other residents managed to apprehend her assailant, who was attempting to flee the scene with the knife still in his hand, he went in his vehicle to get the police.
The husband was disarmed and handed over to the police, while Donnette was picked up and placed in another neighbour’s vehicle and taken to the Diamond Diagnostic Centre.
Residents say that from the little they saw, Donnette sustained several stabs about the body, including her wrists, which were severed. And of the several deep stab wounds to her chest, they said, one almost carved out her breast. She also had many defensive wounds on her hands.
It is believed that Jeffrey Warde attacked Donnette  in the bedroom while they were arguing, but she managed to get away and ran over to the neighbour’s yard.
Yesterday, the entire upper flat of the two-storey building was smeared with dried blood including, the stairs and the concreted yard.
Donnette only returned from Barbados on Wednesday, and neighbours said the husband had turned up but they did not hear any quarreling. Her relatives yesterday told the Guyana Chronicle that Donnette was afraid of her husband, who had threatened to end her life on several occasions, and that the couple had been having some problems but they could not say in detail what was causing the bickering.
Her grandmother, Drena Peters, 85, who is bedridden and blind in both eyes, told reporters yesterday that she heard her granddaughter calling out the niece, Stacy’s name but as she did not scream for help or murder, she assumed that she was just talking.
The elderly woman said it was when she was told that her granddaughter was stabbed and had died she knew what had transpired.
She said that on many occasions she’d had cause to caution her loved one to step away from the relationship with Jeffrey Warde, but her response had always been that she loved him and could not leave him.