A former children’s nurse who was found guilty of attempting to murder her ill husband by injecting him with insulin has been sentenced to nine years in prison, collapsing as she heard the news in the Supreme Court of WA on Monday.
Wendy Sym, 63, was suffering from carer’s burnout and had “hit the end of her tether” after caring for her husband who was suffering from dementia when she injected him with a lethal dose of the diabetes drug in January 2021.
Wendy Ruth Sym was found guilty of attempting to murder her husband, who she cared for.
Kenneth Sym was in Joondalup Hospital at the time of the incident and survived after medical intervention but died a few months later of unrelated issues.
His wife of 39 years was later charged with attempting to kill him after a nurse found a used vial of insulin in the bin of a toilet on the ward where Kenneth was admitted following a dangerously low blood sugar episode that left him unresponsive. He was a diabetic but had not been prescribed insulin.
Sym denied she had attempted to kill her husband and took the matter to trial where a jury found her guilty in April of this year.
During the hearing, the court heard Kenneth had been officially diagnosed with dementia in 2014 but had been displaying signs since 2009. As his condition deteriorated, Sym assumed full responsibility for caring for her husband, which led to “carer’s burnout”.
“You’re watching the person you love most in the world – partners for 40 years – become a different person, the way they’re behaving, the unpredictability of their behaviour,” Sym’s lawyer, Seamus Rafferty, SC, told Justice Amanda Forrester during her sentencing on Monday.
“She was suffering from carer’s fatigue, a recognised psychological condition, that impacts your ability to make calm and rational decisions.
“It shows there is a causal connection between her mental state at the time and her actions.
“This is a person who due to what she had been going through for so long, was at the end of her tether. She simply just couldn’t go any further.”
During the trial, the court was shown a text message Wendy sent just before midnight on January 12, 2021, in which she described having been awoken by Kenneth “talking nonsense”, refusing to get into bed, and having emptied the contents of the refrigerator.
“He has pulled out a box under the bed and stuff is everywhere,” she wrote.
“I honestly could kill him. I won’t, of course.
“Give me a 12-hour night shift with no sleep rather than this.”
The court was told that after Kenneth’s admission to Joondalup Health Campus, Sym had requested no observations or medical intervention be conducted on her husband while she was gone from his side, but the jury did not ultimately accept that this happened.
Instead, she was found to have requested minimal observations out of a desire for him to get some sleep.
The alarm was raised when a nurse who went to conduct an ECG on Kenneth later that afternoon couldn’t wake him and could smell insulin.
The court was told the nurse, who became suspicious of Sym, followed her into the toilets after she returned to the hospital and uncovered an insulin vial dated April 9, 2018 – and containing Wendy’s DNA – in a waste bin.
That type of insulin was not stocked at Joondalup Health Campus but was used at Princess Margaret Hospital (now Perth Children’s Hospital), where Sym had worked in 2018.
In a police interview on January 20, 2021, Sym denied Kenneth required insulin, denied asking nursing staff to leave him alone, and said she did not recall going to the toilet.
She also insisted that despite his worsening condition, she wasn’t finding it difficult to care for Kenneth.
Justice Forrester said she could not accept that Sym administered the insulin to get Kenneth help, “however I do accept you were in a state emotional turmoil”, she said.
“You were exhausted by your care responsibilities and despairing at the prospect of them continuing in the future unabated,” she said.
“In that state you decided to end his life.”
She sentenced Sym to nine years in prison backdated to her initial date of entering custody in March this year and deemed her eligible for parole after seven years.
Sym fell to the floor as her sentence was read out and a packed gallery of friends and family gasped and heckled police.
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