The mother of a teenage girl who died after being stabbed by her father has insisted the incident was an accident.
Simon Vickers, 50, received a minimum term of 15 years behind bars in January after he was convicted of murdering his 14-year-old daughter, Scarlett.
The jury rejected his claim he had killed his daughter by accident during a play fight, with the sentencing judge calling his account “unconvincing and wholly implausible”.
But his wife and Scarlett’s mother, Sarah Hall, has supported her husband – claiming he would “never harm” their daughter.
“How can I blame him for an accident when I know he’s in as much pain as I am?” she told the BBC.
“If I thought he’d done it deliberately then no, I wouldn’t have been here [doing this interview]. I would have protected her with my life, as would he.”
Describing the night of Scarlett’s death, 5 July, Ms Hall said it had been a normal Friday evening at their Darlington home. At 10pm, the three of them gathering in their kitchen where Ms Hall was finishing making dinner for herself and Vickers.
She said she and Scarlett began having “just a fun fight”, throwing grapes into each other’s mouths when Vickers joined in.
She said she accidentally nipped Vickers with kitchen tongs, to which he reacted, and their daughter “jokingly” called him a wimp.
Ms Hall recounted how Vickers replied to Scarlett, asking “how would you like it”, before swiping the tongs across the worktop towards her.
But Ms Hall told the BBC that she believes the tongs instead caught a knife on the worktop, leaving it protruding from the worktop at the same time Scarlett moved towards Vickers, and ran onto the blade.
During the trial, Vickers had given differing versions of what happened in the seconds before he plunged a kitchen knife 11cm into her chest, through her clothes and into her lung and heart.
Home Office pathologist Dr Jennifer Bolton said that the injury must have been caused by a knife held with force and was not accidental. Mr Justice Cotter said Vickers’s version of events was “unconvincing and wholly implausible”.
Sentencing him to life with a minimum term of 15 years, Mr Justice Cotter accepted the defendant was “devastated”, that he was a “broken man”, and that there was no premeditation or intention to kill.
The judge said: “You have lost your only child at your own hand, and you will always live with that awful fact.”
He added: “Simon Vickers, only you know precisely what happened in that kitchen on that Friday evening which led to you fatally stabbing your only daughter in what should have been the safety of her own home.
“It was a momentary but devastating act of anger.”
Ms Hall told the BBC that the judge’s remarks are “absurd”, adding Vickers “never had a flash of anger”.
“I was there that night,” she told the broadcasters. “There were no arguments. There was no temper, no shouting.”
She added: “I thought I’d misheard. It’s just been a never-ending nightmare.”
Ms Hall has also responded to speculation after the trial that her husband had been abusive. She told the BBC: “No, never. He was understanding, comforting. [Our relationship] was very supportive, never controlling.”
Vickers’s sentence is set to be reviewed by the Court of Appeal, after solicitor general Lucy Rigby KC claimed it was too lenient.
