Kenneth and Wendy got engaged four days after they met. Four decades later she tried to kill him

Wendy, a country girl from a Narrogin farming family, was 21 years old when she met Kenneth Sym at church in 1981. Four days later he asked her to marry him, and within five months they had tied the knot.

They spent 39 happy years together and had three children. Wendy, now 63, devoted her life to her family and her work as a paediatric nurse.

She described their marriage as “lovely” and said she loved her husband to bits.

Then she was arrested and found guilty of trying to murder him. This week she was sentenced to nine years behind bars for the crime.

On Monday, looking thin, frail and nervous as she stood in the dock of a Perth courtroom, she collapsed before the judge while learning of her punishment.

Wendy maintains her innocence but police – and later a jury – say she deliberately injected Kenneth with insulin while he was at Joondalup Health Campus in 2021, in an attempt to end his life.

He survived after medical intervention, but died a few months later of natural causes.

He had dementia and had been rapidly deteriorating in the ten years prior, to the point where all he could do was watch television and talk incoherently and incessantly about the Beatles and the Eagles.

He would be awake in the night, and sleep through the day; or sometimes not sleep at all.

Wendy looked after him full-time and until a year before his death was also still working full-time as a nurse at Perth Children’s Hospital.

Ken also suffered multiple strokes before his death, the last causing him to be hospitalised in Joondalup in January 2021, when he also suffered a near-catastrophic blood sugar episode.

He had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes prior, but had not needed insulin to manage the condition.

Despite that, nurses who went to Ken’s aid on January 14 said they could smell insulin on him and a blood test later showed extremely high levels of the drug in his system.

One of those nurses also described Wendy asking where the bathroom was when Ken was being treated by emergency staff.

The nurse told the court something about the way Wendy was holding herself made her suspicious and so after she left, she went to the bathroom to look around.

In a bin underneath some paper towel she found a 10-millilitre vial of Actrapid insulin in a paper cup. This type of insulin was not used at Joondalup Health Campus but was at Princess Margaret Hospital (now Perth Children’s Hospital) and was used on the infant respiratory and endocrinology ward where Wendy had previously worked.

The vial had a handwritten note, which stated it had been opened on April 9, 2018. Wendy was found to have been working at the hospital that day.

The nurse placed the insulin vial in a sealed bag and provided it to her supervisor, who later gave it to the police.

The same nurse found a capped syringe in the sharps container in Ken’s room, although Joondalup Health Campus staff are taught not to cap their syringes.

This too was submitted to police. Further analysis found both the vial and the syringe contained insulin, and the vial bore DNA matching Wendy’s.

‘This was not a mercy killing’

While Wendy was ultimately found guilty of attempting to kill her husband, her reasons for doing so are not so clear.

She has staunchly denied any wrongdoing and therefore no explanation has ever been given for her offending.

It has left psychologists, the police, her defence team and ultimately the Supreme Court judge who sentenced her to come to their own conclusions about why she did it.

“This was not a mercy killing,” Justice Amanda Forrester firmly told the court on Monday.

Wendy also told police during interviews around the time of her arrest that she had not been finding it hard to care for Ken, and insisted that she did not need sympathy when it was put to her that her carer’s role must have been incredibly difficult.

Instead, she told police she found it sad and at times tiring and overwhelming but said her experience as a nurse made it easier for her to care for him.

But text messages shown to the court during the trial painted a different picture.

Two days before Ken was admitted to hospital and the insulin incident occurred, Wendy sent a series of text messages describing 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.”

Just over two weeks before the insulin incident, she sent another text message to her daughter Asha that read: “I am stressed, but mostly I feel very sad and alone. Not lonely. I am a nurse, but I’m his best friend first. I feel for him so much. I have trouble falling asleep even though I’m so tired.”

Apart from loving and supportive friends and family, Wendy had no help with caring for Ken.

A psychologist’s assessment of her before sentencing described Wendy as “stoic” and someone who did not want to be perceived as being unable to cope.

She was also vehemently against putting Ken in a care home, as she knew it went against his wishes.

But by January 14, the same day he was admitted to Joondalup Health Campus and later administered the insulin, a regional assessor went to Ken and Wendy’s home to evaluate whether they were eligible to receive government-subsidised in-home help.

They were ultimately awarded between three and eight hours’ help a week, which over the course of a 24/7 caring role would have done little to relieve Wendy of the burden of Ken’s needs.

Unsurprisingly, the ultimate explanation offered for why Wendy tried to kill the man she loved was “carer’s burnout”.

“This is a person who, due to what she had been going through for so long, was at the end of her tether,” Wendy’s lawyer Seamus Rafferty told the court on Monday, adding that Wendy herself was likely unaware that she was struggling to the extent that she was.

“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.

“It impacts your ability to make calm and rational decisions.”

A psychologist who evaluated Wendy also noted in a report that it may be a “defence mechanism” preventing her from admitting she injected Ken with insulin.

Despite that, and with the handwritten letters of 52 people who knew Wendy and attested to her “generosity, selflessness, caring and empathetic nature, compassion and lifelong dedication to looking after others”, Justice Forrester sentenced Wendy to nine years in prison.

It will be 2031 before she is considered eligible for parole.

With Wendy collapsed on the floor of the courtroom on Monday, and the hearing finished, a large cohort of family and friends who attended to support her heckled the police and prosecutors who mounted the case.

“Thanks for killing Mum,” they shouted.

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