A FORMER engineer with the RAF has received a suspended prison sentence for throttling his wife.
During a trial in January Janet MacGregor said her vision blurred and she couldn’t breathe as her 6ft 4ins estranged strangled her before flinging her across the room like a rag doll.
She told a court: “He launched himself at me... it was lightning quick.
“The pressure on my neck was crushing... I knew he meant to kill me.”
Mrs MacGregor fled the pair’s Newbury home and was found by a couple driving past, sobbing and with livid marks round her neck.
Fifty-seven-year-old former RAF engineer and retired AWE Aldermaston employee John Stephen MacGregor, who was living at Railway Road, Newbury, denied intentionally strangling his wife on August 31 last year, claiming it was she who had launched herself at him.
But he was convicted following a trial.
The court heard the couple were divorcing after 10 years of marriage and, on the evening in question, a domestic row erupted into violence when MacGregor, a former chorister at St Nicolas’ Church in Newbury, attacked his wife.
After strangling her, she said he had picked her up and hurled her across the room into a door, where she smashed her head.
Mrs MacGregor added: “I thought I was going to die.
“He said: ‘You see what happens when you mess with me – don’t mess with me.’”
The court was handed several character references from former colleagues of MacGregor including one from the Royal Air Force and one from a military underwater defence project who said: “His contribution to his country’s defence is a credit to him.”
District judge Dharmesh Patel found the case proved and sent the case to Reading Crown Court to be sentenced.
Macgregor has now been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, suspended for two years.
In addition he was ordered to complete up to 35 rehabilitation activity days and to undertake 250 hours of unpaid community work.
Furthermore, MacGregor was ordered to pay a statutory victim services surcharge plus £1,387 in costs.
Finally, the court made him subject to a restraining order forbidding him from contacting Janet MacGregor, either directly or indirectly.
The order will last for 10 years.
* BERKSHIRE Women’s Aid can be contacted via the hotline number 0808 801 0882 or via email at helpdesk@bwaid.org.uk
The website is at https://www.berkshirewomensaid.org.uk/
Related: Guilty: Newbury man John MacGregor convicted of non-fatal strangulation
