Woman admits manslaughter after killing her mother in Devizes flat

A Christmas morning emergency call in Devizes ended with Tamara Glowka, 86, dead in a flat on Keepers Road and her daughter telling police: “I just killed my mother.” The case now at Bristol Crown Court puts years of unpaid care, acute despair and the law’s narrow test for diminished responsibility in direct collision.

Wiltshire Police were called to the address at about 8.10am on 25 December 2025 after reports of a serious assault. South Western Ambulance Service attended, but Tamara Glowka was pronounced dead at the scene. Stefania Glowka, 64, of Keepers Road, has denied murder and pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility.

Prosecutors said Stefania Glowka had been her mother’s sole carer for 17 years and had told police she could no longer cope. The prosecution case says she strangled her mother with a belt after first attempting to take her own life. Those facts place the legal issue at the centre of the trial: whether a moment of catastrophic breakdown, following years of caregiving strain, reduced her responsibility in law even as it ended in a deliberate killing.

Diminished responsibility is one of the few routes in English criminal law that can reduce murder to manslaughter when a defendant’s mental functioning is shown to have been substantially impaired. In this case, the defence position has put the focus on exhaustion, mental collapse and the pressure of caring alone for an elderly parent, rather than on a conventional murder motive. The trial at Bristol Crown Court was scheduled to last seven days.

The case also speaks to a wider national problem that rarely reaches court in such stark form. Across England and Wales, unpaid carers can spend years looking after relatives with little formal support, few breaks and no easy escape when strain becomes overwhelming. When those arrangements break down, the criminal justice system is left to draw a hard line between compassion and culpability, and to decide how much the law can recognise breakdown without excusing death.

In Devizes, that balance now turns on the final facts of one family’s collapse: a 64-year-old daughter, an 86-year-old mother, a Christmas Day death and a courtroom asked to measure where desperation ended and criminal responsibility began.