Wasp sting kills wife of soccer chief

The chairman of Charlton Athletic told today how his wife was killed by a wasp sting.

Richard Murray saw his wife Jane slump to the floor as they sat at the breakfast table. The shock sent her into a three-year coma, despite desperate efforts to revive her, and she died in July this year.

Mr Murray, whose media company Avesco owns rights to Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, told the Westminster coroner how Mrs Murray, 50, had been having breakfast when she was stung on her finger by a wasp.

"A wasp was in her hair and she flicked it with her hand. In 10 to 20 seconds she collapsed," he said.

Mr Murray called an ambulance as he and their daughter Hannah, now 23, attempted to resuscitate her. The court heard that Mrs Murray's heart had stopped briefly, causing the brain damage which sent her into a coma.

Mr Murray, of Walton-on-the-Hill, Surrey, added: "The operator told us what to do and we tried to open her airways. They worked on Jane in the ambulance for an amount of time and I was told that her heart didn't start again until she reached the hospital."

Doctors told Mr Murray that his wife would only live for three months. But he persisted in seeking out specialist treatment for her. He said: "I was told that there was nothing that could be done. One doctor said: 'What you see is what you get,' but I was not prepared to accept this advice."

He had her moved to the St John and St Elizabeth hospital, St John's Wood, where she underwent oxygen treatment every day for three months.

When this did not work, Mr Murray tried a treatment suggested by Russian doctors involving amino acids and massage to increase oxygenation in the brain.

But his efforts were in vain, and in November 2000 Mrs Murray was moved to the Wakefield Centre in Hampstead for palliative care.

Shortly before her death she was transferred to the Royal Hospital for Neuro Disabilities in Putney where she died on 12 July this year.

Mr Murray said: "We had an exceptional marriage and close family.

"I visited her every day for the first year and thereafter at least five days out of every seven for 30 to 60 minutes, talking to her and massaging her hands and feet."

Recording a verdict of death by misadventure, the coroner, Dr Paul Knapman, said: "What a terrible tragedy. Mercifully these events are not at all common, but that is no compensation at all in such cases as these and our sympathy goes out to the family of this woman."

Dr Knapman added that Mrs Murray had died "from being in a persistent vegetative state due to [brain damage] caused by anaphylactic shock".