A carer who “reached the end of the road” has been jailed for killing her elderly mother on Christmas Day.
Stefania Glowka, 64, killed her 86-year-old mother Tamara Glowka with a belt at their home in Devizes, Wiltshire. The daughter then tried to take her own life by stabbing herself but failed, before calling 999 to calmly tell police: “I just killed my mother.” Glowka told the court how her mother woke up in the night to go to the toilet, and then she took a belt from the chest of drawers and looped it over her neck and tightened it until she died, on December 25, 2025.
Glowka was cleared of murder but was today sentenced to eight years behind bars after admitting manslaughter.
View 3 ImagesGlowka killed her mum(Image: Wiltshire Police/PA Wire)
A video showed the daughter being arrested while being treated for her injuries in an ambulance and asking: “Does that mean my mother is dead?”
In a police interview, she said: “I felt that I’ve just got nothing left to give and something has to be done. Mum and I are so close I could not leave her with someone else because she is so dependent on me and she didn’t like other people in our lives. I thought the best would be to end all this here and there.”
The 64-year-old carer said she thought using the belt was the “easiest way to let my mother go”, then added: “I felt awful but in a way I also felt that our story would soon be over and in a way, it would be nice if we could die on the same day.”
View 3 ImagesGlowka being treated by paramedics after the incident (Image: Wiltshire Police / SWNS)
She added: “I sat and went back to mum and I talked to her. I apologised for everything I’ve done and said if there is an afterlife we will meet each other.” She then stabbed herself but called 999 when she realised her attempt failed.
The daughter told emergency services: “I just killed my mother.” She added: “I was at the end of my road.” Before the incident, the victim had been sectioned and was suffering from high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and thyroid issues. She had also been diagnosed with transient psychosis and began to hear voices and have hallucinations.
Describing the relationship with her mother, Glowka told police officers in her interview: “All my life we lived just the two of us, first in Poland then after I moved to the UK. I never married, never had children, we don’t have any family left, we are like two dinosaurs at the end of the line. She was the best mother I could have had, she always supported me.”
Simon Jones, prosecuting, argued the defendant’s guilty manslaughter plea did “not properly reflect her true level of responsibility” and “there is no lawful justification for what she did.” Her defence argued she had broken “the habit of a lifetime and acted against everything she had lived for” and her “ability to form rational judgment had been substantially impaired”.
The jury, at the end of the trial, found the 64-year-old no guilty of murder. Before sentencing was passed, a letter written by her was read to the court.
She wrote: “My mother was the best mother in the world.” Glowka added: “I felt very bad that I let her down at her most vulnerable when she needed me the most.” In sentencing her, His Honour Judge Julian Lambert described it as an “utterly extraordinary” and “sad case.”
He said: “Your mother had no one else in the world than you – you had no one else in the world than your mother. You were devoted to one another. You showed extraordinary kindness and gave her the highest level of care. You slept beside her every night and did all you could for her.
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“You were a dutiful and considerate daughter. Apart from this one dreadful aberration, no one could have done more for a parent.” The judge said her clinical depression had “distorted her impression of the situation”.
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