You see my original thought was that IS overdosed Helen mistakenly. He was trying to undermine her selfconfidence enough to make her believe she was becoming incapable of managing her affairs, then he could get the POA in motion.
I just want to throw this thought out - why did he take so long to deliberately kill her? Why did he just occassionally dose her with strong zopiclone? What was the purpose of the slow drugging?
The seeming panic in the hiding of her so close to home, his lack of decent alibis, his clearly guilty behaviour (to me anyway) during the police searches and questioning.
We will never know of course. In my opinion he is as guilty as hell and is a cold, unfeeling, unemotional sociopath but I'd like to try and understand his motive.
All that was never meant to come to light, was it?
HB allegedly would disappear because she needed time for herself and did not want contact. IMHO this might have worked if it had not been for the traces left on the internet and the uses of phones ~or the lack of either.
His alibi was as good as you might want it. Medical appointment. Game in te evening. Takeaway. Acting as if nothing had happened and threw away the note by accident. Much better than claiming to be in London and nobody saw you there.
IMHO the motive can - at least partially - be found in the joy of preparation. The growing power that IS held over HB. And more. And more. If she spoke about her symptoms with family and friends, this would only support the idea of a breakdown of sorts.
There is a possibility that grief played a role, also on his part.
The idea was this: When your spouse (partner, sibling etc) dies all of a sudden, in your presence and there is nothing you can do to help, you may be overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness. Unbearable feelings.
Then, when you kill your next spouse (for many different other reasons) you repeat the original scene, but this time, YOU are in control and powerful. This is, of course, madness. But there is a system in it.
This idea came up in a conversation that I had with someone (X) who had gone to see a therapist for a certain condition. The therapist pretended to help X, but under the guise of help, pushed X almost to the abyss. The therapist had suffered from the same condition some years before and sympathised enormeously with the ordeal that X was going through.
X managed to get away from that therapist and is recovering slowly. X has no idea how this would have ended otherwise, nor why the therapist would do this, but X suspects that the therapist projected their own experience on X and somehow recreated their own experience and helplessness, except that the therapist was now
in control of the entire situation.
When you come to think of it, there are more examples to be found, for instance children who were abused and grow up to be abusers.
