A loving husband who gave in to his wife’s pleas to help her to commit suicide was facing life imprisonment last night after a jury at Liverpool Crown Court found him guilty of murder.

Frank Lund, 58, a retired accountant, of New Brighton, Merseyside, was said still to have been passionately in love with his wife, Patricia, 65, after 32 years of marriage.

Mrs Lund had suffered from manic depression and had made five suicide attempts. She became more determined to die when an irritable bowel complaint made her life a misery. Mr Lund argued with his wife over her death wish but eventually agreed to help.

On the chosen day of her death last September, he presented his wife with a farewell bouquet of roses and also wrote cards to her from himself and from their pet dog and cats. He handed her six packets of para-cetamol, but when these failed to work quickly enough he smothered her with a pillow.

After a three-day trial, the jury deliberated for four hours before reaching its verdict. There was a slight tremor from Mr Lund and a reaction of shock from his family and friends in the public gallery.

Mr Justice Silber adjourned sentencing until May 24 for psychiatric reports to be drawn up. He thanked Mr Lund’s family, many of whom were sobbing, for the “quiet way” that they had behaved during the trial. The judge must deliver a mandatory life sentence but will fix a tariff for the minimum term that must be served before parole can be considered.

Yesterday The court had heard that Mrs Lund had suffered from depression since the mid1970s and had made five suicide attempts, all by overdose. She had also suffered from a bowel disease that had left her debilitated for at least 12 months. However, she had been told that the condition would improve within two years. Her determination to die had led to marital arguments.

Gordon Cole, QC, for the prosecution, said: “[Mr Lund] maintained to police that this had initially caused rows between them, but his wife had insisted it was her right to choose and that at one stage he had promised that she would die in her own bed.

“On the morning of September 1, his wife announced that this was the day she had chosen. They had breakfast and she asked the defendant to go out and purchase paracetamol. He did so, together with red roses and cards for himself, their pet dog and their several cats.”

Mrs Lund swallowed about 80 tablets while in her bed. When she vomited, Mr Lund became concerned that she would not die but instead wake up in hospital. He told police that he placed a plastic bag over her head and pushed her head into a pillow until she stopped moving.

Mr Lund cleaned his wife’s body and changed her clothes before telephoning her two adult sons, whom he had helped to bring up since they were children. When paramed-ics arrived at the house he told one of them: “I know I have committed a crime.”

Mr Lund told the jury that he and his wife had watched a television documentary on euthanasia. Several weeks later she asked him again and, after almost a year of refusing to help her to die, he agreed. He said: “I don’t know why I felt differently. Perhaps it was the accumulation, but it did strike a chord with me that it was her choice.”

Mr Cole said that the prosecution did not dispute that Mr Lund was a loving husband but that, in law, his actions amounted to murder.

“This is a very sad case,” he said. “It was a case in which Patricia Lund, it seems, had made the decision to take her own life. But it is a case in which we say that the defendant committed the offence of murder.”

The couple had lived for many years in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, before moving to Merseyside in 2002.

Mr Lund was supported by his wife’s immediate family. Ann Olive, the wife of Stephen Olive, 44, one of her sons, told the jury that they had been a devoted couple. She said: They were not like a husband and wife who had been married for 32 years. They did everything together and were very much in love.”

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