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Lancaster man faces life in prison for stabbing wife

LANCASTER COUNTY, S.C. — Elaine Ghent, 54, worked at Lloyd's convenience store in Lancaster County. She often told her co-workers she wanted to leave her husband John Ghent. She had tried before, but she said he always found her. He hadn't worked in years and she was weary of supporting them both.

This week, John Ghent is on trial for murder, accused of stabbing his wife to death on Oct. 28, 2013, in the bedroom of their home.

Prosecutors said he plotted to kill her before she had a chance to leave him.

"She told him she wanted him to leave, and he said he wouldn't leave," Tressa Howle, Elaine Ghent's sister, testified in court Tuesday in Lancaster.

Their son Jonathan Ghent and his wife, Nicole Ghent, and their two children lived with John and Elaine Ghent in their mobile home on Home Place Lane.

They said their 4-year-old daughter always slept between her grandparents in their bed. However, on the night of Oct. 27, John Ghent told her she couldn't sleep with them. He later confessed that on that night, when his wife came home from work, he stabbed her, then swallowed some of her blood pressure medication to try to kill himself.

In an odd twist, following the stabbing, John Ghent called his daughter Tabitha Reynolds at 4 a.m. and left an emotional voice mail. On it, he repeatedly said he was sorry he had hurt her mother. She awoke at 7 a.m., got the message and her husband mike immediately went to the home, along with other family members.

They beat on the door, waking up Jonathan and Nicole Ghent. Jonathan Ghent testified that he answered the door, then ran to the other side of the house where he found the door to his parents' bedroom locked.

I pushed open the door with my shoulder," Jonathan Ghent said. He found them both in bed.  His mother dead, covered in blood, his father with an arm over her, lying face to face.

“I grabbed my father, drug him into the kitchen and started punching him, and as I was punching him I was asking him, what did you do to my mother?"

He testified that after being severely beat up his father confessed to killing his mother and threatened to kill him too.

Sheriff's deputies and paramedics arrived to find John Ghent on the kitchen floor, badly beaten and then found Elaine Ghent in the bedroom. She'd been dead several hours by that time.

John Ghent confessed to the killing again to the paramedic who treated him when she asked him how he got injured.

It was revealed in court Tuesday that Elaine Ghent had been having an affair, and had been with her lover earlier on the night she was killed, and stayed with him until early that morning. Family members told Channel 9 that John Ghent was not aware of the affair, and wanted to kill his wife so she wouldn't leave him.

Elaine Ghent had been injured in a car accident in June of that year. She planned on using the settlement money that was coming to buy a house and start a new life.

In this trial there is no question about who killed her, but John Ghent decided to go to trial rather than plead guilty.

If he’s convicted, his sentence could be 30 years in prison to life. Prosecutors expect to wrap up their case Wednesday morning and the jury could have it by the afternoon.