A WOMAN who was found dead on her sofa surrounded by filth and squalor had spent decades ‘ruled’ by obsessive compulsive behaviour, a court heard yesterday.

Emma-Jane Kurtz, 41, of Blackwater Way, Didcot, denies one count of wilful neglect against her mother Cecily.

Taking to the witness box at Oxford Crown Court, Dr Flavia Leslie, a consultant psychiatrist who met with the 79-year-old twice in 2003 said that it had been clear that she had bi-polar and ‘severe’ obsessive compulsive disorder.

Clare Wade QC, defending, read out to jurors doctors’ notes, dating from 1978 onwards, showing her obsessive control over household chores was so extreme that her husband was for years not even allowed in the kitchen to get a glass of water.

Dr Leslie told jurors: “When a person suffers from obsessive tendencies they can be quite controlling. In Cecily’s case she could not stand any one else to do household cleaning but, equally, often could not face doing it herself.”

Ms Wade suggested the impact on Kurtz of how the illness ‘ruled’ her mother would have been profound.

Dr Leslie said: “The household must have been chaotic and an absolute nightmare.”

Earlier in the trial Oliver Saxby QC, prosecuting, told jurors that the extent of the neglect ‘beggared belief’ and that when Cecily was discovered by paramedics at home on July 2, 2014, her corpse was in an ‘emaciated’ state. The trial continues.