A distressing six minute phone call to police saw a pastor seemingly confess to the murder of his Sunday school teacher wife through anguished breaths.
Matthew Phelps’ phone call to emergency services started with the alarming admission: “I think I killed my [wife] …”
The 911 operator asks him to elaborate: “What — what do you mean by that? What happened?”
“I had a dream and then I turned on the lights and she’s dead on the floor,” he replies. “Um, I have blood all over me and there’s a bloody knife on the bed and I think I did it.”
In the audio, the 27-year-old can be heard sobbing and breathing heavily as he tells the dispatcher he doesn’t know the time or when he woke up. All he knows is that he took cough medicine before he went to bed.
“I took more medicine than I should have,” Phelps says. “I took Coricidin … because I know it can make you feel good. So a lot of times I can’t sleep at night, so I took some. … She’s not moving. Oh my God.”
The dispatcher repeatedly asks if 29-year-old Lauren Phelps is breathing, but he says that she isn’t and he’s scared to get too close to her.
“There’s all this blood,” he says. “She didn’t deserve this.”
When emergency personnel arrived at their North Carolina home, they found Mrs Phelps with multiple stab wounds and was pronounced dead at the hospital.
The pharmaceutical company that makes Coricidin, Bayer, extended their “deepest sympathies” to the family, but denied any wrongdoing on their part.
“Patient safety is our top priority, and we continually monitor adverse events regarding all of our products,” Bayer told ABC News. “There is no evidence to suggest that Coricidin is associated with violent behavior.”
Phelps was arrested on Friday and charged with murder. He is now being held without bond while he awaits his court appearance on Tuesday.
