A MAN has been found guilty of beating his mother-in-law during a row and leaving her to bleed to death.

Eighty-two-year-old Irene Hawkes was left with a broken nose, jaw and eye socket and fractures to her sternum and seven ribs in the brutal attack by David Towers, 51.

Mrs Hawkes took several days to die after being left lying on the kitchen floor of her home in Wakely Road, Kinson, the jury at Winchester Crown Court heard.

Following the attack, Towers fled the house and went into hiding.

Towers, of no fixed abode, was eventually found by police hiding in a friend’s garden shed in Upton Heath.

After his arrest, he blamed his wife, Mrs Hawkes’s daughter Sylvia, for the murder.

Towers told police that he had left the house because Mrs Hawkes had told him that Sylvia was “coming with the boyfriend and his mates to sort him”.

The court heard that both Towers and Sylvia were both heavy drinkers.

On the day of the murder, Towers had accompanied Mrs Hawkes on errands to Winton and visited two pubs.

Later, they went to the Queens Park Hotel in Holdenhurst Road to celebrate a betting win by Towers.

They were later heard quarrelling in a taxi on the way home, the court heard.

Towers ordered a take-away curry in the evening but there was no reply when it was delivered just after 8pm.

Prosecutor Christopher Parker said: “Between ordering the curry and its delivery this man had set about his mother-in-law in her kitchen.”

In a video interview recorded last year, Lucy Sharpe, who sheltered Towers at her home, said he attacked her when she asked him to leave.

Ms Sharpe said he looked worried, kept checking the windows, hid when a visitor came round and washed his trainers the night he arrived.

Towers will be sentenced this Friday.

DS Pete Yeates, of Dorset Police’s Major Crime Investigation Unit, described it as “a brutal unprovoked attack on an elderly woman”.

He added: “There’s no doubt that the alcohol consumed that day by David Towers played a significant part in the attack.”