A hate-fuelled man who urged his nine-year-old son to poison his mother and frame her new partner for the murder has been jailed for 18 months.
Bradford Crown Court heard that the “diabolical” plot was hatched in more than 3,000 Facebook messages between father and son.
The man, from Ilkley but who cannot be named to protect the identity of his son, first got the child to steal his mother’s bank card and pass on her pin number.
He withdrew £300 from her account after telling his son to hide the stolen card under a rock.
In “brainwashing” messages to the boy, who lives in Bradford with his family, his father urged him to complain that “Mummy is very selfish. I hate living with them. She got rid of our pets.”
The court heard that events took a sinister turn when the man began messaging in detail to his son about poisoning his mother with nicotine.
He was a smoker and suggested he could extract it and it could be applied lethally to the woman’s skin.
The man suggested to his son that his mother’s new partner could be implicated by putting one of his hairs in the jar of poison and it would “kill two birds with one stone.”
He pleaded guilty to theft, fraud and perverting the course of justice. A charge of encouraging or assisting in the commission of causing grievous bodily harm was dropped.
Judge Jonathan Rose said he was satisfied the man did not intend to kill the woman.