AN elderly couple who could not live without each other died after making a joint suicide pact, an inquest heard.

Retired nurse Olive Climpson wrote a suicide note for their daughter Nicola reading: “I have injected your father with insulin. Our wills are at the solicitor.”

James Climpson and his diabetic wife, both aged 82, were found dead at their Earley home by Nicola and a friend on September 28 last year.

The couple had suffered from deteriorating health and had said they “couldn’t live without each other.” They had been devastated by the recent death of their other daughter, Mandy, which Mr Climpson, a retired accountant, described as “the biggest disaster he had known”.

Mrs Climpson injected her husband with a fatal dose of insulin before turning the needle on herself, the inquest heard.

Berkshire coroner Peter Bedford was told that on September 28 last year, Nicole tried to call her parents but got no answer, so she went to their home in Anderson Avenue with friend Lynden Lee.

She found her mum wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, with the television on.

Mr Bedford told Windsor Guildhall on Thursday earlier this month: “On touching her she was cold and you feared the worst.”

Nicola then went into the bedroom and found her father dead. She said: “I wasn’t as shocked as I thought I would be.

“The fact that they went together, that’s what they would have wanted. As far as I’m concerned they both took their own lives.

“I think they were just very concerned that they couldn’t look after each other.”

The inquest heard there was no reason to think Mr Climpson had resisted being injected with the insulin by his wife and Mr Bedford said nothing could have been done to prevent their deaths.

Giving evidence at the inquest, pathologist Dr Ashley Fegan-Earl said their deaths were “consistent with hypoglycaemia due to insulin administration”.

Mr Bedford recorded a narrative verdict, saying that Mrs Climpson had taken her own life but Mr Climpson had not.