Wendy Bickley was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison. Bickley watched as her husband overdosed last year on a variety of drugs. Above, Bickley’s children look on and weep as their mother is led from the courtroom. The girls yelled well-wishes to their mother, then began to scream that the accusations Bickley pleaded guilty to were “all lies.”
(Journal-Tribune photo by Mac Cordell)
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The woman who watched her husband overdose, erased evidence and lied to get his pills will be going to prison.
In January, Wendy Jo Bickley, 34, of Cardington, pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence and deception to obtain dangerous drugs. She was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison and five years of community control.
On Feb. 27, Bickley watched as her husband, Jayson Bickley, overdosed at the couple’s home in New Dover estates. According to court documents, he had heroin, fentanyl and other drugs in his system.
Court documents describe that for hours, he drooled, struggled to breathe and went in and out of consciousness.
Bickley repeatedly called and texted with the man’s mother, who begged her to get help. Instead, Wendy Bickley waited hours to call for emergency help. The man was taken to Memorial Hospital, then to Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center.
By the time he arrived, the man was considered brain dead.
In the afternoon of Feb. 28, Wendy Bickley decided to remove her husband from life support and he died.
In the hours between calling for help and removing the life support, Bickley went to a local pharmacy and filled her husband’s three-months prescription for pain killers. She moved and hid drugs in the home and also found her husband’s phone and erased phone numbers, texts and other information.
At the sentencing hearing, a victim’s advocate read a letter from Jayson Bickley’s mother.
“Every morning I look at his pictures and start to cry,” according to the letter. “How am I supposed to move on?”
The mother wrote Wendy Bickley needed to explain what she had done.
The woman said Wendy Bickley arrived at her son’s funeral with her boyfriend, had the boyfriend carry her son’s casket and let the boyfriend wear her son’s clothes. The mother said she got nothing of her son’s to keep. She said items were given to the boyfriend, sold or just thrown away.
“My life and heart are broken,” the woman wrote. “She will never learn from her mistakes because she has no conscience.”
She asked for the sentence to be “cold and harsh.”
The mother added, “I can only pray God punishes her for her sins.”
Jayson Bickley’s mother also asked the court to mandate Wendy Bickley return to her maiden name.
“The family does not want her to maintain the Bickley name,” the advocate read.
The victim’s advocate also read a letter from the mother of Jayson Bickley’s children.
“Instead of spending his final hours beside him, you stole his prescription, stole his drugs and sold them,” the woman wrote in her statement to the court.
Judge Don Fraser said he also wanted to hear from Lt. Mike Justice of the Union County Sheriff’s Office. Justice served as lead investigator in the case.
Justice testified when an individual overdoses, investigators will often prosecute whoever provided the drugs. He said that because Wendy Bickley erased the information, investigators were not able to do that in this case.
Justice read from a series of reports detailing Wendy Bickley said she did not call for help because she knew there were drugs in the home and she was afraid she would lose her children and that she erased information from her husband’s phone because she is “not a Narc.”
Justice also said when investigators learned of the drugs three days after the death, there were more than 100 pills missing.
“She hampered the death investigation,” said Assistant Union County Prosecutor Rick Rodger. “That’s why we are not here on the death today.”
Defense Attorney Joshua Peistrup argued erasing the information was “a misguided attempt at keeping her husband out of trouble when law enforcement arrived.”
He said despite what others say, his client does show genuine remorse for her husband’s death.
Wendy Bickley said she is “trying to do good.”
“I did everything I could for him that day,” she told the judge.
She said she was getting the drugs for her husband because she didn’t want to believe anything bad would happen to him.
“You will never convince me in a million years you were going to refill those prescriptions for him,” Fraser said.
The judge said while she was not being held legally responsible for her husband’s death, Bickley’s actions the night of the overdose and day of he death, “all of it goes, in part, to whether there was true remorse.”
Fraser said he wanted to structure a sentence that “maximizes the period you are under supervision.”
He sentenced the woman to six years in prison on the deception to obtain a dangerous drug charge. She will be required to serve at least five years in prison before she is eligible to apply for judicial release.
When she is released from prison, Bickley will begin a five-year term of community control.
Fraser said that if the woman violates the terms of her control, she could be sentenced to an additional 30 months in prison.