A civilian police worker allowed her bed-ridden mother to die of malnutrition and infected sores after living in squalid conditions at their Guiseley home, a jury was told.

Eileen Pearson, 82, was “dirty and severely emaciated” when her dead body was taken to Leeds General Infirmary by her daughter Angela, Preston Crown Court, sitting at the Sessions House, heard yesterday.

West Yorkshire Police employee Pearson, 53, of Ghyll Royd, Guiseley, denies manslaughter by gross negligence.

Rachel Smith, prosecuting, told the jury of seven women and five men that Pearson failed to provide adequate food, nourishment and care to her mother and failed to summon timely medical help.

She added: “Eileen Pearson’s death was preventable, but had been caused by the failure of this defendant, her sole carer, to take proper care of her.”

Unmarried Pearson, a prosecution team officer at West Yorkshire Police’s Leeds Criminal Justice Support Unit, took her dead mother to the hospital’s A&E department shortly after 10.30pm on May 10 last year.

She told medical staff her mother, who weighed only 5st 7lb, was “unresponsive” but they immediately saw she was dead, Miss Smith said.

Miss Smith said: “Mrs Pearson was dirty and severely emaciated and had died as a result of the combined effect of malnutrition, Parkinson’s Disease and infected pressure sores.”

Police were alerted and visited Mrs Pearson’s home in Fairway, Guiseley, where her daughter was also living at the time, and found that the house was “uninhabitable”, Miss Smith said.

She told the jury: “There was no running water or sanitation. The building itself was in a dangerous condition.

“The rooms were piled high with a mixture of discarded possessions, soiled clothes, soiled nappies, food waste, bottles filled with urine, human waste and decaying rubbish.

“There were insect infestations and dead rats in the property.”

Mr and Mrs Pearson were described as financially secure with “significant assets”.

The couple were described to police as hoarders by Pearson, their only child. Miss Smith told the jury a prosecution expert would be called to say it was likely Mrs Pearson suffered senile squalor syndrome.

“The main features of the syndrome are social isolation, self-neglect, rubbish hoarding, extreme squalor and indifference to their surroundings,” Miss Smith said.

“However, it does not explain why the defendant failed to take proper care of her mother, who was increasingly frail and vulnerable.

“The defendant alone knew her mother had stopped eating anything other than a few mouthfuls of food at a time and she rarely drank more than a few sips of tea or juice or a slimming drink each day.”

Pearson was described to the jury by Miss Smith as “professional, diligent, articulate and capable”.

The jury was told a defence psychiatrist, disputed by the prosecution, will claim that the daughter has a condition called folie a deux.

The effect of the condition was to “reduce the defendant’s capacity to appreciate the risks to her mother’s health of the conditions she was living in”, Miss Smith said.

In police interviews, the defendant said her mother had an aversion to doctors. She died between 7.30pm and 7.45pm on the night she took the body into hospital, Pearson said in interview.

She told officers her mother took to her bed in early 2001, shortly after the death of her husband of 50 years, Geoffrey.

The trial continues.