A north man who attacked his dad with a knife because he suspected him of killing his mother was jailed for 12 months yesterday.
A social work report on 22-year-old Christopher Thomson assessed him as “still a risk to his father” and a sheriff said she had no option but to send him to prison.
Sentence had been deferred on Thomson several times for various reports to be prepared in a bid by his advocate Shahid Latif to keep him out of jail.
But yesterday Mr Latif told Inverness Sheriff Court his client had informed him he had reached the end of the road.
The lawyer said: “Whilst he appreciates the efforts to keep him out of jail, he feels we are at the end of the road and in a cul-de-sac – back where we started.
The social workers say he cannot be rehabilitated and still poses a risk to his father. But there had been no prior incident like this and none since.
“Imprisonment will not deal with the underlying issues he suffers from. He grew up with the spectre of the disappearance of his mother at a very young age.
“He was also subjected to a whispering campaign by other members of his family about the circumstances of his mother’s disappearance.
“He was destined to chase a rainbow he was never going to reach.
“He has since broken off all contact with his father.”
At an earlier hearing, the court was told Thomson’s hairdresser mother Heather was 27 when she was last seen leaving her home in Inverness on January 19, 1994.
She has not been seen since and police are still treating her disappearance as a missing person inquiry.
But Thomson believed his natural father, Gerard Salvadori, 63, had something to do with his mum’s disappearance.
Mr Salvadori, now aged 63, was a diagnosed schizophrenic and spent a period in Carstairs State Hospital after admitting threatening to petrol bomb an Inverness chemist if staff did not give him drugs 20 years ago.
The High Court was told in September 1994 his motive was to commit suicide with the drugs.
Although he had only seen Mr Salvadori three times in his life and never knew his mother due to his age, Thomson visited his dad’s Conon Bridge home in February, 2013 after making the journey from Inverness by bus.
Fiscal depute Roderick Urquhart told the court: “His mother went missing in 1994 and no trace of her was ever found.
“He blames his father for his mother’s disappearance, or at least believes he knows something of it.
“Mr Salvadori was sitting in the living room of his house when Thomson knocked at his door and was let in.
“Almost immediately he started to talk about his mother, implying that Salvadori knew something about the disappearance.
“His father responded by asking ‘What?’.
“Thomson then punched his father twice to the left hand side of his face, before going into the kitchen.
“He came out holding a knife, walked up to his father and struck him a couple of times on the head with the bottom of the handle of the knife, before putting the knife down.”
Thomson had admitted assaulting his father to his injury by repeatedly punching him on the face, detaining him against his will and striking him on the head with the handle of a knife.