Ludmila Kapsik, 59, was found with a serious head injury at the Garden Towers Apartment block on Jefferson Avenue March 21. Her husband Mike Kapsik, 61, faces second-degree murder charges in connection with the death. After a rare, nearly three-month-long stretch without murder, this was the first homicide of 2010. (Winnipeg Sun)

Miloslav Kapsik admits beating his wife Ludmila to death with a hammer, but it will be up to a jury to decide whether he was suffering a mental disorder at the time of the March 2010 killing.

Kapsik, 64, is on trial charged with second-degree murder.

“You will need to consider whether he was not criminally responsible,” Crown attorney Jennifer Mann told jurors in an opening address Tuesday.

Jurors heard Kapsik and Ludmila, 59, had been watching a hockey game on television at their Jefferson Avenue apartment when, shortly before 11 p.m., he retrieved a hammer from a storage room, walked up behind his wife and bludgeoned her 57 times about the head and body.

Kapsik told police he waited until 12:01 a.m. to call 911 “so he could cool down,” Mann said.