The wife, in the frog? house with a…
As the grisly murder hit the headlines, calls to the police hotline came thick and fast.
Detective Chief Inspector Gareth Morgan of South Wales police, who led the inquiry, received a call from a woman who knew the couple in the Nineties. She told DCI Morgan she had phoned Lee after the couple moved to Beddau.
But when she had asked about John, Lee ‘joked’ that she’d killed him by hitting him over the head with a stone frog. At the time, it was put down to Lee’s warped sense of humour.
But DCI Morgan discovered a stone frog in Lee’s belongings. The shape of the ornament and injuries of the victim matched.
The police believed she lashed out at John during a row.
But another question remained. How had Lee hidden the body for 20 years?
Two men came forward to say they’d been asked to move a package containing what they’d been told was carpet from Lee’s attic to the garden in 2014.
Lee had been storing her husband’s decomposing remains in her loft for 17 years, probably adding layers of plastic wrapping regularly to conceal the increasingly strong smell of the decaying body.
While Lee Sabine got away with murder, she also left behind a trail of destruction.
Michelle James suffered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after finding the body and the subsequent arrest.
‘She’s messed me up,’ she said. ‘I can’t sleep properly. When I close my eyes, it’s all there. When I was at the police station, I thought I would never see my kids or grandkids again. I was terrified I was going to prison for a crime someone else committed.’
And then, of course, there are the Sabines’ children. Those left, anyway…
Martin took his own life in 2000, never recovering from bring left by his parents.
His surviving siblings struggle to come to terms with both their abandonment and what their mother did to their father.
‘I could never forgive him for what he did but I still believe he was manipulated and he fell in love with an evil woman.
That was his biggest crime,’ said Steve. ‘If they had rung up and said my dad had died, then fine – but to find out my own mother had murdered my father, it’s like something out of a Stephen King novel.’ His sister, Jane, agreed: ‘The question I have asked myself my whole life is: “Why?” It’s been so much to process. I have spent my lifetime finding ways to deal with the abandonment.’ ‘She was an evil woman,’ said Christopher, John Sabine’s son from an earlier marriage. ‘ When I was told they’d found my father’s body, I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t seen him for 27 years… I tried to contact him many times but he never replied. Now we know why.’ Lee Sabine may have just taken one person’s life, but she ruined many others…
‘She’s messed me up. I can’t sleep properly’
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