Cold case files
Read our cold case file and see if you correctly predicted the killer’s identity…
THE CASE:
John and Lee Sabine seemed like the perfect couple. They met when Lee was a nurse in London and John had been injured in the Korean War.
They married in 1960 and had four children, then emigrated to New Zealand, where they had a fifth child. Here, the family started to fall apart. Inexplicably, Lee and John abandoned their children in an Auckland nursery. Steve, Martin, Susan, Jane and Lee-Ann were aged between two and 11 in 1969, and they spent the next decade in care. ‘They dropped us off somewhere and never came back to pick us up… I was probably six or seven years old,’ their son, Steve, now 59, recalled.
The couple changed their names to Lee and John Martin and fled to Australia, where Lee tried to carve out a career as a cabaret singer, and John worked as an accountant.
But an apparent change of heart in the mid-Eighties saw them return to New Zealand.
Their reunion with their now-adult children was shortlived. After just a few weeks, the couple fled again, leaving them distraught for a second time.
Eventually the elusive pair started a new life in Beddau, a small village near Pontypridd, in Wales, in February 1997.
But, within a year, John disappeared from the home. He was 67. At first, Lee told those who asked that he’d left her and she was glad to be rid of him.
Her neighbours never questioned her version of events. Despite being known as a little strange with a dark sense of humour and not knowing
much about her past, Lee quickly became a popular member of her community, working hard to transform the little garden she shared with three other flats.
The only hint she gave to one friend, Michelle James, about her life before Beddau was that she had once been a nurse and joked about a medical skeleton she’d bought during her training.
Soon, people forgot John had ever lived there.
Meanwhile, Lee regularly threw parties, barbecues and did tarot card readings for friends. But her health took a turn for the worse when she was diagnosed with a brain tumour in her early 70s.
As she lay in hospital growing frail, it was no secret that, aged 74, she was dying. She was let out of hospital to return home for a few nights, where she met with her friends, Michelle James and Lynne Williams.
Lee took the opportunity to beg a favour from them. Her old medical skeleton was in the shed, would they move it to the attic to scare the people who would move into her flat after she’d died?
‘She joked about a medical skeleton she got learning to be a nurse’
It would be her last macabre joke.
A month after her death in October 2015, Michelle, now 50, finally got round to fulfilling her promise.
Along with another friend, Rhian, they got the skeleton from the shed. It was tightly wrapped in grey plastic, so using knives they’d grabbed from the kitchen, the two women began to cut through what turned out to be over 40 layers, giggling about the joke they were about to play.
But their giggles soon faded as the layers began to give way, releasing the unmistakable smell of rotten flesh.
It quickly became clear – this was no medical skeleton. It was a human corpse.
Screaming, they ran inside to call the police. What had started as an innocent joke was suddenly something far more sinister…