Confessions of wife who got away with perfect murder
How husband’s woman body who in hid attic for 18 years couldn’t keep quiet about it – but no one took her seriously
DURInG her final years, Ann Sabine told anyone who would listen that she was going to be famous. The 74- year- old, who once dreamed of being a cabaret singer, claimed she would one day be as well known as her heroine, Greta Garbo — albeit for more sinister reasons.
‘People will be talking about me long after I have gone,’ she bragged while having her hair done at the beauty salon in the Welsh village of Beddau where she lived. Asked why by salon owner Bernadette Adamiec, she replied mysteriously: ‘Because of the body in the bag.’
But Ann Sabine told so many stories, much of what she said was taken with a pinch of salt. She’d once performed on stage alongside superstar Tom Jones. She’d been married to a millionaire, but fled after being battered.
She called herself Lee, paraded around Beddau in youthful black, tossing her bleached blonde hair like a woman half her age, chain-smoking and calling everyone ‘ darling’ in an Antipodean accent, despite the fact she was a Welsh coal miner’s daughter and had barely two pennies to rub together.
no one took her seriously, especially when she wittered on about the medical skeleton she kept in her small twobedroom flat, a legacy, she said, of her career as a nurse.
It was only after Ann’s death last October that the extraordinary truth about her claims became clear when, days later, her husband John’s mummified body was discovered, wrapped in plastic, next to a shed at the back of the small two-storey block of flats where they once lived.
The retired accountant, who was still dressed in his M&S pyjamas, was wrapped in 41 layers of plastic and had been dead for 18 years.
Having killed her husband, it appeared, Sabine concealed his body for two decades and even continued to claim his pension.
This week, an inquest at Aberdare Coroner’s Court ruled that John Sabine was unlawfully killed, struck over the head with a heavy ceramic frog — pathologists say his head injuries matched the frog’s protruding eye and leg.
It seems that Ann, who told friends her husband had run off with another woman, really did get away with the perfect murder.
Having killed her husband, she wrapped him in roofing felt, Tesco carrier bags, bin liners and foil secured with green twine and put him in the roof space above her flat. Whenever the stench of his decaying body began to seep out, she added more layers of plastic.
In early 2014, she arranged for two men to move the large package from the attic to the garden, telling them it was a carpet. There it lay untouched until it was discovered after her death more than 18 months later.
‘Precisely what happened will never truly be known but it’s beyond doubt that foul play was the cause of death,’ said Glamorgan Valleys coroner Andrew Barclay at the end of the inquest on Thursday.
But over the past few months, a Mail investigation has shed new light on this gripping murder mystery, uncovering the disturbing final months of the Sabines’ twisted, toxic marriage and Ann’s transformation into a cold-hearted killer.
‘John was obsessed with her. She was his life,’ says 79-year-old Valerie Chalkley, a close friend of the couple for the last five years of John’s life and who witnessed his distress as his marriage broke down. ‘If anybody put themselves in a position to be murdered it was him. He would rather be dead than without her.’
‘She was laughing and jovial,’ recalls Mrs Chalkley. ‘She asked me if I had a car to get rid of the body.’
Over the years, whenever Mrs Chalkley asked: ‘How is John?’ Ann would tell her: ‘He’s just the same.’
The Sabines’ turbulent marriage, which culminated in John’s violent death nearly 40 years after they first met, reads like a film script.
Ann was a 17-year-old nurse when she met the married 28-year- old John Sabine. She harboured dreams of becoming a professional singer and had given herself the rather jazzier name Leigh-Ann.
Father-of-two John was recovering from injuries sustained during the Korean War when Ann became pregnant after they had sex in the hospital grounds. not surprisingly, when she discovered this, John’s wife Margaret threw him out.
John and Ann went on to have four children before emigrating to new Zealand in 1965 where a fifth child was born in 1967. Despite being a mother of five, brunette Ann set about trying to build a career as a nightclub singer.
Constantly berated by his wife for not earning enough money, John, meanwhile, was accused of embezzlement and, according to a source who spoke to the Mail, was jailed.
With her husband in prison, Ann abandoned their five children, aged between nine months and 12 years, at a state-run nursery in 1969 and hot-footed it to Australia where she worked as nightclub singer called Lee Martin.
A publicity shot, a copy of which Ann kept on display in her flat until she died, showed her as an attractive woman with a gamine crop, heavy eyeliner and dangling earrings. John later told friends his wife had transformed herself into a ‘tart’ and was having an affair with a surgeon. John simply forgave her.
The ‘ child- dumping’ Sabines became a cause celebre after being investigated by social services and
tracked down by the New Zealand media, but no charges were brought.
When her career failed to take off, the couple changed their surname to Martin and moved back to New Zealand without contacting their children. By then, the children were in foster care.
The Sabines re-emerged in 1984 after being exposed by a New Zealand newspaper and despite meeting up with their now adult children in Auckland, relations quickly broke down with Ann allegedly telling her children she didn’t feel she owed them any explanation.
When furious rows ensued, the Sabines did what they always appeared to do when things became difficult — they took off, to the UK.
John got a job as an accountant at Vodafone and they set up home in a Victorian house overlooking the River Kennet in Reading. Ann became a sales assistant at Debenhams.
It was here, in 1988, that Valerie Chalkley, who was also working at the store, met her. Ann and John, she says, kept to themselves but she adds: ‘They were the epitome of respectable. Nobody knew they had children.’
But it became apparent to Mrs Chalkley that the marriage was one-sided.‘He did everything she wanted,’ she says. ‘But she told me: “He drives me mad. All he does is ring me and wants to know what I’ve done. Nobody knows what it’s like to have someone who’s just there constantly, so controlling.”’
In 1994, Ann said she was leaving her husband and asked Mrs Chalkley to drive her to a guesthouse in Bournemouth. It was more of a halfway house for convicts than a hotel, but Ann seemed delighted with it and soon embarked on a new relationship with a newly released prisoner, half her age.
‘It was a sexual, dangerous relationship,’ says Mrs Chalkley. ‘She got a buzz from the criminal lifestyle.’
Back in Reading, John Sabine was eventually made redundant from his job. Mrs Chalkley adds: ‘He used to pick me up from work, crying. He said: “I can’t go on. I’ll kill myself.” He was uninterested in any woman but her.’
Meanwhile, Ann was withdrawing money from their joint account and using it to rent and furnish a flat in Bournemouth for herself and her lover.
When she ran out of cash, she contacted her husband. She told him she needed to pay off her ‘dangerous’ boyfriend and then she would return to the marital home. In reality, she took the cash and continued the affair.
Yet John was so desperate to find his wife he hired a private detective. Then he arrived on her doorstep. Mrs Chalkley recalls: ‘She phoned me up and said: “He’s outside.” She put the phone to the door and I could hear John saying: “Please let me in. I beg you.”’
What ensued was perhaps the strangest episode of their entire marriage. Overnight, John abandoned their Reading home and moved into the flat his wife shared with her lover. Even when he was brutally assaulted by this man, John refused to leave. ‘She was his obsession,’ recalls Mrs Chalkley.
For a time, Ann appeared unable to choose between her lover and her husband. Then she said that she and John were sick of her lover ‘spending all the money’ and were going to perform a ‘moonlight flit’ to Wales.
So it was that in 1997, John and Ann arrived at Trem-Y-Cwm, a two-storey block of flats in the former mining village of Beddau.
NEIgHBOURS can’t recall meeting John. They never doubted Ann’s story that he had run off with another woman. And having cut all links with friends and family, no one came looking for John, who was 67 when last seen.
A haunting phone call Ann made to Valerie Chalkley is the closest she ever came to making a full confession.
During their conversation, Mrs Chalkley recalled how she joked: ‘I’d have thought by now that one of you would have killed the other.’
Ann replied: “It’s funny you should say that. I’ve killed him. I’ve battered him with a stone frog which was at the side of my bed. He was just driving me mad. Every night he would get into bed crying and weeping, saying: ‘You don’t fancy me.’”
‘She was laughing and jovial. She asked me if I had a car to get rid of the body. I thought: “She’s having me on. She’s just a fantasist.”’
Ann kept up a normal, if eccentric, front for her neighbours, who saw her as steely and capable. She even embarked on a relationship with retired fireman Derek Ellis, who briefly moved into her home before dying in 2010, aged 59, from alcoholic liver disease.
Ann’s family have told the Mail it was her own childhood that ‘damaged’ her. She was abandoned by her mother, Margaret, at five and shunted between relatives, an orphanage and a foster home. Her mother, accused of theft, disappeared without trace.
Ann herself later claimed that her father had killed her mother and disposed of her body. Intriguingly, no death certificate appears to exist.
But in Ann’s final years, she began mentioning her ‘medical skeleton’ more and more to people in the village.
Last August, she fell at home and a hospital scan revealed she was riddled with cancer, which had spread to her brain. She knew, too, that when she did die, John would finally be found. Her lifelong dream of fame would finally come true — for all the wrong reasons.
In late 2014, less than a year before she died, she was contacted out of the blue from New Zealand by one of her daughters. Jane Sabine, 50, had tracked her mother down and wrote explaining that, for her own peace of mind, she needed to understand why her parents had abandoned her.
Ann Sabine’s response was breathtaking in its cruelty. She sent Jane a card bearing an image of a phoenix rising from the flames. Inside was a strange and sinister hand-written verse.
‘Like the phoenix, I will arise from my ashes and sleep will obey me and visit thee never. For my eyes are upon thee for ever and ever.
‘I have served my life sentence of shame and blame. Now it is your turn to suffer the same.’