Pictured for first time, joiner in love triangle that ended in murder
A FATHER who murdered his wife after she had an affair with a joiner was yesterday jailed for life as her relatives said their family had been ‘ripped apart’.
Stuart Gallear, 51, stabbed wife Mandy, 42, three times in the chest after she said she was leaving him for Mark Prescott, pictures of whom have emerged for the first time.
Gallear claimed he ‘ just lost it’ when his wife admitted the 17-month fling with the joiner – who had done work on their home and whom the killer counted as a friend – telling him: ‘We are separating. I love him more than you.’ Sentencing him to life with a minimum term of 17 years, Mr Justice Openshaw said Gallear attacked his wife with ‘targeted and forceful thrusts’, including one that left an 8in deep wound through her heart.
Before the murder, Gallear had ‘gone looking for’ Mr Prescott without success and drunk five pints of lager.
The judge said he acted out of ‘self-indulgence verging on self-pity’, attacking Mrs Gallear in her own home ‘where she was entitled to feel safe from a murderous assault by her husband’.
He also spoke of the murder’s devastating impact on the couple’s two teenage daughters, saying: ‘He has deprived them of their mother and now their father as well. This may weigh heavily upon him but not as hard as it does on them.’
Mrs Gallear’s sister and brother, Adele and Andrew Ingham, who are now the girls’ guardians, said: ‘The actions of Stuart have ripped our family apart.
‘He feels he is the one who had been affected but has never taken into consideration the misery and upset his actions have brought to our family and the girls.
‘He will never know how much devastation he caused. Every birthday, Christmas and special event will never be the same.’
After the case, Detective Inspector Lewis Hughes, of Greater Manchester Police, said the family had suffered ‘unbearable heartbreak’.
The Gallears wed in 1998, but the court heard Gallear later started drinking heavily and neglecting his family.
In 2014, he attempted to kiss his wife’s sister, and in 2015 Mrs Gallear began the affair with Mr Prescott.
Six months before her death, Mrs Gallear confessed to her husband, a warehouse manager, about an affair, but denied it was with Mr Prescott and said it had ended.
However, on October 5 last year, Jack Croft, 21, the son of Mr Prescott’s partner Ann-Marie Croft, went to their home and told Gallear who his wife’s lover was and that the affair was ongoing. During the four- day trial at Manchester Crown Court last week, jurors heard Mrs Gallear, who worked for a property firm, told her husband she planned to take their daughters to set up home with Mr Prescott. She was killed in the couple’s kitchen on October 6 after her husband grabbed a kitchen knife from the cutlery drawer.
Gallear told police his memory of what happened was ‘blurred’, but said his wife protested ‘what are you doing? I still love you’ and he then ‘just snapped out of it’.
The judge accepted Gallear immediately regretted what he had done, called 999 and tried to save his wife’s life. She was pronounced dead in hospital. Simon Csoka QC, defending, said Gallear showed ‘almost instantaneous remorse’, and the stabbing had been ‘impulsive rather than calculated’.
Gallear, from Hindley, Greater Manchester, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, claiming he did not intend to kill his wife, but jurors convicted him of murder.
Mr Justice Openshaw said the affair happened against a backdrop of an ‘unhappy marriage’, adding: ‘ Mrs Gallear believed she would find greater happiness with another, as she was entitled to do. This does not justify, mitigate or excuse his conduct in stabbing her.’
The trial had taken a dramatic turn when Miss Croft, who had been standing by Mr Prescott, told the jury she had thrown him out after only learning from Press reports of the case that he had planned to set up home with Mrs Gallear.
‘Unbearable heartbreak’