Horse whisperer fatally stabbed her husband – then rang friend to look after her dogs BEFORE she dialled 999
HAVING plunged a knife between her husband’s shoulder blades, Christine Rawle didn’t waste any time in blaming her victim. ‘He would have eventually killed me,’ she told police as she was arrested for the fatal attack. ‘ I took his life because he was unbearable.’
Ian Rawle, she went on, had made her life a misery — calling her fat, refusing her money and physically assaulting her.
That the 72-year-old was a less than perfect partner, there can be no doubt. But then nor was Rawle. She was said to have put Viagra in her husband’s tea, itching powder in his underpants and wiped her backside with his ties. On another occasion she ran a hosepipe through the sunroof of her husband’s car and filled it up with water.
Indeed, the jury was told that throughout their 27-year marriage the Rawles carried on like The Twits — the fictional Roald Dahl couple who took great pleasure in doing terrible things to one another.
But what has also emerged is that Rawle’s own deeply unpleasant behaviour was not solely directed at her husband.
Relatives have told the Daily Mail of the 70-year-old’s ‘fiery’ temper and how her first marriage ended in a flurry of arguments and fights — her eldest son moving out of home aged 15 after she destroyed his television with a screwdriver.
The former girlfriend of another son claimed that Rawle had threatened to harm her unborn child when she became pregnant.
As for her husband, before she came on the scene and had an affair with him, he had been in an apparently happy, seven-year relationship with another woman, Margaret Melville.
So determined was Rawle to get her man that she launched a campaign of harassment against her love rival that would eventually drive Ms Melville out of her own home.
All of which indicated, said the prosecution, that while the Rawles’ marriage may have been far from a happy one, it was nothing like as one-sided as she had tried to paint it.
‘ This defendant was far from being a defenceless or timid woman . . . if anyone was the bully, we say it is this woman here,’ said prosecutor Sean Brunton KC. He pointed out that after the stabbing, it took Rawle 15 minutes to dial 999, during which time Rawle rang a friend to ask if she would look after her dogs.
Charged with murder, she would claim that she had found herself in a controlling and coercive relationship and was effectively acting in self-defence.
Although Rawle declined to give evidence during the trial, she told a psychiatrist that her husband had physically abused her, as well as forcing her to perform degrading sexual acts.
But, after a month-long trial, the jury at Exeter Crown Court took just three hours to find her guilty of murder.
Jailing Rawle for life and ordering her to serve a minimum of 17 years, Judge James Adkin told her she had launched a ‘ wholly unexpected’ attack on a ‘defenceless’ man, leaving him dying on the ground as she ignored his pleas for help.
‘Ian was not perfect,’ the judge said. ‘The evidence showed that he was obstinate, sometimes grumpy, he could shout, he was stuck in his ways and he was oldfashioned in terms of how he wanted a relationship with his wife. But he was in no way the serial domestic abuser you sought to portray him as. The main reason you killed your husband was that you have an ungovernable temper.’
While appearances can, clearly, be deceptive, outwardly the Rawles seemed to be living an idyllic life ahead of Ian Rawle’s murder in August 2022.
Home was an £ 800,000 detached rural property on the outskirts of the village of Knowle in north Devon that the couple owned outright.
Mr Rawle still worked. Having previously owned the village shop and garage in nearby Braunton, he had set up a groundworks landscaping business. According to those who knew him, despite being past retirement age he was ‘work, work, work’.
As well as their bungalow, there were barns and stables and an exercise area for the four horses that Christine Rawle kept.
A registered equestrian trainer, she was known locally as the ‘horse whisperer’, gaining a reputation for her gentle and instinctive way with the animals.
‘She lived for them — she was horse-mad,’ a friend said.
More recently she had also taken to helping humans as well, training as a hypnotherapist and a ‘trauma recovery guide’.
A YouTube video shows her discussing her therapy practice. It ends with the words: ‘I guess I am in the business of making people happy.’ A bold statement — and one which some who had crossed paths with her in the past strongly disagreed with.
The daughter of a construction site manager, Rawle grew up in Bristol. Aged 19, she married Stephen Bufton, her first husband. Over the next 15 years, three children would follow — two sons and a daughter — after which the couple split up and divorced. Mr Bufton would later die in a road accident.
‘I remember she loved sewing, she made hobby horses, which she sold in a shop, and was a good cook,’ Margaret Hellin, Mr Bufton’s older sister, told the Daily Mail. ‘But Stephen told me that she had a fiery temper. I never saw that side of her myself.’
Their oldest son, Matthew Bufton, did. He described the marriage as ‘volatile’ with trivial arguing and bickering. His mother, he told the court, was ‘authoritarian’ and while never violent, described arguments and fights where things were broken. ‘My dad was too easy-going,’ he said. ‘She kept the show on the road. Money was an issue for sure.’
Having separated, it was in the late 1980s that Rawle met her future husband at the garage he ran in Braunton.
She bought a car from him and they ‘took a fancy to each other’.
It would lead to Mr Rawle cheating on his then partner, Margaret Melville. And it was not the first time he had been unfaithful.
Born in Barnstaple, Mr Rawle had also married young — he was just 21 when he wed receptionist Jill Docherty in 1971. She painted a picture of a happy marriage with a ‘normal, kind’ man.
‘As a husband we got on really well,’ said Mrs Docherty, who has since remarried. ‘He was very generous. We shared everything.
‘We had a joint account and we shared even after we separated. So I had complete trust in him. He was not ever violent, not angry. He was a nice chap.’
Then working as a foreman at the local council, Mr Rawle’s main passion was motor-racing. He twice won the British Autocross Championship in his home-built Mini. But his marriage to Jill broke down after he began an affair with Ms Melville, a fellow council worker.
Again, Ms Melville described him as a decent and a ‘generous’ man with whom she enjoyed a seven-year relationship.
But all that changed when Rawle — Christine Bufton as she would have been then — rang her in the middle of the night to announce she was having an affair with her partner. ‘ I don’t recall saying anything, I just put the phone down,’ 78-year- old Ms Melville told the jury.
‘I spoke to Ian about it and he just denied it and said “she was nothing to him”. It was unrelenting after that. There were dozens of phone calls and visits to the property. I felt under siege.’
As well as her horse being ‘poisoned’ and a rock thrown at her car, Ms Melville would claim Rawle attacked her in a side street, grabbing and pushing her. She added: ‘Ian did nothing about it. He said she was an embarrassment but carried on the affair. That was the end of our romantic relationship.’
It also saw Ms Melville leave the house she owned and shared with Mr Rawle, and him buying the property from her. Rawle moved in and by 1995 the couple were married. From then on, the court heard, the couple ‘ seemed to almost thrive on bickering and winding each other up’.
They would slap each other, push each other, and call each other names. Rawle referred to her husband as ‘ Dick’ while he referred to her as ‘Fats’, or ‘ Fat Cow’. They targeted each other’s cars, slashing tyres and putting sugar in the petrol tanks.
On a number of occasions there were more serious incidents with Mr Rawle having his firearms taken away by police because of the unstable nature of their relationship.
Police quizzed him over assaults
They targeted each other’s cars – slashing tyres
Police quizzed them both over assault claims
on his wife in 1998 and 2000, when he hit her with a shovel. But they also spoke with Rawle herself: in 1996 after she stabbed her husband in the chest and arm, in 2000 when she hit him with a riding crop and in 2004 when she again attempted to use a knife on him.
Rebecca Lewis, who once dated Rawle’s youngest son Thomas, told the jury how on a visit to their house she saw her holding a knife to her husband’s throat.
‘He [mr Rawle] never retaliated,’ she said. ‘He was very calm. He just kept his cool.’
She also claimed that Rawle had turned on her when she was pregnant with Thomas’s child.
‘She threatened to harm the child if I had the child,’ she said.
‘She did not want Tom and me to have the child and intimidated me and my parents into having a termination.’
The bickering and arguing continued, with money becoming a key point of dispute. mr Rawle would tell his wife: ‘ you came with nothing and you will leave with nothing.’
A video covertly recorded by Rawle ahead of his death and shown to the jury gave a flavour of their relationship.
‘I have to work while you sit there getting fat,’ mr Rawle said to her. ‘What did you prepare for dinner? Nothing. What did you prepare for lunch? Nothing. What did you prepare yesterday? Nothing.’
Rawle responded, calling him a ‘useless idiot, ignorant’ adding there was ‘no way forward’.
By the summer of 2022, she had temporarily moved out of the house and into an old stable building that had been converted into an Airbnb rental.
Friends say she wanted a divorce but could not afford it — and her husband was not going to make it easy.
‘She just wanted out,’ said a friend. ‘Her main concern was always her animals and she did not want to move them.’
The couple were also arguing about selling some land to make improvements and to pay for a cataract eye operation for Rawle.
on the day of the killing, she phoned her daughter, Chiez
Bufton, and spoke about getting divorced. She also messaged her, calling her husband a ‘d**k’ and a ‘bastard’ and said: ‘I hope the c*** dies.’
Later that afternoon the pair were outside. Rawle had been cutting string with a knife to tie up some gates when, without warning, she stabbed her husband in the back as he pushed a wheelbarrow of horse manure.
mr Rawle begged her to help, following her for 100 yards and saying: ‘Take this f***ing knife out of my back.’
He collapsed on the ground but instead of calling the emergency services, Rawle made a number of phone calls, one to her daughter telling her: ‘oh my God, what have I done, I loved him.’
The blade penetrated 10cm into mr Rawle’s chest.
The pensioner’s lung collapsed and blood flowed into the lung cavity. He then suffered a cardiac arrest and died at the scene.
Rawle, meanwhile, rang a friend, asking her to look after the animals.
only later did she call an ambulance and remove the knife, which she kicked under a stable door.
Rawle, who was registered disabled and who suffered with mental as well as physical health problems, did not give evidence.
In police interviews she claimed she ‘couldn’t remember’ if she stabbed her husband or threw the knife.
‘I thought I’d cut his shirt, I thought I’d thrown the knife, I didn’t realise [I’d stabbed him],’ she said. ‘He was my world.’
But the prosecution questioned why Rawle had not just walked away from the argument or, if things were really so bad, gone to live with one of her friends or family.
‘To stab a knife into someone’s back without any warning is not an act of self- defence,’ said mr Brunton. ‘It is not self-defence in any conceivable circumstances to simply lose your temper and lash out because you are not getting your own way in a longstanding argument.’
The jury clearly agreed.
She removed the knife and kicked it away