Jealous man ‘schemed to lure wife to her death’

A JEALOUS husband who couldn’t accept his marriage was over stabbed his younger wife through the heart and then sent her a taunting text message as she lay dying, a court heard.

Lee Anstice, 50, is also said to have sent a voice mail message to his wife’s new lover telling him: “Just want you to know having split her open in front of everyone on the driveway, you had better call your solicitor, you f***.”

By last summer their marriage was on the rocks and Anstice, a civil servant who had served in the RAF, had moved out of the marital home in Dunstable and gone to live with his parents in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

Last August the prosecution allege he hatched a plan to lure Tracy, 37, to her death by telling her he was going to her parents’ house to pick up their eight-year-old daughter, then sitting outside the house in his car to wait for her.

Luton Crown Court heard that as Tracy arrived, Anstice attacked her on the driveway with a knife he had bought earlier that day in a supermarket.

The civil servant pleads not guilty to murdering his wife on August 26 last year.