Cattle Prod Killers
It was the crime that shook the nation. A toxic love triangle saw Sarah Williams concoct a deadly plot to win back the man who’d stolen her heart…
First came the revenge letter every cheating bloke fears. Furious that ex-fireman Ian Johnston had ended their affair, Sarah Williams had written an anonymous letter to his girlfriend, Sadie Hartley in September 2014.
Businesswoman Sadie demanded to know who the mystery woman was.
Ian admitted it was Sarah Williams, who he’d met in 2013, at Manchester’s Chill Factore ski slope, where the pair worked. Sadie and Sarah spoke on the phone later.
But the romance wasn’t to be.
Sadie and Ian, 57 – a couple on-and-off since 2005 – moved into a new home together in Helmshore, Lancashire.
And Williams continued to secretly contact ski-instructor Ian.
Then, in 2015, when he went to Switzerland for New Year – where Sadie was planning to join him – he and Williams exchanged naked photos and explicit texts.
The self-confessed ‘she devil’ had also been seeing a married ‘sugar daddy’, David Hardwick, 57, for 17 years. David knew nothing about her affair with Ian, paying for up to 12 holidays a year, giving her £75,000 towards a house and paying her £320 a week.
But his generosity failed to cool her warped ardour for Ian. Warped because, as well as sex, she had murder in mind.
For 18 months the woman, dubbed a ‘bunny boiler’ by friends, had been planning with her biker pal, Katrina Walsh, 56, to kill Sadie.
Williams, 35, and alopecia victim Walsh devised a plot, described in court as ‘the stuff of spy novels.’
On 14 January 2016, Williams paralysed Sadie, 60, on her doorstep with a cattle prod stun gun, before stabbing her more than 40 times with a carving knife.
Found guilty of murder at Preston Crown Court, in September, both women were sentenced to life – Williams with a minimum of 30 years and Walsh with a minimum of 25 years.
Judge Mr Justice Turner, said: ‘Let no-one believe this was a crime of passion.
‘This was a crime of obsession, arrogance, barbarity and pure evil.’
For Ian Johnston, who was in Switzerland when Sadie was murdered, the whole experience was devastating.