Depraved duo jailed for life
A“PSYCHO” and her accomplice are beginning life sentences for the gruesome stun gun murder of a mum-of-two.
Jealous Sarah Williams, 35, attacked Sadie Hartley, 60, with a 500,000-volt stun gun as her unsuspecting victim answered the door at her Helmshore home, Preston Crown Court heard.
Seconds later, with ‘demonic savagery’, she used a kitchen knife to stab her semi-paralysed victim in the face and neck, inflicting more than 50 injuries, before leaving her in a pool of blood in the hallway of the £500,000 house on Sunny Bank Road.
Williams and depraved accomplice Katrina ‘Kit’ Walsh, 56, spent 17 months plotting ‘the perfect murder’ to eliminate the successful businesswoman, who Williams considered to be her love rival for the attentions of Ian Johnston, Sadie’s partner with whom Williams had had a relationship.
The details of the plot were recorded in a series of astonishing diary entries by Walsh. Williams and Walsh were yesterday found guilty of murder following a seven-week trial in which both women, from Chester, had denied the killing and blamed each other.
Both were handed life sentences, with Williams to serve a minimum of 30 years and Walsh 25 years.
Sentencing, Honourable Mr Justice Turner described the murder as a ‘well rehearsed and savage butchery of an innocent woman’, a ‘crime of obsession, arrogance and barbarity, a crime of pure evil’.
He told Williams: “The murder method you adopted involved not only taking a knife to the scene but invading your victim’s home at night and slaughtering her like an animal by first incapacitating her with a massive electric shock to the head and then hacking and slashing her to death with almost unimaginable ferocity.”
He said Walsh was a willing partner who was just as ‘morally degenerate’, adding: “The evidence in this case as a whole and your diary entries, in particular, Walsh, make me sure that your motive in getting involved was the depraved satisfaction to be gained from helping to kill another human being.”
Williams sat in the dock with her head lowered and her eyes closed as the sentence was delivered.
Williams, described as a “bunny boiler” who was already in a relationship with a wealthy 75-year-old “sugar daddy” and having affairs with ski instructors, had a brief fling with Sadie’s partner ex-fireman Ian Johnston, 57.
The progress of their elaborate murder plot was recorded in astonishing entries in Walsh’s diaries, which police recovered from her farm.
They revealed earlier schemes to run Sadie over with a motorcycle, and to fool the police into thinking it was a terrorist attack by ISIS.
Williams placed a GPS tracker on Mr Johnston’s car to trace his address and, exactly a week before the killing, Walsh delivered flowers to Sadie’s door in a sinister dry run.
Williams then pretended to be at home ill before driving to Helmshore on January 14, where she slaughtered her love rival at around 8pm – wearing men’s boots in a bid to throw police off the trail.
Despite believing they had carried out the “perfect murder”, Williams was arrested on January 17, two days after Sadie’s body was discovered.
Detectives searched her home and found Sadie’s DNA in swabs from her bath, along with traces of the victim’s blood on spectacles found in Williams’ Volvo.
A pair of boots which “matched the marks left by the murderer” were then recovered after Walsh was arrested, as she led police to where she had stashed items including the murder weapons.
Williams had schemed for 17 months to kill her rival and win back Mr Johnston, who had begun a new life with Sadie – but explicit photos and sex texts resumed between the pair.
The court also heard that Williams had penned a poisonous letter to Sadie with lurid claims detailing the affair, and accusing her of trying to ‘trap’ him in the relationship.
The judge added: “Neither of you has shown the slightest remorse about what you did to Sadie Hartley or to the family and friends she left behind her; with you, Williams, resorting to arrogant insouciance and you, Walsh, putting on an ostentatious and devious show of feigned mental impairment to the police in a desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of what you had done.”