Wife, her lover and his daughter jailed for plot to murder her dying husband
A CHEATING wife was jailed for life yesterday with her lover and his daughter for plotting to murder her terminally ill husband.
Their victim, Ray Weatherall, 53, survived poisoning, being shot in the face and a swimming pool heater explosion that left him with seconddegree burns.
His wife Hayley Weatherall, 32, also planned to kill him with sleeping tablets and insulin so she could start a new life with her lover, Glenn Pollard, 49.
Pollard even took Mr Weatherall on a fishing trip on a boat they owned together, intending to push him over the side, but couldn’t go through with it.
When he texted Mrs Weatherall to say he’d failed, she replied: ‘That’s a shame.’
The mother-of-three embarked on ‘a mission’ to hasten his death with Pollard and his ‘devoted’ daughter Heather, 20.
Even though Mr Weatherall had brain cancer and had been given just 18 months to live in 2016, his wife considered hime to be ‘in the way’ of the life she was planning with Pollard, his best friend of more than 20 years.
At Maidstone Crown Court, Judge Adele Williams jailed Mrs Weatherall for at least 15 years, Pollard for 17 years and his daughter, who now identifies herself as a man called Arthur, for 15 years.
She said: ‘This was cruelty of high degree. Cold, calculated and chilling cruelty. You conspired to murder a man because you believed he stood in your way.
‘You plotted and planned to kill him with determination and persistence. I believe that each of you will remain a serious danger to the public.
‘Such will be the revulsion and horror felt by right-thinking members of the public at this crime that only a sentence of imprisonment for life is justified.’ Judge Williams said Mrs Weatherall, a care home worker, was ‘impatient’ for her husband to die after she instigated the affair with Pollard at a family funeral on June 12 last year.
The court heard that she would have received almost £7,000 on the death of Mr Weatherall, her second husband.
The judge said ‘ruthless and arrogant’ Pollard was the leader in the conspiracy and recruited the other two.
Mrs Weatherall, of Ash, Kent, Pollard and his daughter, both of West Stourmouth, Kent, had denied conspiracy to murder between June 1 last year and March 31. But the court found that Mrs Weatherall and her lover planned a series of attempts on her husband’s life that were aborted or failed.
Miss Pollard, then 19, made internet searches for ‘techniques on silent killing’, ‘creative ways to kill someone’ and ‘16 steps to kill someone and not get caught’.
In June last year, Mr Weatherall was badly burned in a swimming pool heater explosion at his home. Police initially believed the incident was an accident, although it is now thought to have been a murder attempt.
The court heard there were three other ‘determined and sophisticated’ attempts to kill Mr Weatherall, who told the court that Pollard had been ‘more or less like a brother’ to him.
In the first, Miss Pollard went to shoot him in Rainham, Essex, on November 20 last year under instruction from her father, but was unable to.
Nine days later she took her father’s rifle, again on his orders, and shot Mr Weatherall at Sandwich marina, leaving a bullet lodged in his jaw.
The third attempt came in December when Miss Pollard researched insulin overdoses on the internet. Mrs Weatherall said
‘Cruelty of high degree’
‘Creative ways to kill someone’
Pollard gave her four sleeping tablets to crush into her diabetic husband’s food so she could inject him with a full pen of insulin while he slept, but she could not go through with it.
Their schemes began unravelling in January after police received a tip-off linking Miss Pollard’s car to the shooting.
officers found the bolt-action rifle used to shoot Mr Weatherall at Pollard’s home, and seized mobile phones revealing hundreds of messages between Pollard and his daughter about how they planned to kill his love rival.