Jilted lover ‘shot rival with stun gun then knifed her 40 times’
Orgy of violence came after 17 months of planning, court is told
A JEALOUS woman paralysed her love rival with a stun gun before stabbing and slashing her 40 times with ‘demonic savagery’, a court heard yesterday.
Sarah Williams, 35, allegedly spent 17 months planning ‘the perfect murder’ before killing mother-oftwo Sadie Hartley in a four-minute ‘orgy of violence’ on her doorstep.
The court heard Williams had ‘set her mind’ on rekindling her relationship with Mrs Hartley’s partner Ian Johnston, and the 60-year-old businesswoman had become an ‘obstacle’.
Prosecutor John McDermott said ski firm worker Williams recruited her close friend and co-accused Katrina Walsh, 57, for the ‘murderous mission’.
He told the court that horse riding instructor Walsh kept a ‘remarkable, compelling record’ of each twist and turn in her diary as they hatched their plan. He said this detailed how the pair travelled to Germany to buy a stun gun, used a tracking device to find their victim’s house and employed untraceable ‘burner’ mobile phones.
Mr McDermott said the pair also went on a test run that was ‘almost the stuff of spy novels’ a week before the murder, delivering a £3 bunch of flowers to Mrs Hartley at home.
Walsh’s diary revealed plans to disguise the murder as a terrorist attack, the court heard. She allegedly said they should ‘maybe take an Isis flag’ (the symbol of the Islamic State terror group) which would be left at the scene ‘to mislead the investigation’.
Walsh later told police she ‘largely thought’ she was taking part in a game of the Channel 4 reality show Hunted – in which contestants try to evade detection by a team of former police and intelligence officers.
The court heard the defendants waited until Mr Johnston, 57, had gone skiing in Switzerland before knocking on Mrs Hartley’s door in Helmshore, Lancashire, just after 8pm on January 14. Opening the case for the prosecution, Mr McDermott said: ‘What happened next is truly shocking. Sarah Williams stood on the doorstep.
‘As soon as the door was opened we suggest she lunged at Sadie Hartley with of all things a stun gun – the sort of thing you might use legitimately to prod cattle. She pressed it against her – Sadie Hartley’s – head and incapacitated her. Then with what can only be described as almost demonic savagery, she attacked her with a knife.
‘She stabbed and slashed at this unfortunate woman, blow after blow, causing appalling and fatal injuries.
‘She left her victim in a pool of blood in the hallway, closed the door, walked back to the car she had used on her murderous mission and set off back to her home in Cheshire. It was a premeditated, planned assassination.’
Wearing a navy trouser suit and striped shirt, Williams – who worked at ski company Crystal Holidays – listened intently to the prosecution’s opening case at Preston Crown Court.
Walsh, who arrived on crutches and wearing a blue patterned bandana to cover her alopecia, kept her eyes closed for the majority of the hearing. The pair, both from Chester, deny murder.
The court heard how Mr Johnston ended his relationship with Williams when she became ‘obsessive and difficult’. Although he continued to keep in contact with her via text message, and often skied at the indoor slope where she worked, he stayed with Mrs Hartley despite Williams’s ‘persistent interest’.
Williams ‘despised’ her love rival and allegedly recruited Walsh in August 2014 to help her achieve her ‘delusional’ dream of ‘life with her ideal man’.
The court heard that Walsh wrote in her diary: ‘She (Mrs Hartley) does seem to be a totally evil bitch.’
The prosecutor said: ‘Nothing could be further from the truth.
‘Sadie Hartley was a decent, hardworking and much-loved guiltless woman. But in the skewed minds of these defendants, she had become the enemy and she had to go.’
The court heard the defendants came up with a range of ideas for killing Mrs Hartley, including a ‘hit’ on a motorcycle and trying to recruit Walsh’s ex-husband Kevin Walsh, 58, as a ‘hitman’.
After settling on a plan, the pair allegedly used a tracking device attached to Mr Johnston’s car to find out where he and Mrs Hartley lived.
This led them to the couple’s £550,000 detached five-bedroom house in a leafy cul-de-sac, the court heard.
Mr McDermott said the defendants travelled to Darmstadt, Germany, by ferry in December 2015 to buy the stun gun as it is legal to do so there. Weeks before the murder, the jury heard the
‘Left her in a pool of blood in the hallway’
pair – ‘believing themselves to be clever’ – had also bought a blue Renault Clio for £430 in cash and used throwaway ‘burner’ phones.
While Walsh is said to have bought the murder weapon – a large kitchen knife – Williams allegedly set about buying size 10 shoes which were too big for her in order to ‘throw the police off the scent’. Mr McDermott said the pair also organised reconnaissance missions, including a ‘sinister’ test run a week before the murder.
The jury was told that Walsh knocked on Mrs Hartley’s door in a ‘bewildering and unheralded visit’ with a £3 bunch of chrysanthemums from Tesco, while Williams ‘skulked nearby’. Mr McDermott said: ‘[Walsh] knew the deceased’s name, she wore a cap, and having delivered the flowers to Sadie Hartley, she left as quickly as she had come ... Sarah Williams skulked nearby out of sight – probably in a bush – watching her prey.’
Mrs Hartley, the mother of two grown-up children from her marriage to Garry Hartley, worked at her own firm which organises medical conferences.
The day after receiving the flowers she texted a colleague saying that a woman had told her ‘these are for you’ before disappearing down the drive. She said: ‘No label or anything on them – bit creepy really. Not from Ian of course but no idea who would do something like that...Needless to say had a bad night sleep last night as a result!’
The jury was told that Walsh did not join in with the attack on Mrs Hartley, but cleared up and disposed of evidence. Despite believing they were carrying out a ‘perfect’ crime, police were able to trace the defendants’ movements via mobile phones, car number plate monitoring and CCTV.
The court heard Williams was seen arriving 40 yards from her victim’s home, going to the house and returning just four minutes and 40 seconds later. Mr McDermott said walking to the house, knocking on the door, using the stun gun and inflicting 40 knife strokes in such a short space of time showed this was a ‘no-hesitation, determined and swiftly executed murder’.
He added: ‘Sarah Williams was obsessed with Ian Johnston. They had a relationship in the past. Sarah Williams wanted that relationship back and set her mind to it. A more cold-blooded plan you cannot imagine.’
The trial continues.