The Body in the Garden

John Sabine was 67 and living in Beddau, a village in Rhondda Cynon Taf in south Wales, with his wife, Leigh Ann. Decades earlier, in 1969, the couple had left their five children, aged two to eleven, at a nursery in Auckland, New Zealand, and never returned for them. The children grew up in foster care. John was last seen alive in 1997.

Leigh Ann told friends he had walked out on her. In fact she had killed him with a stone ornamental frog and wrapped his body in more than forty layers of plastic bags and roofing felt, keeping it first in her flat and later in a garden store, while she went on drawing his pension. She joked to neighbors that the bundle was a medical skeleton left over from her nursing days, and asked them to use it to play a prank after she died.

Leigh Ann Sabine died of brain cancer on October 30, 2015, aged 74. In November, two neighbors set out to play her prank, cut through the wrapping and found human remains, later identified by DNA as John. Police matched the frog ornament, which carried his blood and her fingerprints, to injuries on his skull. With the only suspect already dead, there was no prosecution. On May 19, 2016, at Aberdare, coroner Andrew Barkley concluded that John Sabine had been unlawfully killed.