When a mummified body was found in a Welsh village, the killer turned out to be the most unlikely suspect. Her unmasking left a sleepy community in shock
Nothing much happens in Beddau, a former mining village in south Wales.
Beddau (pronounced 'beh-tha') means 'Graves' in Welsh, and the small community here has a reputation for being uneventful, peaceful and safe – as quiet, some say, as the grave. 'That's why we moved here,' says Alison Wiltshire, 64, who has lived in the area with her husband Roddy, 65, for 36 years.
'We were originally up in the Valleys and we came to Beddau when we had young children. It's a nice area to live, lots of families and a really welcoming community.'
But one day back in November 2015, that changed – and the name of the village the Wiltshire family call home took on a sinister new meaning.
Two local women found a dead body, wrapped in plastic in a communal garden on a housing estate in the centre of Beddau and police launched a murder investigation.
Leigh Ann Sabine died from terminal brain cancer just 25 days before the body of her husband John was found wrapped in plastic in a communal garden on a housing estate in Beddau
One of the women, Michelle James, was arrested and the other, Rhian Lee, was taken in for questioning. A cordon was set up and police began rigorous searches and forensic tests, conducting interviews with everyone in the area.
The body was a white male, middle-aged and around 5ft 6in tall, dressed in blue striped Marks & Spencer pyjamas and with a gold signet ring on one finger.
He had been killed, it was soon ascertained, by blunt-force trauma to the head, and his body wrapped 41 times, in a combination of carrier bags, plastic sheeting and carpet.
A pathologist estimated the victim, whose skin, hair and organs were still intact, had been dead for weeks or months at most.
But who was he? Who had murdered him? And why?
What ensued, as documented in a new, three-part series, The Body Next Door, on Sky Documentaries, was a deeply unsettling time for the residents of Beddau, as suspicion and rumour gripped the village and dominated daily life.
Police went door-to-door. Neighbours turned on one another. People began checking their locks, holding their children's hands a little tighter, afraid a murderer might be on the prowl.
'It was winter – the nights were dark and it was all very spooky,' Roddy recalls. 'We were all in total shock. Things like that don't happen around here.'
Alison says it was 'the talk of the village for weeks'.
Police, awaiting forensic examination of the body, were at a loss for clues, which only fuelled wagging tongues in the community.
Michelle James was released after four days, with detectives putting her inconsistent answers down to shock, rather than guilt.
However, that wasn't the end of her plight, with her name now tainted among people she'd previously called friends. 'She was badly affected by it,' Rhian Lee, the friend who found the body with Michelle, told the Mail this week.
'It was terrible – she'd go to the shops and people would shout 'Murderer' at her. It was so unfair.'
Rhian, 48, still lives in Beddau, across the road from the Trem-Y-Cwm flats where the body was found on November 24, 2015. She, too, was questioned by police, and had seven months of counselling to come to terms with it all.
It would be three long weeks before Rhian, the Wiltshires and other worried residents of Beddau finally got some answers.
But the results of forensic tests were more jaw-dropping than anyone could have imagined.
Analysis of the materials wrapping the body (including a Tesco bag dated '1992') and fluids from the victim revealed he'd been dead a lot longer than experts had predicted: almost two decades, in fact.
John was found to be killed by blunt-force trauma to the head, and his body wrapped 41 times in a combination of carrier bags, plastic sheeting and carpet
The flats in Beddau where Leigh was living and where John's remains were discovered in the back garden
Further examinations uncovered his identity: John Sabine, a 67-year-old resident of the flats, whose wife, Leigh, 74, an eccentric figure who claimed to be a cabaret singer from New Zealand, had died just 25 days before the body was found, of terminal brain cancer.
Leigh and John had signed the lease on their flat together in February 1997, and John was recorded visiting a doctor in Beddau in April that year – but, after that, he was never seen again.
Leigh told friends he had been violent and abusive, claiming he once raped her and used to lock her in their flat.
A breast cancer survivor, she said he had left her because of her double mastectomy – and explained his disappearance by saying he'd moved to Newcastle in the late 1990s.
'We would sit and chat, and I said, 'What happened to John?',' recalls Mary West, 68, a teacher at the local comprehensive school and street pastor, who befriended Leigh in 2014 when her mother was living in the same block.
'She'd say, 'Oh, he left me. He left me for another woman, because he's Italian and that's what they do.'
DNA evidence, dental records and a match on a hip replacement confirmed that John was, indeed, the body in the bag. But he wasn't Italian, he was an accountant born in London. Nor had he left Leigh.
The multiple layers of wrapping, which went 20cm deep, had prevented decomposition, effectively mummifying the body for 18 years.
Suspicion immediately fell on Leigh: a blonde hair found within the packaging linked her irrefutably with the crime, and it was revealed that she'd been claiming John's pension for herself. The police had their murderer.
Leigh Ann Sabine (she also went by 'Lee' and 'Ann') was the most flamboyant figure people in this sleepy Welsh village had ever encountered.
Neighbours remember a larger-than-life, outspoken woman who called everyone 'Darling' and was rarely seen without a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She always wore red lipstick and nail varnish, dyed her permed hair peroxide blonde and was known for her 'look-at-me outfits'.
'When she first turned up, a lady in her 60s, she was wearing denim shorts with fishnet tights,' remembers Mary West. 'I asked her about this once and she said, 'Well, I want to be noticed, darling,'.'
No-one could quite work out Leigh's origins: she claimed to be from New Zealand, where she and John had lived before moving to the UK – first to Reading in 1986, then to Beddau.
The stone frog garden ornament that Leigh used to kill her husband John. It was found among her possessions and matched the injuries on John's skull
Neighbours remember Leigh as a larger-than-life, outspoken woman who called everyone 'Darling' and was rarely seen without a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other
'She had a very strange accent, in one sentence trying to talk quite posh, and then not,' says Alison Wiltshire.
Later investigation would reveal she was, in fact, Welsh, born Ann Evans, to a coal mining family in the Rhonda Valley, just 20 minutes up the road from Beddau.
Her career path, too, was something of a mystery.
Leigh told friends and neighbours outlandish stories: she'd been a drugs counsellor, a dog breeder, a dancer, a model and a famous cabaret singer, though Google searches yielded not a single mention of her name.
Hanging in the spare bedroom of her cluttered, chintzy flat was a black-and-white portrait of herself, dolled up to the nines, supposedly in her heyday.
'She was very eccentric, and even though I wasn't really sure if all her stories were true, it was always fun listening to her,' says Sian Baker, 51, who runs a hair salon in Beddau and started doing Leigh's hair in 2005.
'She told us she would be famous but for all the wrong reasons. I never understood that at the time.'
In fact, Leigh had once made headlines, but not in the way she liked to suggest. She and John had five children in New Zealand, whom they'd cruelly abandoned in 1969, leaving them – then aged between two and 11 – at a nursery in Auckland without explanation.
They moved to Sydney, purportedly to pursue her singing dream, but returned to New Zealand in 1972, where – astonishingly – they changed their surname and failed to contact their children, who were now in state care.
Speaking to the Auckland Star in 1984, when they attempted an abortive reunion with their children, Leigh – branded a 'runaway mum' – claimed she had done it all 'for love' to build them a better life.
Leigh and John forged a relationship with their eldest son, Marty, with whom they moved to the UK, but later lost touch with, while the younger four stayed in New Zealand and heard nothing of their parents until their mother's death, when the twisted saga started to unravel.
Meanwhile, in Wales, police were faced with a troubling question: in the last 12 months of Leigh's life she'd been increasingly frail, meaning she wouldn't have been able to move the body of her long-dead husband.
So how had it got into the garden at Trem-Y-Cwm flats?
Suspicion bubbled up once again. There was Lynne Williams, a carer who had looked after Leigh in her final months. Along with Rhian and Michelle, she'd helped clear the old woman's flat and distributed her possessions after her death.
Michelle James sits at the spot where John's remains were found. Michelle had helped clear Leigh's flat and distributed her possessions after her death
Rhian, 48, still lives in Beddau, across the road from the Trem-Y-Cwm flats where the body was found on November 24, 2015
Mary, too, was questioned by police, as Leigh had dubbed her the unofficial 'executor' of her will. Even Alison and Roddy had a talk with detectives, as they were among the few Beddau locals to have met John Sabine, having visited the couple's flat for a cup of tea when they first moved in.
Police soon learned, from piecing together fragments of Leigh's outrageous and embellished tales, that she had long-claimed to own a 'medical skeleton' from her days as a nurse.
Leigh had briefly trained as a nurse at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, which is where, as a 17-year-old in 1957, she met John, then 28, who was being treated for injuries he'd suffered in the Korean War.
Everyone Leigh met seemed to know about her macabre possession,
Although it's unclear where Leigh stored her husband's body, it's reported to have been kept under her divan bed, with its flowery duvet and heart-shaped pillow – the same bed where police believe she bludgeoned John to death, using a stone frog she kept as a doorstop.
Alison and Roddy remember a 'terrible smell in the air' when they visited the block.
It's thought Leigh kept re-wrapping the body as the years passed, in a bid to conceal it and stop the rotten stench.
A carpet that was found wrapped around it can be seen in situ in the flat in a picture taken by photographer Juliet Eden, who interviewed Leigh at home in 2014, showing she was still adding to the wrapping even then.
Rhian believes Leigh paid a couple of local men to move it, possibly inside a wheelie bin, down to the communal garden in the years before her death.
Leigh had a new – and perhaps peculiar – interest in the garden in later life, even appearing in a local magazine in 2012 where she was credited with breathing new life into the shared space.
Once a year, she'd host a BBQ there for residents in the surrounding flats.
'Michelle must have spotted the bag when she was putting her washing on the line,' Rhian says. 'It was on the gravelly bit of the patio, with a long potting table over the top.
'It was hidden, but you could see it – it was just that nobody tried to look at it until that day.'
On November 24, 2015, Rhian was at Michelle's house – directly below Leigh's old flat, No 57 – having a coffee, when the pair decided to play a prank on Keith, another upstairs neighbour.
On the spur-of-the-moment, Michelle remembered her crazy old friend's medical skeleton.
She and Rhian decided to take two kitchen knives, cut open the bag in the garden and bring the skeleton into her living room, where they were going to prop it on the sofa, call Keith over and joke that it was Michelle's new boyfriend.
But when they started sawing through the layers of plastic, putrid sludge began leaking out, and they realised they'd found something else entirely.
We will never know quite why or how Leigh came to murder John, though – ever brazen – she appears to have made an early confession to a friend.
Valerie Chalkley, who knew the couple when they lived in Reading, contacted the police about a phone call she received from Leigh back in 1997.
In the call, Valerie asked Leigh if she was still with John, joking that they might have killed each other by now, so turbulent was their marriage.
Leigh replied: 'I have killed him. I hit him over the head with a stone frog because he was getting on my nerves.'
Valerie brushed it off as a poor-taste joke. Nearly two decades later, distinctive features on the frog (found among Leigh's possessions) were matched to the injuries on John's skull.
The gruesome tale, the stuff of Hollywood horror, is the talk of Beddau once again this week and neighbours still have stories to tell about 'Mad Leigh'.
The communal garden beneath her old flat is unchanged: there are washing lines, children's bikes propped against a wall and a pink laundry bucket. A deflated rugby ball lies on the gravel where John's body was found.
One resident, a 36-year-old who got to know Leigh as a teenager, says: 'I never thought of her as a murderer, but what does a murderer look like?
Additional reporting: Tom Bedford
