Murder most foul
Who killed the man in the blood-soaked M&S pyjamas?
© SKY
- Terry Payne
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When a sleepy Welsh village, whose name in English means graves, became the centre of a modern murder mystery, it sparked both anxiety and intrigue. A body had been found in macabre circumstances, wrapped in multiple layers of plastic, in the garden of a woman whose brazen exploits had alienated her from village folk.
Leigh Sabine, the woman in question, was in her 50s when she arrived in Beddau in 1997, and is remembered for flouncing around in tight denim shorts and hitting on any man who caught her eye. There was even talk of her having abandoned her five children in New Zealand, but with Sabine the locals found it impossible to separate fact from fantasy.
That she didn’t seem to be hewn from the same rock as those who inhabited the former pit village seemed obvious. But good people tend to be graciously forgiving at the end of life and so when Sabine died in 2015, aged 74, more than 50 locals gathered around her graveside and, as she’d instructed, sang the Gracie Fields wartime ditty Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye as her coffin was lowered.
My husband and brother were quite frightened of her
“Yes, she was very eccentric,” says pastor Mary West, who knew her as well as anyone. She conducted Sabine’s funeral service and appears in a three-part Sky documentary that reveals how the murderer was identified. “She just wanted to be noticed. She was always in outfits that were designed to attract attention. Any man who came into her orbit was immediately subject to her advances. My husband and my brother were really quite frightened of her. In fact, when she was in the hospice two days before she died, the oncologist bent over her and she tried to kiss him.”
Leigh Sabine was at the centre of the investigation. Shutterstock
Losing its eccentric talking point following her death, the village quickly regained a peaceful normality, though first there was the job of sorting through her personal effects. Her husband had, apparently, left her soon after arriving in the village and with no other known family members the few mementos Sabine had in her small council flat were passed out to those who knew her. However, there was one bulky item in the garden that aroused curiosity.
Sabine, a former nurse, had previously said it was a medical skeleton she’d bought in her student days. But after the 41 layers of plastic in which the skeleton had been tightly and meticulously wrapped were cut through, police launched a murder investigation. Inside the packaging was the body of a man. The condition of the body suggested he had died only weeks earlier. The blood-drenched, blue-striped Marks & Spencer pyjamas he was wearing were still totally intact.
Mary West, a Beddau resident. © SKY
Although Sabine became, to use the jargon, a person of interest – albeit a dead one – the maths didn’t add up. At the estimated time of death she herself was weak and dying of brain cancer. Whoever the victim was, Sabine couldn’t possibly have killed him in the specified time frame. And so, as they often do in small communities, tongues started wagging. Back to Mary West. “It was a very unsettling time. There were rumours about who it could be and how it could have happened, and a general feeling of unease.”
Police, desperate for leads, started interviewing the villagers, some as potential suspects. West, who had been a schoolteacher in the village for 30 years, was among them. “My name was brought up, which I thought was very strange. All these years later it’s something I still can’t get my head around. The police treated me very fairly, but other local people were interviewed at work and called at awkward times. A lot of people went through a very difficult time afterwards.”
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Today West, who still takes services at her local church of St Michael’s, says that people who live in the village are generally welcoming of the TV exhumation of a murder that shattered the calm of life in Beddau. “As much as people are getting on with their lives, it was always felt that more could be revealed.”
Authors
Terry Payne
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