London - After a seven-week trial here, a woman and her accomplice have been jailed for life after they were convicted of the murder of Sadie Hartley.
Metro.co.uk reports that Preston Crown Court heard that Sarah Williams, 35, shot businesswoman Sadie Hartley, 60, with a 500 000-volt stun gun. Williams, described as a ‘bunny boiler’, then stabbed the semi-paralysed woman with a kitchen knife in the face and neck with ‘demonic savagery’, before leaving her in a pool of blood in the hallway of her home in Lancashire.
Her accomplice, horse riding instructor Katrina Walsh, 56, was also found guilty.
The dead woman's husband, ex-fireman Ian Johnston, was away on a skiing trip when the murder took place.
Williams had a brief affair with Johnston before he dumped her and began a new life with Hartley, Metro reports.
The Daily Mail looks at the long history leading up to the trial:
THE MIDDLE-CLASS MANEATER AND THE LONER SHE MANIPULATED INTO MURDER
BY BARBARA DAVIES
When Sarah Williams first crossed paths with the police, it was as an apparently innocent victim, not a murderess. Aged just 13, she was spotted in a distressed state by a lorry driver close to the M6 in Cheshire. The blonde teenager told police she had been grabbed from her bike near the stables where she rode.
Her kidnapper had bundled her into the boot of his Vauxhall Cavalier and driven her away before holding her for six hours, physically assaulting her and then dumping her at the roadside.
She told detectives a baby had been strapped into a child seat in the back of the car. Williams’s bizarre abduction in January 1995 made headline news across Britain. ‘This was the most dreadful assault,’ declared Detective Inspector Neil Johnson of Cheshire CID. ‘It is in everyone’s interest that we find him.’
A reconstruction was filmed in and around Wirral Riding Centre where Williams frequently rode. A national appeal was aired on ITV’s Granada Tonight. But Williams’s attacker was never caught.
Back at the stables where she spent nearly all her free time, tongues wagged. Even as a teenager, Williams had a reputation for tall tales and exaggeration. Had she made the story up?
‘It didn’t really make sense,’ said a former friend of Williams who also rode at the stables.
A pathological liar
‘She told police she had screamed when he took her but during the reconstruction, everybody on the yard heard the scream. In the countryside everything carries.’
Another friend added: ‘Everyone at the stables thought she had made it up to impress a bloke at the yard that she was obsessed with. She fancied him and did it for attention.’
Nick Ward, the 52-year-old riding centre owner, agrees: ‘It seemed like a load of rubbish, to be honest. That’s what everyone thought at the time. A policeman said there was something not right about it. We weren’t experts but we thought she knew who it was that took her and then covered it up as obviously she was under age. And if you look at the pattern after, it starts to fall into place.’
Certainly, there can be no doubt now that Williams - a former call centre worker and ski instructor - is a pathological liar.
Almost exactly 21 years to the day in January on which she claimed to have been abducted, she ruthlessly murdered her love rival Sadie Hartley. And despite the irrefutable evidence against her, the 35-year-old has continued to lie about what happened.
Over the past few months, the Mail has examined Williams’s life, speaking to those who witnessed at close hand her disturbing descent from attention-seeking child into a ruthless, manipulative woman capable of murder.
Typically middle class
Even as a young teenager, she had a reputation for wearing skimpy clothes and flirting with older men. The man she was believed to have been trying to impress at the time of her abduction was in his thirties and had a partner.
Regardless of the truth about the abduction, a pattern of behaviour was beginning to form that would repeat itself until it culminated in murder. ‘Even at that age, she was chasing after older men,’ said a former friend. ‘She wouldn’t hang around with teenagers. She’d be with the adults.’
Williams’s childhood was typically middle class, and she enjoyed a private school education.
Her 63-year-old father Christopher, from whom she was estranged at the time of Mrs Hartley’s murder, is a retired electrician. He and her mother separated not long after Williams’s alleged abduction.
They sent their cherished only child to fee-paying Birkenhead High School for Girls. There, she complained she was bullied because of a lazy eye which surgery had failed to fix.
Those around her, she perceived, were both prettier and richer, the latter sparking a deep-seated desire for more a affluent lifestyle. But, say contemporaries, she excelled in sport. Outside school she was a keen rower and a passionate horse rider. As puberty arrived, she quickly found she could use her body in other ways.
The talk of the stables
Williams was 17 when she embarked on an affair with David Hardwick, a 57-year-old wealthy businessman. It lasted from 1998 to the time of Mrs Hartley’s murder. Hardwick, who is now 75, came to the Wirral Riding Centre for twice-weekly lessons with his wife Rowena, a spiritualist medium who turned a blind eye to her husband’s infidelity.
Not surprisingly given their uncomfortable age difference - a gap of forty years - their relationship was the talk of the stables.
‘She twigged that David had money and could buy her everything,’ says her former friend. ‘She had all the best equipment. David bought a brand new horsebox that she used. She started swanning around like she was something.’
During the trial at Preston Crown Court, Hardwick denied being Williams’s sugar daddy even though he funded up to 12 foreign holidays a year, gave her £75,000 to buy a house and transferred £320 into her bank account every week.
Observing their extraordinary relationship - and aware of the multiple affairs she was having behind her lover’s back - was the woman who would go on to be Williams’s partner in crime, 56-year-old Katrina Walsh.
A bit of a loner
Known at the stables as Kit, she was heavily tattooed and passionate about horses and Harley Davidson motorcycles. She and Williams became firm friends despite their near 20-year age gap.
According to Williams’s former friend: ‘We all thought that she crept around Sarah because she wanted to use the horse box. It was very much Kit trying to get in with Sarah. She was always tootling along behind her.’
Walsh is the daughter of Michael Hurn, an experimental weapons scientist at the MoD in London and his second wife Perry, a teacher. She was raised in New Malden, a middle-class suburb of Surrey and then Weymouth, Dorset, along with her elder half-sister Maureen, the daughter of her father’s first wife. Both Walsh’s parents are dead.
‘She was a bit of a loner,’ says her cousin Michael Woodford.
One of her friends added: ‘Awkward. Self-determined. Didn’t mingle and mix as much as the rest of us. I wouldn’t describe her as a weak person. She was very forthright, although I got the impression she didn’t like confrontation.’
When her mother was dying from cancer in a hospice, she maintained contact only by phone and did not even attend her funeral in 2006, telling a relative that she found it too upsetting.
As a child Walsh began suffering from the stress-related alopecia that has afflicted her ever since.
By the time of her arrest in January just a few dark tufts were left on her balding scalp. She told one friend she had breast cancer, another that her hair loss was due to a motorcycle accident.
A talented artist like her mother, Walsh studied art at college. As she got older, her subject matter became darker. She took to painting skulls and gothic imagery.
After meeting farmhand Kevin Walsh they married - with her attending the wedding in biker clothes. On her marriage certificate she described herself as a magazine illustrator.
Increasingly bizarre
In truth, Walsh had no career and rarely worked, picking up money now and then as a riding instructor, despite having no formal qualifications. One of her close friends said that the image presented in court, of a vulnerable, weak-willed woman was at odds with that of the confident, well-respected horse trainer. Despite being socially awkward, she used coarse language.
‘She had a very odd manner,’ said the friend. ‘If you didn’t know her, you would think she was rude. She didn’t seem to have a filter between her mouth and her brain.
‘I often wondered if she was bordering on Asperger’s or on the autistic spectrum. It was as if she didn’t have any social skills.’
When her husband Kevin left her for another woman her behaviour became increasingly bizarre. She told those at the stables that she had lost her husband. ‘We thought he was dead. We felt sorry for her,’ says the former friend of Williams who knew both women.
She started talking to herself, had ‘conversations’ with her horse, Lady and there were rumours she was involved in black magic. She kept scorpions. Ferrets ran wild at her untidy, chaotic home that stank of animal mess. Her habit of rescuing wild bats led to her being known as ‘Mrs Batty’.
Williams filled the gap in Walsh’s life and neighbours assumed they were lovers. ‘The only person she ever talked about was Sarah, so much so that some people thought they were in a gay relationship,’ says one friend.
Another recalls a barbecue at the stables where Walsh spent the entire evening staring at Williams and fluttering her eyelashes at her.
‘Sarah knew that and had Kit around her little finger. Kit lived through Sarah,’ she says. ‘She was obsessed with her.’
Thanks to Mr Hardwick’s money, Williams took Walsh on holidays abroad to Thailand and to ski resorts. ‘She gave Katrina a life that she hadn’t had before,’ says Walsh’s cousin Judith Woodford.
‘It was a glamorous life compared to what she had before and it happened when Kevin left her.
‘She does appear to have been very naive. We can’t understand how she could be involved in it and not understand where it was going.’
Williams enjoyed having an older woman at her beck and call, ready to drop everything whenever she demanded it. Walsh was living second-hand through her best friend, feeding off Williams’s sexual escapades and relationship dramas and writing about them in her diary. Having Williams’s trust made her feel important too. ‘Will show Sarah what a fine friend I am,’ she wrote in one telling diary entry.
'The sex is unbelievably fantastic'
If Walsh was obsessed with Williams then Williams was obsessed with men. That obsession led to an affair with married martial arts expert, Somapat Sitiwatjana. When he rejected her, she gave a frightening glimpse of the fury that would boil over later when her affair with Ian Johnston turned sour. Walsh also displayed her willingness to do anything for her friend.
At William’s instruction, she sabotaged Sitiwatjana’s car by squirting filler foam into the exhaust pipe.
Williams met former fireman Mr Johnston in 2013 and embarked on a year-long affair with him.
When he finally shunned her, she wrote a spiteful letter to his partner Mrs Hartley.
‘The sex is unbelievably fantastic, the best he’s ever had by a really, really long way,’ she wrote.
Over the next 17 months, Williams and Walsh discussed ways of killing Mrs Hartley.
‘We’re seriously talking of getting rid of her opponent,’ Walsh wrote in her diary in June 2015, seven months before the murder.
‘I agree is probably a good ploy. She does seem to be a totally evil bitch.’
In court, Walsh refused to take the stand. She portrayed herself as a weak, vulnerable woman, shuffling into the courtroom with the aid of a walking stick.
The truth, of course, is that Walsh knew exactly what Williams was planning to do. She found their plotting thrilling and helped bring it to fruition. After the killing, the cold-hearted pair shared a meal at Walsh’s home, lying on the bed together and watching a DVD of the film Mamma Mia! After their arrests, this twisted friendship crumbled in an instant.
Walsh led police to the farm near Chester where she had hidden the knife, stun gun and boots Williams wore to commit the murder, as well as the diary she had kept, detailing ‘endless murder plots’.
Williams, who was arrested first, just showed utter scorn. A police photograph shows her sneering at the camera, her face contorted by the arrogance she displayed even as the jury found her guilty.
Additional reporting: Liz Hull and Jim Norton.
Daily Mail