An abusive wife who murdered her husband before using his bank card to buy cleaning products to remove his blood stains as he rotted in the back garden was jailed for life.
Maureen Rickards, 50, callously dumped 65-year-old Jeremy Rickards’ body in a holdall beneath grass cuttings at their home in Canterbury, Kent in June 2024.
Mr Justice Kerr jailed her for a minimum of 22 years after a two week trial which heard she frequently assaulted her husband in domestic arguments.
Justice Kerr said he could not understand what had motivated her savage actions, remarking: ‘I accept you loved him. I don’t know why you killed him. You have to live with the loss of him. You have shown no remorse.’
But he told Rickards, who refused to appear in person at Canterbury Crown Court, that she had ‘desecrated’ her husband’s body.
Justice Kerr said: ‘I am sure you intended his death and nothing less. After the killing, you desecrated your husband’s corpse.’
After repeatedly stabbing her husband of 27 years in the chest, Rickards used his bank card to buying cleaning products to remove his blood stains from their house.
Mr Rickards, who worked as a geologist, was not discovered until 11 July after he was reported missing, by his daughter who became suspicious of her mother.
After stabbing him in the chest five times, Rickards began impersonating her husband using his phone to send text messages to their daughter Chima, claiming he was working in Saudi Arabia.
By early July, with Mr Rickards still apparently abroad, his wife panicked when asked for his whereabouts again by their daughter and told her he had committed suicide.
Chima contacted the police who attended her parents’ address and initially arrested Rickards on suspicion of fraud but detected a strong odour in the house.
Officers left the house and began digging up the back garden and found Mr Rickards wrapped in bin bags in the holdall.
It emerged at trial, before dumping him in the garden, Rickards first stored her husband in a cupboard.
Pools of blood found inside the cupboard and on the floor beneath it were consistent with a body lying on it.
Analysis revealed Rickards had attempted to remove blood from the upper side of the carpet in the bedroom after she purchased cleaning products on June 20, using her husband’s bank card.
At her arrest Rickards pretended to be shocked asking, ‘What body?’ and incredulously repeating, ‘Murder? Murder?’ when told she was being held on suspicion of her husband’s murder.
During the trial it was revealed that Mr Rickards was the victim of domestic abuse at the hands of his wife in the lead-up to his murder.
A post mortem examination showed he was strangled weeks before his death and that he was also recovering from recent rib fractures.
Rickard’s housemates also spoke of seeing Mr Rickards looking as though he had been ‘ten rounds’ in a boxing ring and saying he was ‘scared’ of his wife who was ‘annoyed’ with him.
Shocking videos played to the court showed Rickards berating her bruised and frail husband, whilst others showed Mr Rickards drinking in a Wetherspoons pub in Canterbury with evident marks on his face.
James Fisher, a Senior Crown Prosecutor who helped bring the case against Rickards said she had subjected her husband to ‘unimaginable pain and suffering’.
He said: ‘As we built the case against Maureen Rickards, we were able to unpick her web of lies, using forensic evidence and her actions before and after the murder, to paint the picture of a callous abuser, who subjected Jeremy to unimaginable pain and suffering.
‘Maureen has never taken responsibility for her actions nor shown any remorse for murdering Jeremy.’