Killer Couples (9 page)

But while the practical arguments for marriage had never been strong, it remained a powerful emotional statement – a symbol of commitment to one another and to a joint future. Now Colin was making that commitment to someone else.

Up until this point, Ann had been able to convince herself that Colin would soon realise he’d made a mistake. She told herself that she was still the alpha female in his life, she was the one who’d been with him for more than two decades, who’d given him children. His new love would never be able to compete with that.

Now Judith Crowshaw had something Ann had never achieved: a ring on her finger, and the legal right to be called Mrs Love. Ann had been bested by a woman she considered her inferior in every respect. It was simply intolerable.

Put yourself in Ann Hunter’s designer shoes. For years she has carried around an image of herself as a super-achiever, someone who works hard to earn the successful lifestyle she enjoys, a person whose family gives her the foundations from which to soar skywards. For years she has called herself Ann Hunter-Love, convincing herself that the legal ceremony is only a formality, that she and Colin are married in every other sense of the word. And now that image is destroyed. Another woman walks around calling herself Mrs Love, only she has the certificate to prove it; another woman has taken up residence in her house, sleeping beside her man. Another woman is enjoying the fruits of her hard labour, feathering her own nest from the riches she has worked so hard to provide – a woman who is, to her uncomprehending mind, older, less attractive, less dynamic, less worthy.

Over the next few months, the natural jealousy she felt on discovering she’d been replaced in her partner’s affections didn’t lighten, but instead solidified into a bitterness that
festered, like a tumour, inside her. Even when she started seeing Anton Lee – a great match on paper – she couldn’t rid herself of the loathing that stuck like a lump in her throat. At work she was the same hard-headed businesswoman she’d always been, but at night when she was on her own, or when she was driving down the motorway to London on a Friday evening, a mist of rage and frustration and – that most unfamiliar emotion to Ann – envy, would descend, colouring everything she saw, everything she thought with a fine red tint. In bed, she’d like awake as hatred flowed like acid through her veins.

She began bombarding her former lover with abusive emails, pouring out her vitriol so it spewed like poison from Colin’s inbox. He dreaded opening the messages.

‘You carry the corruption and stench of the whore whenever you come down to see the children,’ read one.

Judith was always portrayed as moneygrabbing, a gold-digger who exchanged sex for material gain. ‘Her underhand way to get a meal ticket, by lying on her back and whispering sweet words,’ spat another message, in which Judith was referred to as ‘the old bitch whore (OBW)’.

Colin Love had to get used to reading about his new wife being a ‘carrion crow’, or ‘that two-legged dog of yours’. ‘The gutter is too good for her,’ wrote his former lover. ‘She would destroy it.’

Colin hated reading the emails, but he was also well aware of the old adage: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. He knew he’d hurt Ann deeply, and that’s why he made allowances for her
bitterness, trying to allow the insults to wash over him. She’d calm down once she got used to things, he’d tell himself.

But, far from resigning herself to the new status quo, Ann Hunter was becoming more and more obsessed with the wrong that had been done to her. Soon after the horror of Colin’s wedding to Judy, came a further bombshell when she discovered that if he left his estate to his new wife in his Will, she and her children would get nothing. The gorgeous, quirky old mansion where they’d all enjoyed long weekends as a family would be forever closed off to them, all the money Ann had poured into it lost. That bitch would get the lot!

That was when Ann and Anton had the conversation that they would both so greatly regret. Accidents could, and did happen, they agreed. And if they didn’t, they could be made to happen.

‘How would you go about it?’ Ann had been trying not to ask. She’d been doing her best to put that July late-night conversation out of her head. And yet, even here on holiday in Morocco, it still kept creeping back into her mind for it seemed like a clean end to such a messy situation. She couldn’t force Colin to love her again, but equally she didn’t seem able to let go of him and move on with her life. The only way she could imagine breathing freely again was if something happened so that she could be sure Colin and his hateful new wife weren’t together any more, living in her house, enjoying the fruits of her labour.

She wanted back the money she’d made from her investment in the Bedfordshire house, but more than that, she wanted revenge.

Anton’s heart sank as Ann voiced her question. He too had been
trying to get the whole conversation out of his head, to put it down to too much alcohol, or too little sleep. Now he had a double realisation: first, Ann was never going to relax until she’d got Colin and Judy out of her life for good, and second, that helping her do just that was to be his way of proving how much he loved her.

Still not quite believing what he was doing, Anton Lee set about making some enquiries. Part of him just wanted to see Ann happy, part believed hatching a plan like this would bring them closer together, and then again, he just assumed that when it came to it, they wouldn’t actually go through with it. He’d do his part, but she’d change her mind at the end. They were the elite, people like him and Ann Hunter. One thing they definitely weren’t were people who murdered.

‘Er, Bill, it’s Anton here,’ Anton Lee held the receiver slightly away from his mouth, trying to hide the anxiety in his voice as he spoke to his friend William Niven. ‘How do you fancy meeting up some time?’

William Niven’s stint in the Army had introduced him to all sorts of people – the type you don’t normally come across in everyday civilian life. People who knew how to use weapons, people who weren’t afraid of physical violence, and people who could be persuaded to do anything – for a price.

While Ann enjoyed a holiday in Antigua with her children, Anton went for a pre-arranged meeting with his old friend. Even as the two men were shaking hands, he had doubts whether he could actually go through with it. Until now, this had almost been a game between himself and Ann, a secret they
both shared. Was he really about to involve someone else, to make it all suddenly, horribly real?

‘Erm, I was wondering…’ Anton’s own voice sounded suddenly strange to him, as if it was someone else’s.

‘You must come across all sorts of people. Do you know any … erm … hitmen?’

It was like something out of a low-budget TV cop show, not the kind of thing people actually said in real life. Perhaps that helped Anton distance himself from the full impact of what he was saying.

‘It would need to be a professional job, something like a car crash,’ he added. ‘For a middle aged-couple.’

Surely anything that sounded so preposterous couldn’t be taken seriously, could it? But his sweating palms and the sick feeling in his stomach told him this was far from an elaborate joke.

On his way home that night, William Niven was shaken. He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. Anton simply wasn’t the kind of man to wish harm on anyone, let alone a middle-aged couple whose only crime was to fall in love. Again and again he replayed their conversation, trying to work out if he could have got it wrong. Might there have been a phrase he’d misconstrued? Could they have been talking at cross-purposes?

But then he’d remember Anton’s anxious, clammy face and the way he’d been unable to meet his eyes, and he knew for sure that he hadn’t misinterpreted anything. If there was one thing his spell in the military had taught him it was that a person under pressure can act in the most unexpected of ways.

Of course, that didn’t help him in deciding what to do. Anton Lee was talking about committing the most terrible crime. If he was really serious, two people’s lives would be over. But then again, he was a friend, and there was a certain code of honour among friends, wasn’t there? In the end, he had no choice. With a heavy heart, he picked up the phone and dialled the number…

‘Tell me again, I want to be sure I’ve got it straight,’ he said.

In the hotel bed, Ann Hunter propped herself up on one elbow. The couple were enjoying a romantic night in a North London hotel to celebrate the two-year ‘anti-versary’ of the date Colin Love had first told Ann he was leaving her.

To besotted Anton Lee, she’d rarely looked so beautiful, her black hair swinging around her face, her brown eyes soft and huge without their customary glasses.

Once again, Anton went through the initial meeting with William Niven and how his old friend had subsequently called him to set up another meeting, with a man he knew only as ‘Darren’. He was to meet Darren in a church car park to discuss what Ann wanted him to do.

‘It’ll cost £10,000,’ Anton told her, the first time in his career in finance that he’d been faced with calculating the cost of a human life. ‘But he’ll do it – he’ll kill them.’

By the time of the meeting, however, Ann had changed her mind. She no longer wanted Colin killed; if truth be told, she still loved her former partner and after all, he was the father of her children. Buried deep inside her was a kernel of hope that
he would still, at this late stage, have a change of heart and rediscover his feelings for her. If only that overweight old whore was out of the way, he’d break free of whatever vile spell she’d cast over him and he’d come back to her! Not that she voiced these secret hopes to her current lover.

‘It’s just the woman she has a problem with now,’ Anton explained to Darren when they met in August 2005. ‘She doesn’t want him killed because she doesn’t want on her conscience the fact that she’s got to look her kids in the eye knowing she’s killed their father. And there’s no point in just killing him because if you kill him everything goes to her.’

‘So it’s Judy who is to die.’

Once again, the whole situation was so improbable, so reminiscent of a bad TV transcript that he found it almost impossible to believe he was really sitting there, in this car park, with this total stranger. He was a professional man. All his life he’d done everything by the book – people like him just didn’t arrange for other people to be murdered.

Darren, on the other hand, seemed to be taking it all in his stride.

‘I’ll need a description,’ he said, gruffly.

Anton faltered slightly, as if realising that by describing Judith Love he was paradoxically bringing her to life, only to sign her death warrant.

‘She’s about 55,’ he said quietly. ‘14 stone, with greying looks, like Dame Judi Dench.’

He fought hard to get the picture of her out of his mind,
knowing the only way he could go through with this was to objectify the intended victim, making her an obstacle that needed to be removed. Once she became a person, he’d be done for.

While he may have been battling his own doubts, when it came to what Ann wanted done, Anton Lee had no misgivings: ‘She wants to kill Judith – she doesn’t want Colin killed. Just take Judith out!’

As the summer of 2005 turned into autumn, sending cool breezes wafting through houses where schoolchildren in shiny shoes prepared for the winter term to start, Ann and Anton talked about little other than the ‘plan’.

At one of the fancy French restaurants they loved to frequent, they looked the picture of a successful professional couple – immaculately groomed, cultivated, talking animatedly about an art exhibition they wanted to see or a polo match they’d attended. Once in the car driving home, however, their fellow diners would have been shocked at the turn their conversation took.

‘I just want them both gone, out of my life!’ Ann would complain, ignoring the part of her that still dreamed of reconciliation with her former partner.

Anton Lee, trained as a financial advisor to think of all the angles, tried to find another way of arriving at the outcome his lover so desperately craved.

‘Is there any way you might be able to get them to move
away?’ he asked. ‘That way they’d sell the house and release the capital you’ve invested.’

If Judith died, Colin might move away, Ann conceded. He’d talked before about teaching abroad. Or, if one of them became infirm, they’d have to move out because the Bedfordshire house, hundreds of years old, was certainly not built for the disabled. That’s when a second idea began to form…

By the time Ann Hunter had her first meeting with Darren in September 2005, in the gentile surroundings of Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, she’d had a change of heart about killing Judith.

It was not that she had any moral qualms she hastened to assure Darren, not wanting to appear a soft touch. After years spent honing her professional image as a tough negotiator, she knew better than to allow any hint of weakness to show through. No, her new idea was to have Judith Love beaten up so badly that she was left maimed or blinded. That would force the sale of the house as it would no longer be suitable for her, plus it would carry such ghastly memories.

‘If she was damaged in such a way that it was a horrible experience, and it happened in the home, she would want to move,’ Ann reasoned, as if putting forward a preferred proposal at a business meeting.

‘She wouldn’t necessarily have the mental aptitude to live in that home with the fear of it all happening again, particularly if he is away one or two nights a week.’

Warming to her theme, Ann expounded on her theory that a
traumatic event would force the Loves to sell up – and pay up: ‘So she would put pressure on him to leave because mentally she just couldn’t stand being in that home, having been duffed up so badly.’

The more she thought about this plan, the more convinced she became that it was the best option. She’d get the satisfaction of getting back the money that was rightfully hers and of knowing that the OBW was no longer living in the house that had been their family home. Plus, once she was in a wheelchair, or unable to see, Colin would doubtless grow tired of her. He wanted to be a lover, she reasoned, not a carer. To her way of thinking, it was a win-win situation.