Ann Sabin named as main suspect in her husband’s murder

HER friends used to call her “mad Leigh”. Her neighbours thought she was “odd”. But no one imagined this woman was a killer.

Leigh Ann Sabine’s secrets have been revealed — including that she could be have murdered her husband. Picture: WALES NEWS SERVICE

SHE was known as “mad Leigh” to her friends, while neighbours thought she could be eccentric and a little odd. But no one ever imagined she was a killer.

Leigh Ann Sabine’s dark secrets didn’t start to unravel until after she died of cancer in October, aged 74.

It was three weeks after her death her neighbours made a horrific discovery in the small garden of her South Wales home — a secret that had been hidden there for 18 years.

In the garden of the block of flats in Beddau they found the skeletal remains of Mrs Sabine’s husband John, lying above ground wrapped in plastic.

DNA tests confirmed his identity and that his death was consistent with assault. Detectives from South Wales named Mrs Sabine as their primary murder suspect.

Mr Sabine was last seen in 1997, the same year the couple moved to Beddau. No missing persons report was ever filed and no one saw him after this time. It was as if he just vanished off the face of the earth, BBC Wales reported.

A neighbour, Violet Scott, 75, told the Daily Mail Leigh was a “very talkative and outgoing woman” who could sometimes be blunt.

“ ... but it is hard to comprehend what has happened,” Ms Scott said.

She was struggling with the idea Mrs Sabine could have been a killer.

Another local said she was known as “mad Leigh” because of her “funny ways”.

“She had a heart of gold, though. She is the last person you would expect to be accused of something like this.”

It is only now the couple is gone that their colourful past has been revealed — one that stretches Down Under to Australia and New Zealand and involves abandoned children and different identities.

The couple moved with their young children from Wales to Australia and then to New Zealand in the 1960s. It was across the Tasman where they become infamous for leaving their young children — two young sons and three daughters — alone when they fled back to Australia. The children were aged between two and 11 and were left at an Auckland nursery, the New Zealand Herald reported.

John Sabine. Was he murdered by his wife? Picture: WALES NEWS SERVICE

The parents reportedly told the children they would be back to pick them up in a few days. But they never returned.

While they were gone the couple lived in Perth where she worked in nightclubs and as a cabaret singer. Her husband worked as an accountant.

Details of what the couple did in Australia are unclear; one of the children last week told Wales Online John Sabine fled the country because he’d ripped clients off, and moved to NZ with the money.

It’s also possible he may have been arrested at some point in Australia.

The couple gave various interviews later when they returned to New Zealand to justify their position.

“We were poor and had no money at the time,” Mrs Sabine, who by then was known as Lee Martin, told the Auckland Star.

“We went there on a four-week contract hoping the money would be enough for a deposit on a house in Auckland.”

“But when we got there the agent didn’t know anything about our contract. We were left with $20 and no fare back to our children in New Zealand.”

They were eventually reunited with the children in 1984 — but not all of them were happy to see the parents who’d turned their backs on them all those years earlier.

Mrs Sabine told the Star: “We felt cheap, dirty. But we adored our children and wanted to be with them so badly.”

But no sooner had they reunited with children, who had grown up to be adults by then, that the cracks and strain began to emerge. There were allegations of assault on Mrs Sabine by second eldest daughter Jane and people came forward to say they had known the couple, by their new identity as the Martins.

What’s more, they claimed the couple had been living in New Zealand for at least four years longer than they had previously admitted, throwing their claims of reconciliation with their children into doubt.

Police guard the block of flats where John Sabine’s body was found. Picture: WALES NEWS SERVICE

Neighbours recalled them saying they were going to stay at the beach north of Auckland before they disappeared a second time, this time to the United Kingdom.

The children, having had their world turned upside down again by their parents’ brief return, tried to get on with their lives. Nothing more was heard from the couple until Mrs Sabine’s death and the discovery of her husband’s body.

Steve Sabin told Wales Online from his NZ home he wasn’t surprised to hear his mother could be a killer.

“If anyone was going to do it, she was going to do it.”

He told of his memories of growing up in Australia — and why they left.

“We lived in Australia for a while when we were kids and their story was that because he was an accountant, he had ripped someone off and came to New Zealand with the money.

“My mother was a cabaret performer and they said they went back to Australia for that. But he got arrested and she stayed out there with him and things just escalated from there,” Wales Online reported.

Steve Sabin blamed his mother for much of what had happened, believing she’d led him astray.

“My father was actually a good man, a soft-hearted man. But she was a conniving b***h. She controlled him but he loved her to pieces. He fell in love with an evil woman.”

Steve said he was devastated by his father’s death and the knowledge he had been murdered.

“You watch programs like CSI on TV and think, ‘Christ, that’s an evil woman’ — but that was her. Everything had to be about her.”

[e-mail]

Originally published as Ann Sabin named as main suspect in her husband’s murder