Twisted love saw killer husband keep his wife in a barrel in the back yard for 23 years

HE said he loved his wife so much that after he killed her, Fred Boyle kept her body in a barrel in the back yard for 23 years.

Fred and Edwina Boyle: “I loved my wife dearly … I still do now.”

FRED Boyle said he loved his wife Edwina.

He said he loved her even though he was having an affair with another woman.

And so he kept her close, for 23 years after her death.

Edwina’s body was stuffed into a metal barrel; a green cylindrical coffin he kept nearby until his beloved wife’s skeleton was found inside.

Boyle had carted Edwina with him every time he moved house.

He refused to allow it to be taken away to the tip.

Edwina, the mother of his two daughters, was, after all, deserving of better than that after — or so he would say in court.

The metal barrel would be stored close to the house, and move with every family possession when Boyle and his daughters shifted homes.

It was a drum that would remain close by at family functions and birthday parties — appearing in the background of family photos.

Unwitting guests at a party pictured with the green barrel in background holding Edwina Boyle’s body.

Boyle, born in Wales, met Englishwoman Edwina, 19, in Wales.

They married in 1972.

Less than four months after tying the knot the couple migrated to Australia.

They had two daughters, Careesa and Sharon.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the family lived in the Dandenong district.

Boyle was a carpet layer. Edwina worked as a poultry farmhand.

Most of their family time was spent at the local ice-skating rink, where Careesa and Sharon would practise and skate in competition.

Boyle took a role on the skating club committee and began an affair with a committee member.

“That relationship had been going for something like 12 months prior to the disappearance of Mrs Boyle,” Crown prosecutor Gavin Silbert, SC, would say during Boyle’s eventual Supreme Court murder trial.

“Many of the couple’s friends suspected that there was a relationship.”

Edwina, too, was aware that Boyle was nailing more than just resolutions on committee time.

Boyle murdered Edwina, aged 30 at the time, on the night of October 6, 1983.

“As she lay, probably asleep, in the bedroom of your matrimonial home,” Justice Jack Forrest would explain, “you used a .22 calibre weapon to shoot her in the head. Your two young daughters were in the next bedroom.”

It was a murder Boyle planned to hide behind a crazy story.

The green barrel seen in the background of another gathering.

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The following morning, Boyle showed his visiting brother-in-law a fabricated note from Edwina which said she had left for another man.

Boyle told his daughters their mum had gone away “with some truck driver named Ray”.

The following month Boyle told local detectives the same story.

He later sent a letter telling Edwina’s overseas relatives telling them not to be surprised if they did not hear from her for Christmas.

Edwina’s relatives became suspicious and filed a missing-person report.

Not even they could have imagined the shocking revelation that was to come: that Boyle had killed Edwina and stuffed her in a metal drum.

Fred Boyle leaving the Supreme Court. Picture: Supplied

It was a drum with which Boyle developed a strange close bond.

While most killers try to destroy and distance themselves from evidence linking them to the crime, Boyle had made the bizarre decision to hide his crime under the noses of others.

As prosecutor Silbert would say in court: “Anyone who hangs on to his wife’s remains in a barrel for 23 years can hardly be accused of a sophisticated cover-up.”

By 1990 Boyle and his daughters were living in Frankston.

Careesa’s future husband, a good-natured young tradesman named Michael Hegarty, moved in with them.

Mr Hegarty noticed how the metal drum went with them when they changed homes again.

He asked Boyle what was in it.

At first Boyle said it was good carpet glue, but later said it was glue that had turned toxic and therefore could not be dumped.

The drum and its contents eventually began to haunt Mr Hegarty.

He began a running joke that Boyle had Edwina stuffed nicely inside.

The barrel, almost with an eerie persona of its own, featured in the background of pictures taken at Mr Hegarty’s 21st birthday party held in Boyle’s Carrum Downs garage.

Mr Hegarty’s joke about Edwina being stuffed inside started prodding at his mind.

Boyle’s possessive nature fuelled the fire.

Boyle got grumpy when Mr Hegarty moved the barrel out into the weather one time.

“There was a time when I put it on the back of a trailer and had all the rubbish on the trailer loaded to go to the tip and Fred was supposed to take the trailer to the tip the next day,” Mr Hegarty said in court.

“The next day the drum was back in the backyard.”

It was in August 2006 that Mr Hegarty’s urge of curiosity prevailed.

With the help of his brother and a mate, Mr Hegarty cut the barrel open with an angle grinder.

Inside they found women’s clothes and a hessian bag — but no body.

During a clean-up of the garage in October 2006, 23 years after Edwina Boyle’s murder, Mr Hegarty found the hessian bag stuffed under boxes of power tools and garbage bags in a wheelie bin.

He was doing a backyard clean-up at the time.

The former home, where Edwina’s body was found. Picture: Brownbill Andrew

For some inexplicable reason, Fred Boyle had kept the bag — with what it contained — and hidden it on the property.

Mr Hegarty tentatively reached inside.

“I pulled out what appeared to be a pelvis and human leg bone,” he said in court.

“I just had to confirm to myself that it was human so I continued to look through the bag and found the skull.”

Mr Hegarty told Boyle’s trial the barrel had often given him chills.

“I had a thing about that drum for 16 years,” he said.

A pathologist found a gunshot wound had shattered a hole in Edwina’s skull.

Boyle contested a murder charge, unsuccessfully claiming at trial that he came home to find his wife dead in bed.

He claimed he first put her body in the bag and placed it in his van, but bought the barrel and cemented the bag inside it when the body began to smell.

“My wife died in a terrible way and I was not going to let her remains be thrown down the tip like bloody garbage, so I held on to the drum and it stayed with me all the time,” Boyle claimed in testimony.

The jury believed otherwise.

Boyle was sentenced to 21 years’ jail with a 17-year minimum term.

“You have shown no remorse whatsoever; rather, you have sought to live a lie, with the sole aim of avoiding apprehension for your dastardly actions,” Justice Forrest said.