Dad lied to kids as he killed and buried their mum, yet still they support him

A Queensland father killed his wife, hid her body, reburie­d her remains­ years later and lied to ­relatives, police and the courts.

Patricia Riggs’s son Mark Knowles, second left, Knowles’s wife Tracey and her father Jon Knowles yesterday. Picture: Liam Kidston

A Queensland father killed his wife, hid her body, reburie­d her remains­ years later and lied to ­relatives, police and the courts.

But there was perhaps no element­ more callous in Edmund Ian Riggs’s cover-up of the killing of his wife, Patricia, than the way he cut the couple’s four young children off from her family.

Riggs was sentenced in the Queensland Supreme Court yesterday to a combined 15 years’ jail for manslaughter, interfering with a corpse and four counts of perjury. A jury had acquitted him of murder, but judge Peter Flanagan rejected his belated version of how his wife died, declaring it a “violent and sudden” death at his hands.

A cause of death could not be established, Justice Flanagan telling Riggs “this uncertainty is in large part… due to your concealment of your wife’s body”.

In harrowing victim impact statements, Patricia Riggs’s father, brother and stepfather told the court that after she went missing­, Riggs cut the family from the lives of her children, who were aged between seven and 14 at the time, while maintaining the fiction that she had walked out on them.

At yesterday’s sentencing, two of the children sat behind Riggs in an apparent act of support, on opposite­ sides of the public gallery to Patricia Riggs’s family.

The court was told that Riggs’s children and other relatives had provided references saying he was a caring and loving father.

On the night of September 30, 2001, 34-year-old Patricia Riggs vanished from the couple’s home at Margate, north of Brisbane.

Riggs was an early person of interest but it wasn’t until the home’s new owners discovered partial skeletal remains on the property, while building a retaining wall in 2016, that he was arres­ted and charged with murder.

Riggs, now 59, claimed his wife, 34, spat on him during an argument in their bedroom.

He said he pushed her with both hands, she fell, hit her head on a bed post, started convulsing and died.

Justice Flanagan said Riggs’s actions were “out of all proportion­” to his story. Physical evidence including blood splattered on the bedroom wall also did not match his version.

Riggs will be eligible for parole in September 2027 after serving just over 11 years.