Exclusive:
A decade has passed since Mary West, and the rest of her once tight-knit community discovered a killer was lurking among them. Here, she opens up about the ordeal
In November 2015, a well-preserved corpse wrapped up in 40 layers of polythene sheeting was found in the back garden of a block of flats in the sleepy village of Beddau, South Wales. A former resident of Trem y Cwm flats claimed she owned a medical skeleton from her nursing days, and even teased her friends about “killing” her ex-husband John Sabine who has not been seen alive since 1998.
When Leigh Ann Sabine, known locally as ‘Mad Leigh’, died in October 2015, her belongings were dumped in the flat block’s communal garden. A neighbour, named Michelle James, and her friend Rhian Lee thought a large plastic package in the pile of Leigh Ann’s belongings must have been the medical skeleton she once talked about.
It wasn’t until they started cutting the plastic sheeting open and getting foul-smelling fluid on their hands that they realised a dead body was inside. They contacted the police, and Michelle was initially arrested as a murder suspect until DNA tests proved the remains were of Leigh Ann’s ex-husband, John.
Following further investigation into the shopping bags used to wrap John’s lifeless body, police established he’d died in the late 1990s. The investigation took a shocking turn when a friend of Leigh’s – who has anonymity – told the police the mother-of-five claimed during a harrowing phone call in 1997 that she’d “battered” John with a stone frog when he irritated her.
South Wales Police later recovered the frog ornament which had traces of John’s blood alongside Leigh’s fingerprints. Police believed when Leigh was dying of cancer aged 74, she wanted to get rid of the evidence and hired two men to take the remains into the garden area. It is still unknown exactly when he died.
Retired teacher Mary West has exclusively spoken to us about how she became close to Leigh in her final days, and the chilling words the cold-blooded killer uttered to her before she died.
When Mary’s mother died in February 2015, she started helping Leigh as she knew she was suffering from cancer. “My mother was always wary of Leigh,” Mary explained.
Her mother was cautious of Leigh as she had a reputation for being a larger-than-life character who partied in the communal gardens of her flat block and hosted local teenagers in her home. Despite the warning from her late mother, Mary wanted to be of assistance and grew closer to Leigh, often visiting her.
“What I thought was strange was that she only had pictures of her cabaret days in her home, none of her children or husband,” Mary recalled.
Leigh and John had lived in Australia when they were investigated by the authorities for abandoning their five children in a nursery in Auckland, New Zealand in 1969. The children, named Susan, Steven, Martin, Jane and Lee-Ann, were abandoned when they were between the ages of two and 11.
While Mary wasn’t sure why the children were left in Auckland and subsequently put into foster care, she made contact with Leigh’s youngest daughter after being part of a Sky documentary series about the case named The Body Next Door.
Mary shared: “I also found out she’d [Leigh] sent a package of letters full of hate-filled venom to her children before she died – and that shocked me.” It’s understood Leigh rejected her children to build a singing career in Sydney.
When asked why Leigh never confessed to killing her ex-husband, Mary said the former nurse was always asking people questions about their lives but never shared details about hers.
“She’d always say, ‘Oh, I’ll save that story for another day’ when she was ever asked anything,” Mary added.
However, Mary reflected on a disturbing moment she shared with Leigh while she was dying, which haunts her to this day.
Leigh looked Mary in the eye and cryptically said: “You know, don’t you?” Mary now wonders whether it was the nearest Leigh ever got to confessing.
Leigh thought Mary’s religious beliefs gave her the ability to see through her wrongdoings, the latter shared.
Reflecting on the horrific case, Mary explained: “I am angry as if she confessed to murder, it would have saved the police a lot of time and questions and it would have saved the community as elderly people who were living in her apartment block were being interviewed about the murder. It was like she was mocking them all.”