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Jealous husband ‘stabbed wife through the heart’
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A JEALOUS and controlling husband, who couldn’t accept his marriage was over, stabbed his wife through the heart and then sent her a taunting text message as she lay dying, a court heard this week.
Lee Anstice is also said to have sent a voicemail message to his wife’s new lover, telling him: “Just want you to know having split her open in front of everyone on the driveway, you had better call your solicitor, you f......”
Twice-married Anstice had sat in his car eating sweets waiting for wife Tracy to arrive at her parents’ house in Flitwick last August.
By last summer their marriage was on the rocks and Anstice, a civil servant who had served in the RAF, had moved out of the marital home in Dunstable and gone to live with his parents in Oxfordshire.
Last August the prosecution allege he hatched a plan to lure her to her death.
After contacting her by phone to say he was on his way to her parents’ home to collect their eight-year-old daughter, he knew it would send her rushing to the house.
It worked, Luton Crown Court was told, because as 37-year-old Tracy arrived outside her parents’ home, Anstice pulled up in his car and attacked her on the driveway with a knife he had bought earlier that day in a supermarket.
Beverley Cripps, prosecuting, said the wife was trapped on the driveway between parked cars. Her screams alerted her parents Roger and Patricia Bagnall, who were inside the house.
The father rushed out to be confronted by his son-in-law pointing the knife at him shouting: “Do you want some of this?”
He then plunged the knife into is estranged wife’s body a number of times and one blow pierced her heart.
The court was told the father managed to drag his dying daughter into his home and called 999.
Anstice drove off but a short while later sent her a text in which he referred to their daughter and her boyfriend saying: “Are you taking her back for happy families? Not now.”
He is then said to have sent love rival Glen Feasey a voicemail message telling how he had just split Tracy open.
The 50-year-old civil servant pleads not guilty to murdering his wife on August 26 last year.
Outlining the crown’s case to the jury, Miss Cripps said “He refused to accept the relationship was over and her wishes that it should end.”
Miss Cripps described Anstice as “jealous and controlling”. The court was told as a result of his behaviour, which had included two suicide attempts, it was decided he should move out of the marital home.
The jury heard that, after his arrest for the murder of his wife, Anstice claimed to police he had been hearing voices telling him to hurt his wife just as she had hurt him.
Miss Cripps said Anstice had been treated for depression, which she said was getting better, and at no point in his dealings with health professionals and members of his own family had he once spoken about voices.
She said the claims about the voices were false and she said Anstice was guilty of a calculated killing that he had planned.
The case continues.
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Monday 28 May 2012
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