Leigh Ann Sabine (right), who died in 2015 killed her husband John Sabine (left) and buried his body in their garden for 18 years.

Body in the garden: Killer mother who left her children in NZ subject of new doco

News
Crime

Author: NZ Herald,
Publish Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2024, 3:59pm

The woman at the centre of a new crime documentary left behind her five children in New Zealand before returning to the UK where she killed and buried her husband.

Sky TV UK three-part documentary The Body Next Door tells the story of Leigh Ann Sabine who, after abandoning their children in foster care in New Zealand, travelled back to Wales and murdered her husband and kept his body concealed in her backyard.

It was only upon her death in 2015, that investigators found John Sabine’s mummified corpse.

Mrs Sabine was thought to have claimed thousands of pounds by pretending he was still alive and had left her.

The Herald spoke to one of her children in 2016 following the death of her mother and the discovery of her father’s corpse in 2015.

The then 50-year-old Jane Sabine said she was robbed of her history when her parents abandoned her and her four siblings 47 years ago, sentencing her to a childhood of foster parents, abuse and a life without a sense of identity.

“I feel disconnected. I am the age I am now, yet I am still that little girl with the need to know. That [need for a] sense of belonging,” she said.

“I used to get mad at people that said they were adopted because I used to think, ‘At least your parents gave a damn. They loved you enough to say, ‘Hey, I can’t look after you. I want you to have the best life you can’ and they signed a piece of paper [so they could] be with a family that nurtured them and loved them regardless.

“Our parents didn’t even care enough to do that.”

Jane Sabine was one of five children abandoned in New Zealand by Leigh Ann Sabine and her husband John in 1969. Photo / Nick Reed

Mrs Sabine’s son Steven told Wales Online in 2015 that his mother was a “conniving bitch”.

“If anyone was going to do it, she was going to do it. My father was actually a good man, a soft-hearted man. But she was a conniving bitch. She controlled him but he loved her to pieces,” he said.

“I could never forgive him for what he did but I still believe he was manipulated and he fell in love with an evil woman. That was his biggest crime.”

In a 1984 Auckland Star interview describing her reunion with the children she abandoned, Mrs Sabine revealed she moved to Sydney in 1969 to pursue a career as a cabaret singer in Sydney.

“We were poor and had no money at the time,” said Mrs Sabine, who then went under the name of Lee Martin.

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

The couple were eventually reunited with their children in July 1984.

John Sabine was killed by his wife Leigh Ann and left buried in their backyard for 18 years.

At the time the two sons, Steven, then 22, Martin, 20, and daughter Susan, 25, were reported to have quickly accepted their parents’ return, though the younger two, Jane, 19, and Lee-Ann, 16, found this harder.

“There was a strangeness - almost cold feeling - when we first met,” Mrs Sabine told the Auckland Star.

Sick garden discovery

One of Sabine’s best friends Rhian Lee recently told The Sun she was the one who found the body in the garden more than a month after Leigh Ann’s death.

“I had over six months of counselling to help get over the trauma of the discovery,” Lee said.

“That morning I went over to my friend Michelle’s [James] for a cuppa and we thought, for a laugh, we’d play a prank,” she told The Sun.

“We knew about the medical skeleton wrapped up like a big package under the potting table in the garden and so we thought we’d bring it in, put it on the settee and give a knock to the neighbour to come down to see, as a joke.”

However, after cutting through the wrapped plastic layers, they realised it was a body.

The body had been wrapped 41 times in plastic supermarket bags and had created a mummifying affect meaning there was no decomposition or maggots.