• Leigh Ann Sabine abandoned her five children in New Zealand before heading to Australia with her husband John
• The couple eventually returned home to the United Kingdom where she then murdered him

• Auckland man Paul Bucknell said the husband and wife would go out at night and leave the children without a babysitter

An Auckland man who lived next to the woman at the centre of a new murder documentary says she was a wonderful singer but would regularly leave her children home alone at night.

The new Sky TV UK three-part documentary The Body Next Door tells the story of Leigh Ann Sabine, who abandoned her children in foster care in New Zealand, before travelling back to Wales and murdering her husband John, keeping his body concealed in her backyard.

The then 14-year-old Paul Bucknell lived next door to the family in Auckland’s Pt Chevalier for 12 months in 1969, right before Leigh Ann and John left for Australia.

He remembered hearing Leigh Ann practising her cabaret singing in the house and John “trailing behind her” when they walked down the road “like she was in full control”.

“She had a fabulous big booming jazz voice.”

However, he said the pair would often go out at night and leave their five children alone in the house.

“I think the oldest was only about 9 years old, at the time.”

Leigh Ann Sabine (right) murdered her husband John (left) and left him buried in their backyard for 18 years.

Bucknell said, being a teenager living next to a group of children, he had a bit of a connection with the Sabine children.

“The kids seemed happy enough at this stage, but it all turned to custard afterwards.

“But one day, all of a sudden...they [the parents] were gone,” he said.

“I remember people being around the next day and somehow, somebody raised the alarm that they were there on their own.”

Leigh Ann died from cancer in 2015 and it was only then that investigators found John’s mummified corpse in the garden of their home in Wales.

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

Jane Sabine was abandoned in New Zealand by her parents Leigh Ann and John after the couple moved to Australia in 1969. Photo / Nick Reed

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.

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

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,” Lee-Ann told the Auckland Star.

David Williams is an Auckland-based multimedia journalist who joined the Herald in 2023. He covers breaking news and general topics.