Woman 'beat husband to death with stone frog' then hid body under marital bed for 18 years

Leigh Ann Sabine reportedly confessed killing her spouse and John 18 years ago to a friend, who dismissed it as a joke

Leigh Ann Sabine, who died in October (PA)

A woman who hid her husband's body under their marital bed for 18 years after beating him to death with a stone frog, reportedly confessed her crime days later.

Leigh Ann Sabine, 75, died on October 30 last year believing she took the secrets of her fatal attack to her grave.

But three weeks after her death from cancer, the skeleton of husband John Sabine was found carefully wrapped-up at her flat in Beddau, near Pontypridd, South Wales.

The former cabaret singer's life with Mr Sabine, a retired accountant, was described as the “epitome of middle-class respectability”, according to the Daily Mail.

The Sabines' apparently normal 37-year-old marriage disguised the abandonment of their five children in New Zealand and a series of fraud allegations.

And according to the Daily Mail, Ms Sabine confessed to killing her husband a few days after his murder in 1997, telling friend Valerie Chalkley.

Mrs Chalkley told the newspaper that she shrugged off Sabine's story at the time as a joke, and the phrase "Watch out or I will frog you" became a long-running joke in her family.

Police believe Mr Sabine was assaulted before his death (PA)

Mrs Chalkley said: “It was a couple of years since we'd spoken, so I said 'I wondered what had happened to you both. I would have thought by now that one of you would have killed the other’.

“She replied, 'It's funny you should say that. I've killed him. I've battered him with a stone frog which was at the side of the bed. He was just driving me mad. Every night he would get into bed crying and weeping, saying you don't fancy me.'”

A post mortem examination of Mr Sabine's remains found in a communal rubbish area, where Ms Sabine is thought to have moved the corpse shortly before her death, showed his injuries were "consistent with an assault".

After the discovery of Mr Sabine's corpse, Mrs Chalkley contacted the police and she is due to testify at Mr Sabine’s inquest, resuming next week.

The Sabines married in 1960 before emigrating to New Zealand, where they had five children they abandoned in a care home while the police were investigating the pair over allegations of fraud.

Mrs Chalkley first met the pair in 1988 after they returned to Britain. She told the Daily Mail: “They looked a lovely couple, the epitome of respectable.”

But a few years later, she said Ms Sabine admitted to her friend that her husband was controlling and asked her to drive her to a hotel in Bournemouth, where she said Ms Sabine, then in her 50s, started an affair with a convicted criminal recently released from prison and half her age.