Graham Wood, 23, of Scunthorpe, who had a two-year-old daughter and another child on the way, was a policeman. He was also a married man, and his lover was a young policewoman.
Wood was on night beat on JUNE 28th, 1971. Not his usual night beat, because he had specifically asked to patrol a beat near his home that night.
Just after 1 p.m. police headquarters lost contact with him for about an hour. At the end of the night shift a colleague took him home, and Wood asked him in for a cup of coffee.
PC Wood went into his bedroom and gave a gasp as he saw his wife Glenis lying dead on the bed, strangled with an electric-kettle flex. Hidden under the body was an anonymous letter made up of newspaper cuttings.
Grilled by his own colleagues, Wood made a pathetic attempt to lay the blame on an intruder. His deceit collapsed within hours. He pleaded guilty at Leicester Assizes to murdering his wife, and those who sat in court wondering how he ever imagined such a feeble plan would fool his own police colleagues were answered in part by a defence psychiatrist.
This young officer is immature, and he was ill-equipped to deal with the emotional situation in which he found himself, declared the expert, before Wood was sentenced to life imprisonment.