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'Obsessed' partner faces life sentence after strangling lover
A wealthy car dealer who strangled his partner and set fire to her body is facing a life sentence for her murder.
Alan Jermey was "obsessive" about Mercedes executive Kirsty Wilson, the mother of his two children, and hatched a cold-blooded plot to kill her after learning she planned to leave him for her married boss Simon Goddard.
The martial arts expert throttled her, leaving few external injuries and set her body alight to try to make it look as though she had died in a fire but the blaze failed to take hold.
Miss Wilson, who was originally from Bradford, signalled an end to the nine-year relationship with Jermey but he was not prepared to lose her, their two daughters, or the four-bedroom house where they lived together in Woking, Surrey.
He secretly ordered a 100,000-volt stun gun over the internet in his partner's name so he could knock her out before killing her.
After pouring petrol over her, he arranged her body to make it look as if it had been set alight and clambered on to an extension roof with their two daughters as one of them cried: "I want mummy." Jermey, who worked for a car firm near Heathrow, claimed in court that he had gone to bed early and left Miss Wilson downstairs when he was woken by an explosion and was prevented from saving her by thick black smoke. But when firefighters arrived, they found there were only a few wisps and noticed he seemed calm and unconcerned about what had happened to her after they rescued him and his daughters.
The killer now faces a life sentence after an Old Bailey jury found him guilty of murder.
Miss Wilson's parents Peter and Sandra Wilson, from Bradford, described their daughter as popular and beautiful, and "the kind of woman who turned heads".
They said the real victims were their two granddaughters, who had been deprived of their mother. Mrs Wilson said Jermey was "obsessive" about her daughter. "When I would say 'that's a pretty girl on the TV', he would say 'no, she's not as nice as Kirsty, there's nobody as nice as Kirsty'," she said.
Mr Goddard, who had already left his wife and two children for Miss Wilson, said they were "very much in love" and planned to marry.
He said his life had been destroyed by the murder of his "soulmate" but that she would always be in his heart. "I still find it hard to accept that all of our dreams and plans for the future will never materialise," he said.
When Miss Wilson told Jermey in May last year that she planned to leave him, he at first seemed to have calmly accepted it.
They stayed together in the house, but cracks began to appear and one night she found him crawling on the floor looking at her mobile phone.
Jermey, who was also several thousand pounds in debt, killed his partner in August, the night before their property was due to go on the market.
Sarah Forshaw QC, prosecuting, told the jury: "That night, when the children were upstairs asleep, he killed her. He arranged her dead body on the floor." Jermey was remanded in custody until Monday when he will receive a life sentence after the judge decides on the minimum term he should serve.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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