Thomas Nutt trial: Man wheeled body of new wife out of Yorkshire home as police arrived to ask about her disappearance

The body of grandmother Dawn Walker, 52, was found in a field in Halifax four days after she married Thomas Nutt, 45, Bradford Crown Court was told on Monday.

She had not been seen since her wedding night on October 27, 2021.

Jurors were shown CCTV footage of Nutt, who denies murder, wheeling a large suitcase out of the back of his house and into nearby bushes just as a police officer arrives at his front door to follow up the defendant’s missing person report.

Prosecutor Alistair MacDonald QC told a jury: “It is often said that someone’s wedding day and the period immediately following is one of the happiest times of their life.”

He said this was not the case for Ms Walker “because her body was found stuffed into a suitcase and dumped into some undergrowth in a field towards the back of this defendant’s house four days after she was married”.

Mr MacDonald told the court that Nutt rang police on October 31 telling them his wife had gone missing after leaving their home in Shirley Grove, Lightcliffe, near Halifax, that morning, and he appeared to mount a search.

The prosecutor said the “hard and stark reality” was that the defendant “knew perfectly well that her body was lying dead in a cupboard at the marital home”.

He said: “He knew she was there because he had killed her and put her body there before stuffing it into a suitcase, breaking bones in order to achieve that objective, before wheeling that suitcase to a place at which he dumped her body.”

Mr MacDonald said Nutt then handed himself in to a police station and told officers he and Ms Walker had been on a two-day caravan honeymoon, staying in a layby at Skegness.

The prosecutor said the defendant told police: “We came back and she has got bipolar and is depressed, said she wanted to get divorced.

“She put me in jail before, said I had tried raping and assaulting her.

“Said she was going to do it again. She started screaming and I have hit her in the face and put my arm round her neck.”

Mr MacDonald told the jury that Nutt admitted the manslaughter of his wife on the basis that “he did not intend to cause her really serious harm at the time at which he killed her”.

But the prosecution says he is guilty of murder and lied about taking Ms Walker to Skegness.

Mr MacDonald said Nutt killed Ms Walker before going to Skegness by himself, leaving her body in their house.

The prosecutor said Nutt returned to act out the “ghastly charade” of telling her daughter she was missing and carrying out a search.

The jury was shown CCTV footage of the defendant and Ms Walker arriving at the Prince Albert pub in Brighouse for a reception after their wedding at Brighouse Register Office.

The trial continues.