Seventeen years jail for murdering wife's GP lover in a jealous rage

A HUSBAND who brutally beat a GP to death and buried his body in isolated woodland after failing to halt an affair between the doctor and his wife was yesterday jailed for at least 17 years.

Andrew Hill, 49, had denied murdering Dr Colin Shawcross, but a jury convicted him after hearing how he bludgeoned his love rival to death with a pickaxe handle in a jealous rage.

Hill, a telecommunications engineer, had led a normal life until his wife Julie, a nurse, met Colin Shawcross when he began working with her at Sheffield’s Royal Hallamshire Hospital.

The court heard that when the affair came to light, Hill tried to win his wife back, but failed. Later, he went to the house being rented by the GP, killed him and then set about concealing his crime.

After carrying out the murder at the house in Aston, Sheffield, Hill put the body in the boot of the GP’s red Jaguar and drove it to woods in nearby Harthill, digging a five-foot deep grave.

He was arrested almost immediately after the killing and charged with murder, but refused to assist in a five-month search for the body and said he had hired Irish “hardmen” to carry out an attack.

Mr Justice Wilkie told Hill he would go to prison for life, with a minimum term of 17 years and said he had acted in a “devious, vengeful, cowardly and unmanly way” over the affair.

Hill gasped and clung to the glass screen of the dock as he was being sentenced. When the judge described his story of gipsy hardmen as “utter fabrication” he shouted: “It wasn’t sir”.

Before sentencing, Colin Shawcross’s wife Carol, also a GP, read a personal statement to the

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