She Hid Her Husband’s Body for 18 Years — Then a Prank Went Wrong and Exposed the Chilling Truth

Leigh Sabine always seemed to be spinning some sort of tale.

That’s according to those who knew her over the years, throughout her mysterious moves from Britain to New Zealand, then to Australia, and then back to Britain, where she settled in Wales. Throughout that time, according to The Washington Post, Leigh had sought a life of fame as a cabaret singer, and she told plenty of people she had succeeded — just in other places, at other times in her life.

But the biggest mystery surrounding Leigh — and the one that would eventually bring her international fame — was the disappearance of her husband John Sabine in 1997. Over the years, Leigh made passing references to murdering John, but people believed her about as much as they believed her tales about her music career, according to the BBC.

It just wasn’t until November 2015, when John’s body was discovered in the couple’s backyard, that Leigh’s friends finally began to believe the stories she told.

A Suspicious Life on the Move

Leigh and John Sabine married in 1960 and had five children together, first meeting when she was a teenager and John was already married with two other children. The couple made several big moves over their next four decades together, according to the Post, all in an effort for Leigh to find fame and fortune as a singer.

The New Zealand Herald reported in 2024 that Leigh and John’s many moves culminated in their abandoning their five children at an Auckland foster care facility before heading back to Britain, where they remained through John’s 1997 death and the discovery of his body 18 years later — which came after a neighbor’s prank went horribly wrong.

The Discovery of John Sabine

A woman named Michelle James heard that the previous tenant of her Wales flat, Leigh Sabine, had kept a medical skeleton in a package in the backyard. Leigh, who had died of cancer a month earlier, in October 2015, had often asked her caregiver to move the hefty package and made seemingly joking references to a body being kept inside of it, according to the BBC.

The outlet reported that James and her friend, Rhian Lee, decided one day to use the so-called medical skeleton for a prank. But when they cut the package open, bodily fluids from the carefully preserved corpse spilled onto their hands, prompting them to call police.

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“We thought we’d bring it in, put it on the settee, and then knock the ceiling for the neighbour to come down just to play a prank,” Lee said in a 2024 Sky TV documentary about the case, according to the BBC.

“It obviously wasn’t a medical skeleton,” South Wales police constable Joy Nicholls said in the documentary, according to the BBC. A pathologist determined the male body had died from blunt force trauma and had been preserved through chemical mummification.

The Investigation

DNA analysis would later confirm the body found in the Sabine’s backyard belonged to John, who was 67 at the time of he was last seen in 1997, according to The Guardian.

During an inquiry into John’s murder in 2016, one of Leigh’s friends, Valerie Chalkley, testified that Leigh confessed to killing John during a 1997 phone call. But Chalkley said she wasn’t ever sure if Leigh was being serious, noting Leigh’s similar grandiose statements about her singing career.

“The problem with [Leigh] was you never knew if she was telling the truth or not,” Chalkley said, according to the BBC.

In 2024, Glamorgan valleys coroner Andrew Barkley told the BBC, “Precisely what happened and the circumstances will sadly never totally be known.”

But other investigators have little hesitancy when it comes to their conclusion: “It is my view that Leigh Sabine probably killed John Sabine and wrapped up his body,” South Wales Detective Chief Inspector Gareth Morgan told The Guardian in 2016. “There was no evidence to suggest anyone else knew of his death.”

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