Wife killer who manipulated child jailed for life
32 minutes agoCharlie Rose and Nick Johnson,at Inner London Crown CourtandPatrick Barlow,South East
Surrey PoliceA man who “brutally” murdered his wife in a jealous rage and manipulated their child into helping him cover up his actions has been jailed for life.
Robert Rhodes cut wife Dawn’s throat in the kitchen of their Surrey family home in 2016, but was acquitted of murder in 2017 after claiming she had tried to attack him.
The 53-year-old carpenter was branded a “coward” by Judge Mrs Justice Naomi Ellenbogen for not attending his sentencing after a retrial at Inner London Crown Court.
“Your wicked and callous acts have had a devastating and divisive effect on Dawn’s family and your own,” the judge told him.
Rhodes will serve a minimum term of 29-and-a-half years.
Warning: Some readers may find the following details distressing.
The court heard how Rhodes had killed his wife at their home near Redhill as his marriage crumbled.
He had found out she was having an affair with a work colleague, the court was told.
He plotted the murder for months and duped their child into helping him carry out the attack.
Rhodes thought he had got away with murder when he was acquitted at an Old Bailey trial in 2017, but in 2021, his traumatised child told a therapist and police what had really happened.
The carpenter had spun a web of lies to pretend he had inflicted the wound in self-defence and “gaslit” his child into supporting his story, the court was told.
Surrey PoliceDuring sentencing, the child said the trauma would never go away.
The child hit out at Rhodes for “gaslighting me, parading around as a survivor, while destroying me and my mother”.
They said: “I wish I could say his manipulating and abuse has not ruined my life, but I can’t.”
Sentencing, the judge said Rhodes’s cowardice added to his list of “malignant characteristics”.
She told him he “brutally” murdered his wife and concluded the motive was sexual jealousy.
Ellenbogen said of Rhodes’ plan to claim self-defence: “Having took her life, you sought also to deprive Dawn over her good name.”
In an impact statement, Dawn Rhodes’s mother, Liz Spencer, said: “I have waited nearly 10 years for this result.
“I don’t look upon the result as justice, but I feel for the first time my daughter’s voice is being heard.”
The couple, who had been together for more than 20 years, were in the process of separating after Dawn Rhodes had begun a relationship with another man.
Having married in 2003, the couple lived in Epsom and across Surrey, before settling in Wimborne Avenue in Earlswood.
On 2 June, 2016, Rhodes stabbed his wife after the child said they had drawn a painting for her and told her to “close your eyes and hold out your hand”.
After the killing, Rhodes then cut the child and asked them to stab him in the back so he could claim he had been attacked.
Rhodes later told police his wife had “flipped like the Hulk” and attacked him with a knife following an argument about the end of their marriage.
As the child was aged under 10 at the time of the killing, they bear no criminal responsibility for aiding the attack.
Rhodes was also convicted of child cruelty, perverting the course of justice and two counts of perjury.
The judge imposed concurrent jail terms for those charges.
After the hearing, Libby Clark, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said the evidence that came from the child witness was “profoundly shocking”.
She said it showed just how much “careful planning” Rhodes had put into murdering his wife.
Clark said: “It is thanks to the immense bravery of the child in coming forward to explain exactly what happened that night that Robert Rhodes has finally been brought to justice for the murder of Dawn, something he mistakenly thought he could get away with.”
Det Ch Insp Kimball Edey said that during the first trial when Rhodes was acquitted, his wife had been portrayed as the villain.
But he said she had “actually been a victim of domestic abuse and coercive control at the hands of her husband for years”.
Edey said: “”The fact that Rhodes not only murdered his wife in cold blood but then manipulated and groomed his own child to play a part in his evil scheme and cover up what he had done is simply despicable.
“Not only did he take a life; he irreparably damaged another, as well as the lives of everyone else who loved Dawn.”
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