Considering the extreme lengths both women went to in order to carry out and conceal their crime, it did not take long for Sarah Williams and Katrina Walsh to sell each other out.
However, on Wednesday, the jury at Preston crown court saw through their attempts at self-preservation by blaming each other and found both guilty of murdering Sadie Hartley, the long-term partner of Williams’s lover, Ian Johnston.
Though it was Williams who dealt the fatal blows, Walsh was judged to have been an equal part of the planning. Digging deeper into their dysfunctional friendship reveals a history of broken marriages, loneliness and vulnerability.
Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Walsh’s ex-husband Kevin recalls how the balance of power between the two women changed over time. At first, a 17-year-old Williams – “shy and affected” and with a lazy eye – started hanging around the stables where Walsh, then in her 30s, kept her horse. Williams would “muck out the stables for free horse rides” and soon caught the eye of David Hardwick, a married horse enthusiast 40 years her senior.
It was the 1990s and Kevin and Katrina Walsh were married, happy and content. She was a freelance artist, he worked on a farm and they had a shared love of cycling and wildlife. “I loved her because of the way she was, the person she was, everything that we had in common,” recalls Kevin. “They were very happy years of marriage.”
An unlikely foursome emerged: the Walshes, Williams and her married “sugar-daddy” Hardwick – an entrepreneur and keen horseman – would go away together in his mobile horse box with sleeping accommodation.
“We called it the ‘purple passion wagon’,” says Kevin. “The four of us would load the horses up and go off around north Wales, riding the horses around the mountains and beaches.”
The nomadic, carefree lifestyle ended when Kevin Walsh had an affair, split with Katrina and moved to North Yorkshire, 150 miles away. They divorced in 2008. He claims they remained close friends and she attended his mother’s 80th birthday party. But he cannot hide the guilt he feels for what followed.
“Once I left, the two women got a lot closer and they started going on holidays together, subsidised by Sarah. Kit [Katrina] is a very intelligent woman, but she can be a little away with the fairies sometimes.
“Kit was lonely. She was ripe for being taken advantage of and was suffering from health problems after multiple falls off her bike and the horses.” He added: “They were friends because they had the horses in common. But there was nothing to suggest anything sinister.”
During these intervening years Katrina Walsh was drawn further into Williams’s exciting world, becoming so close that some friends thought the two women were a couple. The truth was Williams had become infatuated with Johnston after they met at the indoor ski slope Chill Factore in Manchester in 2012.
In August 2015 Kevin received a text message from his estranged wife saying Williams wanted to meet him, he said. Williams then called him directly offering a job suiting his “particular key skill” but that she preferred to discuss it in person.
“Alarm bells were going off in my head,” he recounts. “Whatever she wanted was something dodgy. After the conversation I thought, ‘Hang on, I have never trusted this girl, just walk away now.’
“I told Kit and she replied saying, ‘Yes, knowing Sarah it will be something nefarious.’”
Later, Walsh’s diaries revealed that the idea was for Kevin to murder Johnston’s partner, Sadie Hartley, using his archery skills gained from Viking re-enactments.
Kevin confesses to being “baffled” by the details that emerged during the trial, particularly by his ex-wife’s meticulous notes that revealed she was not merely a naive patsy who had been framed and manipulated by Williams.
“I don’t know how to think anymore,” Kevin says. “My only explanation for this bizarre behaviour is that Kit lives in a fantasy world sometimes and I can see her getting caught up in something that sounds like a game.
“But, it is hard to believe that someone is so naive really. I thought she was frightened of Sarah and maybe slightly in awe of her. It used to be the other way round and Sarah was in awe of her, but things shifted over the past few years.
“I can’t explain everything that has come out in court. I’m just totally baffled by what has happened. She has changed so much in the last few years. She has become a lot more vulnerable.
“I still feel that Kit was like a puppet, but the fact that she tried to involve me in this has left me utterly staggered and I will never be able to explain her motives. I just have to believe that she was being manipulated otherwise I wouldn’t know how to deal with it.”
