A farm that became embroiled in a grisly murder case is at the centre of a £3.6 million legal battle between two sisters-in-law.
Roger Kingsley made the news when he found a severed leg in a bag hanging from a hedgerow on his land in March 2009.
The limb belonged to murdered salesman Jeffrey Howe, whose body parts had been distributed around the English countryside by killer Stephen Marshall in the so-called Jigsaw Man case.
The 180-acre farm in the market town of Buntingford, near Stevenage, is now the subject of a legal dispute following Mr Kingsley’s death aged 57 in 2015.
He left his share to wife Karim, 51, while his sister Sally Kingsley, 67, owns the other half.
Sally worked alongside her brother on the farm all her life, and wants to buy out her sister-in-law so she can keep the land, which she values at £3.3 million. It has been in the family for almost 200 years.
But Karim wants to sell the farm on the open market, believing it can attract bids of up to £3.6 million.
Sally’s barrister, Catherine Taskis, told the High Court that selling on the open market would ignore the “historical and family context” of the land.
“Both she [Sally] and her brother envisaged the land remaining in the family beyond the end of their partnership,” she said. “The interest of Sally is in the land itself; in the family business of which she has always been part, and which is the greater part of her livelihood.”
The dispute came to court after Karim and the executors of Mr Kingsley’s estate rejected Sally’s £1.5 million offer to buy out her brother’s stake last year.
Giving evidence, Sally conceded that she has no “fixed plans” for the farm after her own death and has not got children of her own, but added: “I have other relations.”
Karim’s barrister Clifford Darton accused Sally of deliberately frustrating plans to sell the farm because she wants to redevelop some of the land. But Sally said: “I certainly don’t intend building houses around the farmyard.”
In the Jigsaw Man case Marshall, who had been Howe’s lodger, admitted the murder halfway through his Old Bailey trial and was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 36 years, in 2010.
The High Court hearing over the future of the Kingsleys’ farm land continues.
