When Juliet Eden was offered £30 in 2014 to photograph a woman in the Welsh village of Beddau, she wondered if it was worth it. The cash would just about cover petrol for the round-trip from the town of Bridgend where she lived at the time, 30 minutes away. But, after speaking to the eccentric woman – known locally as ‘Mad Lee’ – on the phone , she decided to go for it.
Little did Juliet know, her photos would go on to be featured under headlines, on news bulletins and across the pages of magazines. That was because Mad Lee – real name Lee Anne Sabine – had murdered her husband. However, the crime was only discovered when she died aged 74 in 2015; 18 years after the killing took place.
‘I’ve asked around, and people who knew Lee are convinced she wanted professional pictures taken because she wanted to look good when she was dead and infamous,’ Juliet tells Metro . Since her photos went viral, she has written a book, Frog Murderer , which revisits her experience with Sabine. In it, Juliet mentions how ‘some people are like onions’.
‘They have good layers, bad layers and evil layers, and they show you the one they want you to see,’ she explains. Sabine’s husband John, a 67-year-old accountant, vanished from the couple’s home at the Trem-Y-Cwm flats in Beddau in 1997. The disappearance wasn’t reported to police as his wife claimed he had upped and left of his own accord.
In reality Sabine had savagely murdered John with an ornamental stone frog .
