Thomas Nutt, 45, has been found guilty of killing his 52-year-old wife, Dawn Walker, in West Yorkshire, Britain. On October 27, 2021, four days after their wedding, Nutt killed Walker and placed her body in a closet before placing it in a suitcase. This was said in court. The body was then thrown into the bushes behind her house.
Police told the jury that Nutt said nothing in the first part of the trial but admitted to accidentally killing his wife. The person who killed her also said that he didn’t mean to hurt her very much when he did it. During the trial, it was discovered that Walker’s legs had been injured and her right leg had been twisted. The body was bent over and her face was turned to the wheels of the suitcase. A report in the Daily Mail says that after three hours of questioning, the jury found him guilty of murder.
dr Kirsten Hope, a forensic pathologist, said that she found Walker’s body in a black suitcase with wheels. During interrogation, Nutt said he attacked her for telling him she wanted a divorce. Walker also told him not to accuse him of rape if he didn’t. At the start of the trial, prosecutor Alistair MacDonald QC told the jury: “It is often said that a person’s wedding anniversary and the time immediately following it is one of the happiest times of their life.” MacDonald said that was not the case with Walker, because her body was found four days after her marriage, stuffed in a suitcase and dumped in a field behind the accused’s house. MacDonald told the court that Nutt told police on October 31 that his wife had left their home in Shirley Grove and was missing. The prosecutor said: “He knew with certainty that her body was in a closet in the house they shared.”
Prosecutors also showed CCTV footage of Nutt carrying a large suitcase from his home to some nearby bushes just before police arrived to search for Walker. Before the murder, Nutt and Walker were on their two-day caravanning honeymoon in Skegness. Nutt said during the trial: “When we came back she told us she wanted a divorce because she’s bipolar and sad. She put me in jail before for saying I tried to rape and beat her. She said she would do it again. She started screaming, so I slapped her in the face and put my arm around her neck.”
But the prosecutor said the person who did it would have gone to Skegness alone. He may have killed his wife on their wedding night or the day after, leaving her body in the house. The act Nutt did of telling Walker’s daughter she was missing and searching for her was described by the prosecutor as a “ghastly charade”. Mac Donald said that despite being together for a long time, the couple had a hard time getting along.
In 2020, a neighbor who was one of the witnesses in the case said she saw Walker with a “massive” black eye and cuts to his face. The prosecutor said the witness never saw the defendant hit her, but she heard them argue and Dawn said, “Tommo, get off me.” Another neighbor said he’s never had a wife so heard screaming as he walked near their house. When asked, Nutt told the neighbor that Walker was having an asthma attack, but she yelled, “Don’t believe him, he’s lying, he’s trying to kill me!”
On August 19, Nutt will be sentenced. At the end of the hearing, Judge Jonathan Rose said he would be sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum sentence to be determined at that time. Detective Inspector Amanda Wimbles of the Homicide and Major Inquiry Team, who led the investigation, said: “We welcome today’s jury verdict. Our immediate thoughts are with Dawn’s family who have been so brave and strong throughout the investigation and trial.”