Revenge of a betrayed wife

Rena Salmon denied murder

On an ordinary September morning Rena Salmon dropped her daughter off at school before driving to confront her love rival.

Pregnant Lorna Stewart had been having an affair with Salmon's husband Paul and the pair had set up home together.

The jilted wife drove from her home in the village of Great Shefford, in Berkshire, to Ms Stewart's beauty salon, Equilibrium, in Chiswick, west London.

Here she took a double-barrelled shotgun out of her car boot to shoot her estranged husband's younger lover in cold blood.

Minutes later the 36-year-old salon owner was dead, killed by the two shots fired from the weapon, which had been a birthday present from Salmon to her husband.

The only witness to the crime of passion - salon book keeper Lindsey Rees - had told the court former Army corporal Salmon and Ms Stewart had been calm before the shooting.

I wanted her [Ms Stewart] to feel some of the pain she had put me and my kids through

Rena Salmon

Miss Rees said she had seen someone in the doorway of the salon basement.

"Then I heard Lorna say, 'So you have come to shoot me?'

"She said 'Yes'. Then she shot Lorna."

Miss Stewart had asked her "what about the children" to which she replied, "Paul will look after them."

Prosecutor Peter Clarke QC described Salmon as being "as cool as a cucumber" after killing Miss Stewart.

In a 999 call Salmon told the operator: "I shot my husband's mistress."

And Salmon's IT consultant husband Paul told how she had seemed "very calm and collected" when he phoned her after she sent him a text message telling him she had killed his lover.

Salmon, 43, did not deny shooting Miss Stewart on 10 September last year but denied murder.

However the jury of 10 men and two women rejected her defence of "diminished responsibility".

Divorce hearing

Salmon not only had access to weapons but knew how to use them, thanks to her army training.

She had told the court she had gone to the salon - the day before she had been due to attend a divorce court hearing - intending to kill herself.

"I wanted her [Ms Stewart] to feel some of the pain she had put me and my kids through. I wanted her to have some feeling for someone other than herself," she said.

Mr Salmon had begun divorce proceedings

Instead the jury accepted the prosecution's case that Salmon had killed her former friend turned rival out of "plain anger and revenge".

Five days before the murder, Salmon had hired a locksmith to open a cabinet containing her husband's three guns.

She had heard about her husband's affair from Ms Stewart's husband Keith Rodrigues.

He had attempted to save his own marriage by taking his wife and children to Australia.

But on Ms Stewart's return to the UK in July last year, she moved into Mr Salmon's flat in Iver, Buckinghamshire.

And Mr Salmon, 42, began divorce proceedings.

Troubled childhood

He told the court his wife had attacked his lover in her own home, attempted suicide before and said she had thought about killing her own children.

As the trial unfolded the jury was told Salmon's childhood had fuelled her sense of rejection.

The court heard her mother had been a prostitute who had abused her and her siblings, and had told her that her Asian father had been one of her clients.

At the age of 13, Salmon was taken into care, but found security after joining the Army where she met her husband.

They married in 1985 and went on to have two children, and Mr Salmon later became an IT consultant earning £85,000 a year.

Mr Curran, defending Salmon, said: "Everything she had achieved, at such cost in her life, had been ruined."

It was only after the verdict that the jury was told Miss Stewart had been two months pregnant when she was killed.

In summing up the case, Judge Neil Denison said that while people often suffered "intense unhappiness" when marriages broke up and many felt "justifiable anger" towards the person they considered responsible, "very rarely" did they kill that person.