Man 'strangled wife before play'

Sheila Tailor was found dead in her car

An optician strangled his wife and hid her body before going to watch their two children in a nativity play, a jury heard on Wednesday.

Narendra Tailor killed Sheila, 34, in the kitchen of their home in December last year before seeing the production, Leicester Crown Court was told.

He abandoned her corpse in her car in the middle of Leicester, jurors heard.

Mr Tailor, 39, from Quickthorns, Oadby, and his part-time receptionist, Manjinder Binning, 34, deny murder.

The court was told Mr Tailor abandoned the body in the car the next day.

'Fictitious affair'

He cooked up an elaborate story for police, telling them she died in a sex attack, jurors were told.

Ms Binning, 34, is accused of being his accomplice, and allegedly helped him invent a fictitious affair between Mrs Tailor and a drug-dealing boyfriend.

Ms Binning, of Huggett Close, Rushey Mead, Leicester, admitted a second count of perverting the course of justice by helping Mr Tailor to hide the body.

Gregory Dickinson QC, prosecuting, said Ms Binning claimed Mr Tailor murdered his wife and that she did not know what she was getting herself into.

Mrs Tailor was found dead on the back seat of her Audi in Hamilton Street on 10 January this year.

He hatched a plot that really was as carefully planned as it was utterly wicked Gregory Dickinson QC, prosecutin

It is alleged her husband murdered her because he was having an affair and did not want to be shamed in divorce proceedings as an adulterer.

Mr Dickinson told the jury: "Her husband arranged to make it look as though she had been subject to a sexual assault.

"It was obviously intended that the body should be found, but this was no spur of the moment, hot-blooded, loss-of-temper killing.

"This was a carefully planned, cold-blooded killing.

"It was Narendra Tailor who killed her, but he received considerable support and assistance from Manjinder Binning, both in the days leading up to the killing and in the immediate aftermath of it."

'Not happy'

Mrs Tailor worked at the Department for Work and Pensions, in Leicester, and had a daughter, aged 10, and seven-year-old son with her husband.

Mr Dickinson told the jury that her marriage to Mr Tailor was "not happy".

Both the victim and defendant, who owned two opticians shops, in Leicester and Sleaford, Lincolnshire, had had affairs, he said.

Mr Dickinson said a divorce for Mr Tailor, and the fact he would be accused of adultery, would not go down well at his Hindu temple.

He added: "So what he decided to do was to murder his wife. "He hatched a plot that really was as carefully planned as it was utterly wicked.

"His intention was that when her body was found, everybody would come to the conclusion that she was killed by another man."

The case continues.