Shallow grave killer given life

Lukasz Reszpondek will be deported to Poland after he serves his sentence

A "devious" dairy worker has been jailed for life for the murder of a woman whose body he buried in a shallow grave on farmland.

Lukasz Reszpondek, 28, must serve a minimum of 18 years and should be deported home to Poland after his sentence, Mold Crown Court heard.

The married father-of-two was previously found guilty of killing Ermatati Rodgers, 41, of Wrexham.

The Indonesia-born divorcee was found buried 14 months after going missing.

Sentencing Reszpondek, Mr Justice Lloyd-Jones branded him a devious, calculating and determined liar and said that the knowledge of the enormity of what he had done should shame him for the rest of his life.

The court heard he had a previous conviction for downloading child pornography from the internet.

The court heard the effect of the murder on Ms Rodgers' family Her father Sabri Jalil told police officers who travelled to his home in Padang, Sumatra, that Ms Rodgers provided the children in the family with clothes and toys from the UK and had sent money for him to buy a television and telephone. In a victim impact statement he said: "Not knowing what happened to her has made me and my family very sad and we were hoping in time she would be found," he said of the 14 months during which her body was buried in a field outside Wrexham. When the family received confirmation that she was dead, Mr Jalil said his wife cried, rolling on the floor, and he had to calm her down. "It was very painful and my family and I were grief-stricken to find out that Ermatati had died, particularly that she had been murdered and that we would never see her again," his statement added

Reszpondek was not given a separate sentence for burying the body but Mr Justice Lloyd-Jones said he would recommend to the Home Secretary he be deported back to Poland.

"Such a course would be proportionate and I make it clear it is based on your personal conduct, which represents a genuine and sufficiently serious threat affecting the fundamental interests of society," the judge said.

The killer, who sat in the dock next to an interpreter, showed no emotion as he was taken down to the cells.

During his three week trial, the jury heard how Reszpondek met divorcee Ms Rodgers - known as Tati - at a Dairy Crest plant in Wrexham.

Despite his claims she was only a friend who helped him with his English, the prosecution alleged they had become lovers and that Reszpondek strangled her in anger "against a background of the emotional and conflicting demands of the eternal triangle of a wife and another woman".

He then played computer games for a day and a half while her body remained at his house, before burying her in a field at Erddig near Wrexham.

Ermatati Rodgers' body was found 14 months after she went missing

Fourteen months after she was reported missing, he tried to dig her up again as police closed in on him.

Officers had become suspicious of Reszpondek and had placed him under surveillance.

They found he kept returning to the burial site and it emerged that he had saved the area in the favourites of his satnav and named it "TT", short for Tati - the name by which Ms Rodgers was known to her friends.

When officers began digging up fields looking for the body, Reszpondek, who had been watching the police's movements, spent three hours digging with a spade, a fork, and his bare hands to try to recover the body. But it was too difficult.

So in March this year he went to police to tell them where the body was - and claimed she had simply dropped dead of natural causes at his home.

He claimed that in panic he buried Ms Rodgers, who he described as very attractive.

But the jury rejected his story.