Michael Thompson, a former amateur boxer from Northampton, has been found guilty of murdering and raping his estranged wife, Kimberley Thompson, and of attempting to disguise the killing as a suicide. The case matters because the "coercive and controlling" father-of-four very nearly evaded justice after police initially accepted the staged scene he created, believing his wife had taken a fatal overdose of pills and spirits following consensual sex.

Kimberley Thompson, a civil servant and award-winning basketball coach, was attacked in the middle of the night last August as the couple were going through a divorce. Jurors heard that Thompson had been watching sex videos while "stewing" over her new relationship and her demand for a larger divorce settlement. He was convicted of murder, rape and two counts of perverting the course of justice after a six-week trial and nearly 12 hours of jury deliberation, and reacted by shaking his head and mouthing "wow" in the dock. He will be sentenced next Thursday. Following the verdict, it emerged that police had re-examined the death 25 years earlier of Rhonda Anderson, mother of his elder two children, who was found electrocuted in a bath in 2000 in what a coroner ruled an accident.