Michael Thompson, 56, has been convicted of raping and murdering his estranged wife, Kimberley, at their marital home in Northampton in August last year, then staging the scene to make her death appear a suicide. The case matters because it cast fresh suspicion on the death 25 years earlier of Thompson's former partner, Rhonda Anderson, who was found electrocuted in her bath and whose death had been ruled an accident at the time.

The court heard that Thompson, a former doorman and amateur boxer, killed 43-year-old Kimberley in the early hours after watching sex videos and brooding over her new relationship and a financial settlement demand in their divorce. He arranged empty spirit bottles and pill packets by her body, sent messages from her phone claiming she had been drinking, and placed a wedding photograph and images of her late sister, who had taken her own life, beside her before calling police and paramedics. Rhonda Anderson, 29, mother of his two children, had been found dead in her bath in 2000 or 2001 alongside a mains-powered radio, a death a coroner deemed a tragic accident.