A man who murdered his wife on their wedding night and stuffed her dead body into a suitcase has been jailed at Bradford Crown Court for life with a minimum term of 21 years.
The body of grandmother Dawn Walker, 52, was found in a field four days after she married Thomas Nutt on October 27 last year.
Bradford Crown Court heard that Nutt broke her leg so he could fit her corpse into the suitcase, which he later tossed over a fence before hiding it in bushes, where her remains were found four days after they married.
At the start of the trial, prosecutor Alistair MacDonald QC told jurors: “It is often said that someone’s wedding day, and the period immediately following, is one of the happiest times of their life.”
He said that this was not the case for Walker “because her body was found stuffed into a suitcase and dumped into some undergrowth in a field towards the back of this defendant’s house four days after she was married.”
MacDonald said witnesses described how Nutt and Walker had been together for a number of years but had a “troubled” relationship.
He said one neighbour described Walker – who had three daughters – as “chirpy and energetic.”
The neighbour had said that in 2020 she had seen her with a “massive” black eye and cuts to her face.
The prosecutor said this neighbour remembers that the defendant was sent to prison after these injuries appeared but the couple resumed living together once he was released.
Jurors in the trial were shown CCTV footage of Nutt wheeling a large suitcase out of the back of his house and into nearby bushes just as a police officer arrived at his front door to follow up on a missing person’s report for Walker.
MacDonald told the court that Nutt rang police on October 31 telling them his wife had gone missing after leaving their home in Shirley Grove, Lightcliffe, near Halifax, that morning, and he appeared to mount a search.
The prosecutor said the “hard and stark reality” was that the defendant “knew perfectly well that her body was lying dead in a cupboard at the marital home.”
Nutt lied to her family, blaming her disappearance on her mental health, sent them false texts supposedly from her, and convinced her youngest daughter to help try to find her, all the while knowing she was dead.
He had controlled his 52-year-old victim for years and isolated her from members of family, her sister told the court.
During the sentencing: judge Jonathan Rose told Nutt: “Dawn Walker died because you are a bully, used to getting your own way with women, used to controlling and manipulating women and used to using your considerable size advantage to inflict violence on women if you considered it necessary to do so.”
The victim’s daughter Kiera-Lee Guest told the court Nutt put up Halloween decorations in the house even while Ms Walker was lying dead.
Ms Guest said Nutt knew what he had done when she went from place to place with a photo of her mother, asking if people had seen her.
She said: “Justice will be served for my beautiful mother.”
Ms Walker’s sister Lisa said Nutt manipulated his victim and isolated her from family for three years “before his ungodly hands took her away from us forever”.
Lisa Walker told the court: “I mourn for my sister who suffered so much and felt like she had nobody to turn to because this man made her feel worthless.”
After the judge imposed a life sentence with a 21-year minimum term, a woman in the public gallery called out: “Thank you Your Honour, thank you.”
