Horse trainer who stabbed husband to death told cops ‘he was such a cruel b*stard’
This is the moment a horse trainer arrested for her husband’s murder tearfully told police: ‘he was such a cruel bastard’.
Christine Rawle, 70, asked her husband Ian to help her clean their stables before stabbing him in the back as he walked past, a jury heard.
After committing the crime, the defendant then called a friend and asked her to ‘sort her dogs out’ before removing the blade from between her husband’s shoulders.
Rawle, who had picked the knife up to cut some cord to tie up the gates as her husband had asked, was on the phone to her daughter when she attacked him.
Police had previously attended the couple’s house prior to Mr Rawle’s killing, and two had been likened to Roald Dahl characters The Twits due to their constant bickering.
In bodycam footage released by Devon and Cornwall Police after being shown to the jury, Rawle is taken in custody and fights back tears as she tells cops: ‘How can someone be so cruel? He is narcissistic.
‘Oh please god, he is such a cruel bastard.
‘How could you love someone and they are so calculatingly nasty to you.
‘It’s been boiling…
‘Even my dog and my horses. He will come and get me, he will kill me.’
When told she was being arrested for his murder, Rawle was heard on camera saying: ‘Oh god, why couldn’t someone have stopped him from doing this to me.
‘I’ve tried that many times – I tried the other day to phone the police and it takes forever for them to pick up.
‘You can’t do a 999 call and say he’s just shouting at me can you?’
The footage was released after being shown to the jury during the ongoing trial.
Earlier in the trial, jurors at Exeter Crown Court heard how Mrs Rawle would put viagra in her husband’s tea, chilli powder in his underpants and would wipe her backside with his ties.
After the killing took place on August 21, 2022, Mrs Rawle told her daughter on the phone: ‘I’ve stabbed him’.
Upon hearing the news of the stabbing ,Mrs Rawle’s adult daughter, who lives in Milton Keynes, hung up and called the police and ambulance services.
After knifing her husband of 27 years, prosecutor Sean Brunton KC told the jury she ran away shouting ‘help me, help me’ as Mr Rawle followed her asking her to remove the knife.
He said: ‘Her husband tells her to tie the gates back, she says she can’t find the scissors, so he tells her to use the knife.
‘He then says something about the children and when he walks past her with the wheelbarrow, she stabs him in the back. He puts the wheelbarrow down.
‘He asks her – not unreasonably you might think – to take the knife out of his back.
‘She runs away, shouting “help me, help me” and he walks after her, no doubt very angry or distressed, with the knife still in his back.
‘At some point, he collapses in the garden, she doesn’t take the knife out straight away.
‘She puts the dogs away, calls her friend, then takes the knife out and puts it under the stable door.’
He added: ‘At 14.40, the ambulance service called her back. But Christine Rawle calls her friend to sort her dogs out rather than call for help for her husband.’
‘While her husband was dying and while the ambulance operator was trying to get her to spring into action, she was heard saying “d*ck, d*ck, I’ve killed him the b*astard”.
‘She stabbed her husband between the shoulder blades, it punctured between the ribs and he bled into his chest cavity, which caused cardiac arrest.
‘The knife was 10cm into his back which caused a collapsed lung.’
When police arrived at the scene, she told officers: ‘I took his life because he was horrible to me. He terrorised. It was continuous. I wanted out.’
She also told officers: ‘He wasn’t sexually capable, he had a prostate issue, he used to blame me and tell me I’m not attractive.
‘He didn’t want children, he made me get sterilised.’
Mr Brunton added: ‘We say these claims were this defendant trying to justify to the police – and maybe to herself – what she had done.
‘We also say she was 42 when they got together, she already had three children from a previous relationship.
‘Did she sound like she wanted to have children with him? Could he have made her get sterilised?’
When asked by police if she stabbed her husband, she said: ‘I suppose I must have done, but I can’t remember.
Mr Bruntontold the court how in 1993, Rawle had got into trouble with the police over nuisance phone calls made to one of her husband’s ex-partners.
A few years later, police were called to the house again when she stabbed her husband in the chest, Mr Brunton said.
A neighbour, who was introduced to the couple by her partner, was told this sort of behaviour was ‘normal’ for the pair.
Mr Brunton said: ‘We fully accept Ian Rawle was not very nice to his wife, but that may have been for a reason.’
Rawle denies murder. The case continues.
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