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A powerfully-built ‘bully’ who murdered his bride on their wedding night and stuffed her body into a suitcase has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 22 years.
The body of 5ft grandmother Dawn Walker, 52, was found in a field in Lightcliffe, West Yorkshire, four days after she married Thomas Nutt on October 27 last year.
Nutt punched and then strangled Ms Walker just hours after their wedding. He then broke her leg so he could fit her corpse into the suitcase, which he later tossed over a fence before hiding it in bushes in a field, where her remains were later discovered.
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 victim for years and isolated her from members of family, her sister told Bradford Crown Court.
Nutt, who was convicted of murder earlier this month following a trial, was sentenced this morning. Judge Jonathan Rose told him: ‘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.’
Previously, jurors were told that Nutt, who did not give evidence in the trial, admitted the manslaughter of his wife on the basis that ‘he did not intend to cause her really serious harm at the time at which he killed her’.
But on Wednesday last week, a jury found him guilty of murder after three hours of deliberation. There were cheers in the courtroom after the verdict was announced.
Thomas Nutt killed his new wife Dawn Walker (pictured together) hours after their wedding
Nutt killed the mother-of-three hours after their wedding when they returned to their home.
He told police they had gone on honeymoon to Skegness the next day, but the judge said there was no evidence to support that claim, and the judge was sure Ms Walker was already dead.
The killer ‘desecrated’ her body by breaking bones to make her fit in the suitcase, Judge Rose said.
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.’
Alistair MacDonald QC, prosecuting, said the crime was aggravated by the way Nutt deceived her family after the murder, causing them ‘psychological damage’, he said.
Stephen Wood QC, defending, said there was no evidence that Nutt intended to kill his wife and that it had been ‘spontaneous’.
At the start of the trial, Mr MacDonald 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.’
Thomas Nutt, 46, has been jailed for life after being found guilty of murdering his wife
He said that this was not the case for Ms 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’.
Mr 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 in 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’.
Jurors 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 arrives at his front door to follow up the defendant’s missing person report.
Mr MacDonald said Nutt then handed himself in to a police station and told officers he and Ms Walker had been on a two-day caravan honeymoon, staying in a layby at Skegness.
The prosecutor said the defendant told police: ‘We came back and she has got bipolar and is depressed, said she wanted to get divorced.
‘She put me in jail before, said I had tried raping and assaulting her. Said she was going to do it again. She started screaming and I have hit her in the face and put my arm round her neck.’
Mr MacDonald said it was the prosecution case that Nutt went to Skegness alone, having killed his wife on their wedding night or the day after, and left her body in the house.
The body of grandmother Dawn Walker, 52, was found in a field on October 27 last year
The prosecutor said Nutt returned to act out the ‘ghastly charade’ of telling her daughter she was missing and carrying out a search.
The jury was shown CCTV footage of the defendant and Ms Walker arriving at the Prince Albert pub in Brighouse for a reception after their wedding at Brighouse Register Office.
Mr MacDonald said witnesses described how Nutt and Ms Walker had been together for a number of years but had a ‘troubled’ relationship.
He said one neighbour described Ms Walker, who had three daughters, as ‘chirpy and energetic’.
This neighbour, the lawyer added, 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.
He said: ‘She (the neighbour) recollects that Dawn and the defendant argued quite often during this period – one minute they were loved-up and the next they would be arguing.
‘She had never seen the defendant actually administer any physical violence to Dawn but she had heard arguing coming from the house and Dawn calling out: ‘Tommo, get off me’.’
Mr MacDonald said another neighbour described going round to the house two months before the wedding after he ‘had never heard such screaming coming from a woman before’.
He said Nutt told the neighbour that Ms Walker was having an asthma attack but that she shouted: ‘Don’t believe him, he’s lying, he’s trying to kill me.’
The prosecutor said an examination of Ms Walker’s body showed that she had suffered significant neck injuries which indicated there had been ‘a forceful application of pressure to her neck’.