Sculptress

PROLOGUE

Dawlington Evening Herald, January, 1988

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS FOR BRUTAL MURDERS

At Winchester Crown Court yesterday, Olive Martin, 23, of 22 Leven Road, Dawlington, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal murders of her mother and sister, with a recommendation that she serve twenty-five years. The judge, who referred to Martin as ‘a monster without a grain of humanity’, said that nothing could excuse the savagery she had shown to two defenceless women. The murder of a mother by her daughter was the most unnatural of crimes and demanded the strongest penalty that the law could impose. The murder of a sister by a sister was no less heinous.

“Martin’s butchery of the bodies,” he went on, ‘was an unforgivable and barbarous desecration that will rank in the annals of crime as an act of supreme evil.” Martin showed no emotion as sentence was passed…