A woman and and her lover who killed her husband were found guilty yesterday at Armagh Crown Court.
A jury unanimously convicted Jacqueline Crymble and her lover, Rodger Ferguson, of murdering 35-year-old Paul Crymble nearly three years ago out of "greed, a lust for money".
After the trial ended the two of them were branded "murdering scum" by Crymble's sister, Nicola Cree.
The judge also told Crymble that while giving evidence "it was as if you were talking about a complete stranger instead of a man who was your husband and the father of your children".
Four months to the day since the start of the trial, the Armagh Crown Court jury of eight men and three women took just minutes over two hours to convict 35-year-old Crymble and her 31-year-old lover of the "appalling and callous murder".
By its verdict the jury rejected Crymble's claims that her "entirely innocent husband" had been abducted and then murdered by four masked men who burst into their home on June 20th, 2004.
However, the jury acquitted Ferguson's friend, Colin Robinson (21), of the murder of Mr Crymble, who was suffocated and found bound hand and foot, a black bin bag tied about his head with masking tape, in the back of his Seat Ibiza car which was abandoned in a remote country lane near his Ballybreagh Road home, at Ahorey, near Richhill.
Instead, Robinson, of Riverside Apartments, Gilford, who had given Ferguson a lift on the night of the murder, was convicted of assisting an offender.
Neither Crymble, now of Edenkennedy Way, Markethill, nor Ferguson, of Cabragh Road, Tandragee, showed any emotion at the verdicts.
However, trial judge Mr Justice McLaughlin, thanking the jury, said he agreed "entirely with the verdicts" and told the pair they had "committed the most appalling and cruel murder of an entirely innocent man who did no harm to anyone in his life and you will have to pay the price for that.When you failed to take his reputation, you took his life instead." The judge said he had watched Crymble throughout the trial, and he told her it appeared to him "you are living somewhere that is not attached to reality" and for that reason, before sentence, he wanted "extensive psychiatric and psychological" reports on her.