Deadly Divorces. Tammy Cohen

Lorna toppled over and fell to the floor, Lindsey Rees jumped to her feet and ran out of the office and up the stairs. As she reached the top, she heard another shot.

      Downstairs Rena Salmon walked calmly over to Lorna and took her by the hand. She maintains Lorna was still alive at this point and, as she squeezed her hand, they reverted to the close friends they’d once been – two best friends facing death together.

      Rena reached for her phone and dialled 999, telling the operator: ‘I’ve just shot my husband’s mistress.’

      ‘Do you want to give yourself up?’ she was asked.

      ‘Yeah,’ came the reply. ‘I’m sitting with her.’

      When the operator asked the caller’s name, there was the same unhurried and almost casual air about her reply: ‘Rena Salmon – Salmon as in the fish. Right, got to go.’

      After that, Rena smoked first one cigarette and then a second as she sat next to Lorna Stewart’s now motionless body. While she waited, she sent a series of text messages.

      ‘I’ve shot Lorna, you pushed me to it,’ read the one she sent to husband Paul.

      Then she sent a message to Leone Griffin: ‘I’ve shot Lorna. Look after my daughter for me.’

      At first Leone couldn’t take it seriously.

      ‘I hope it’s a joke,’ she messaged back.

      When she got no reply, Leone rang Rena. ‘What have you done?’ she demanded. ‘I hope you’re joking.’

      But this was no joke. In the same calm voice, Rena said, ‘No, I’ve shot her. Once in the back and once in the side, and she’s lying on the floor.’

      By this time Paul Salmon had received the harrowing text from his wife and was on his way to the salon. He rang Rena from his car.

      ‘What have you done?’ he yelled.

      ‘I’ve shot Lorna,’ Rena repeated.

      ‘Is she dead?’ Paul demanded, trying to keep control of his emotions as he drove to the scene.

      ‘I don’t know,’ came the answer.

      There’s nothing more surreal than being in a familiar place where something cataclysmic has taken place. All the physical surroundings are the same – the grey streets, with the odd bit of litter blowing in the gutter, the same shop fronts, the same peeling posters, and yet something fundamental has shifted so it’s as if you are seeing it all for the first time. Everything is different and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

      Paul Salmon pulled up in front of the salon on 10 September with his heart pounding. It was as if he was in a film, as if it was all happening to someone else. Unfortunately, this was one movie he couldn’t pause or switch off, or walk out of. By the time he arrived, the police were already there: Lorna Stewart was dead and it was all over; it was all too late.

      * * * * *

      After a 9-day trial in which her defence team sought to prove that she was a devoted wife who was traumatised by an unhappy childhood and pushed to the brink of insanity by a cruel and unfaithful husband, on 16 May 2003 Rena Salmon was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The court was then told that Lorna had been two months’ pregnant at the time she was killed. Rena’s worst fears had been on course, after all.

      In the fallout from one violent death, many lives can be radically altered. Paul Salmon, who went on record saying he had ‘no regrets’ about his affair with love-of-his-life Lorna and no guilt about cheating on Rena, was divorced a month after the trial ended. Six months later he was engaged to his new girlfriend.

      Both the Salmon and the Rodrigues children are growing up without a mother and Keith Rodrigues, who never stopped loving his wife, knows there’ll always be an empty space at special family occasions no one else can fill.

      As for Rena Salmon herself, faced with a lifetime of imprisonment she has had all the time in the world to think about what she did and all the time in the world for regrets. She knows she will miss her children growing up; she’ll miss being there when they rip open their exam results and miss waving them off on their first day of university. She won’t be there to wipe their tears when they experience the first heartbreak of young love, nor will she share their everyday fears and frustrations, their disappointments and their triumphs.

      Rena has told friends that Lorna haunts her and she would do anything to swap places with her. She may be eligible for parole in 2017, but even then she will take her past with her: things that are done can never be undone.

      When a marriage breaks down in bitterness there are no winners and when the fetid entrails of a life together are spilled out on the pavement for all the world to see there can be only losers.

      It’s something Rena Salmon knows only too well.