Husband jailed for wife's killing

Robert Lund, originally from Darwen in Lancashire, was convicted of killing his second wife Evelyn, whose badly decomposed body was found in a lake two years after she went missing.

The jury of five men and four women rejected 55-year-old Lund's claim that his wife had driven into the lake by accident following a storm.

Lund was cleared of murder, but convicted of the lesser offence of involuntary homicide, which means that the jury did not accept that he intended to kill her.

During the five-day trial in the town of Albi, the court heard that Lund, a former tree cutter, had subjected his wife to a sustained campaign of mental and physical abuse that culminated in her death in December 1999.

Mrs Lund went missing from the farmhouse she shared with her husband in the remote village of Rayssac, south west France, on December 29 1999.

Her body was found two years later, slumped on the back seat of her Toyota Landcruiser in a lake 15 miles away.

The car was spotted by a horserider when a severe drought caused the level of Lake Bancalie to fall by 30ft.

A post-mortem examination on the body failed to establish the cause of death, but a pathologist said Mrs Lund was probably dead when she entered the water.

The prosecution argued that Lund killed his wife and tried to make the crime look like an accident so he could live off her life insurance. Mrs Lund's first husband Arthur Taylor, the father of her three daughters, left her well-off when he died from cancer in 1991.