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Banker ‘strangled wife after bugging calls to her tennis coach lover’
Paul Cheston, Courts Correspondent24 Sep 2009
A City bank executive strangled his wife who was having an affair with their son's tennis coach, the Old Bailey heard today.
Neil Ellerbeck killed her because he was convinced she would leave him and cost him all his hard work and riches, the jury was told.
At 46, Ellerbeck was chief investment manager of HSBC, had a beautiful wife, expensive house and two talented children.
But the marriage had been deeply unhappy for years and he was obsessively jealous of wife, Kate, who had had sex not just with the tennis coach but also an old school friend, the jury heard.
Despite his jealousy, Ellerbeck, too, had been having an affair for seven years. He bugged hours of his wife's telephone calls and hid large amounts of money from her in case divorce proved inevitable.
Mrs Ellerbeck, 45, was also convinced that her husband had bugged her car and police later found gadgets in his office capable of spying on her emails and text messages.
Finally his suspicions and jealousies culminated in a violent argument in November last year and he strangled her in their Enfield home with up to 30 seconds of “sustained pressure on her neck,” the court heard
Ellerbeck sat in the dock dressed in a dark suit and black tie as he was described as “an ambitious and successful man”.
Edward Brown QC, prosecuting, said: “He had made lots of money, his children were doing well, but as you will hear he was a man with an obsessive and jealous nature.”
Faced with her infidelity, he killed because he was “confronted with the increasing reality of divorce — with all the consequences he had to envisage for the family and his finances”.
The evidence came in one of the taped phone calls — later discovered by police at his Canary Wharf office — which revealed “intimate details" of his wife's affair with tennis coach Patrick McAdam.
She had also became friendly with — and “was intimate with on one occasion” — a friend she had known for many years, said Mr Brown.
Ellerbeck, who has pleaded not guilty to murder, told police that he had been involved in a fight with his wife. On the day she died, the Ellerbecks' daughter faced an important exam, but after dropping her off at school the couple started arguing.
Just after midday Mrs Ellerbeck was dead and Ellerbeck called 999 saying he had come home to find her unconscious and not breathing.
In the 50 minutes prior to that call, Ellerbeck had collected his daughter and taken her back to school, received a text from his mistress and sent one back and bought a lottery ticket.
Mr Brown said: “It is very likely that Kate was dead by this time — the dreadful reality is that at some point during this period she was killed by her husband.”
Ellerbeck later told police that they had had a “bad argument” which escalated into a fight during which he had “turned a bit violent” and he had “pinned her down” on the carpet.
Ellerbeck told police he gave his wife “a decent shove” after she had attacked him and taunted him with the words “maybe I'm just going to divorce you,” the court heard.
He accepted that she had blood on her face and was “breathing heavily and was pale”.
But she was alive when he left the house to pick up his daughter even though their struggle had lasted 50 minutes, he said.
A pathologist found that Mrs Ellerbeck had 45 marks on her body, mostly over the mouth, jaw and neck, the court heard.
The case continues.
