John and Leigh Sabine. Photo: Police handout
Warning: Contains spoilers for the three-part series The Body Next Door.
When a body entombed in layers of plastic was discovered in a South Wales village, it was the end of a tragic tale which began in Auckland in the 1960s.
The body, discovered in 2015, was John Sabine, husband of Leigh Sabine. It was found, shortly after her own death from cancer, on the property where she had lived.
A new documentary, The Body Next Door, tells this sad, convoluted story over three episodes.
In 1969, John and Leigh Sabine dropped their five children at day care in Auckland, telling them they would be back for them later. They never returned.
The five abandoned children spent the next 10 or so years in and out of foster care.
Their parents had fled to Australia, where Leigh had ambitions of launching a career as a cabaret singer.
Steve Sabine. Photo: Screenshot
"She used to think she was Shirley Bassey or something," her son Steve Sabine said.
The abandoned children were a big national news story at the time, which got even bigger in the early 1980s when the Sabine parents reappeared in New Zealand claiming they always intended to put the family back together.
Of the five children, Steve, Lee-Ann and Jane all feature extensively in The Body Next Door. Their recollections of the trauma of abandonment and the abuse they endured in foster care are heart-wrenching.
"We never got any nurturing, or anything like that," Steve Sabine said.
The 1984 reunion soon fell to pieces. The parents again abandoned the family, sold up and and headed to the UK with eldest boy Marty in tow.
The second rupture was brought to a head by Jane challenging her mother over the initial abandonment and talking to the media about it. Leigh was incandescent, Steve recalled.
Jane Sabine. Photo: Screenshot
"Jane had challenged her, she was that angry, you could see the rage in her, and I sort of looked at her, and I thought, 'my God, she could kill someone'."
Leigh was indifferent to the suffering her actions caused the children, Jane Sabine said.
"My mother was a nasty, horrible, heartless bitch."
Lee-Ann, the youngest, never felt Leigh was her mother.
"She was the lady that gave birth to me, and gave me life, but she was not my mother."
Lee-Ann Sabine. Photo: Screenshot
Years later, Leigh's new Welsh neighbours found her to be charming, if eccentric, company. Flamboyant, cigarette and drink permanently to hand, she was a keen raconteur.
She told neighbours her husband John had left her years previously.
"There was no doubt she was an absolute story-teller," detective chief inspector Gareth Edwards said. "The stories of her life were totally mythical."
She frequently mentioned to neighbours and carers a "medical skeleton" she had in the communal garden wrapped up in plastic.
When it was opened up as a prank after Leigh's death, the grisly truth was revealed - a mummified body lay within.
"Every homicide is unique, but in this case, it was absolutely bizarre," Edwards said.
Detective chief inspector Gareth Edwards. Photo: Screenshot
Eventually a DNA match with a son from a previous relationship in England revealed the body to be John Sabine. A hair found in the layers of packaging wrapped around the body was identified as Leigh's, making her prime suspect.
A woman, Valerie Chalkley, meanwhile got in touch with South Wales police after a media appeal for information.
She recalled an out-of-the-blue conversation with her former neighbour Leigh Sabine in 1997, after many years of not being in touch.
"She said 'I've killed him. I've battered him with a stone frog, because he was getting on me nerves.' I thought, she's having me on, she could come out with statements that were totally ridiculous."
But it was the truth - a brutal end to a sorry tale.
The children she and John abandoned all struggled in various ways in their adult life; Steve, Lee-Ann and Jane are testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
But the trauma of that abandonment still echoes through the years.
"We thought we did something to upset them, why else would your parents drop you and run?" Steve said..
The Body Next Door is streaming on TVNZ+ from 2 September.
