A British cleaner murdered his wife eight days after their wedding, burned her body, and then spent $123,000 of her inheritance traveling through 32 countries while pretending she was still alive, according to New York Post reporting on the case.
Jamie Starbuck, who married Nottingham woman Debbie Cooper in 2010, was sentenced to 30 years in prison by Judge Michael Stokes QC, who called the crime one of the most horrific he had seen in a long judicial career. The full account of the deception has been laid out in The Telegraph's Missing Debbie podcast and revisited this month in international coverage.
How the deception worked
Debbie Cooper and Jamie Starbuck met in July 2009 through a Nottingham MeetUp group. Within three months they were living together, and within ten months they married in a small registry office ceremony, the New York Post report details.
Weeks later, Starbuck, who dreamed of becoming a photographer, told her family he had won a photography competition. The prize, he said, was a trip photographing Europe. He and Debbie would set off on an open-ended journey around the world, starting in Amsterdam.
For nearly two years, Debbie's sisters and friends back in Britain received sporadic emails describing yoga retreats on the side of a volcano, beaches in India, and life on a Nicaraguan ecovillage. One message described waking at 5:15 for meditation. Another explained her silences by saying that checking email simply did not feel like a priority.
But the sisters never received a single photograph. Suggestions of phone calls were ignored.
The tells that family and friends could not ignore
Starbuck ran a travel blog called Diary of a Misanthrope, and its tone was bitter. He wrote that Greece was terrible, that the food in Colombia was poor, and complained of food poisoning in India. The blog covered 32 countries, including South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Thailand, India, and finally Peru.
Friends noticed something worse than bad manners. Matthew, a friend from the MeetUp group, observed that Starbuck never mentioned Debbie in his posts and never included her in his plans. Another friend, Andy, noticed the blog had stopped using the word