Stockport woman jailed after killing father and burying him in her back garden

A Stockport woman has been jailed for nine years for killing her father 12 years ago, then burying his body in her back garden.

Barbara Coombes, 63, pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Kenneth Coombes by reason of diminished responsibility.

At Manchester Crown Court on Wednesday, Michelle Colborne, QC, prosecuting, said she accepted the guilty plea by reason of diminished responsibility and would not refute that she has suffered years of physical, mental and, possibly, also sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

The prosecution also accepted that, at the time Coombes killed her father, she had been suffering from PTSD and a severe depressive illness.

On January 7th of this year, she walked into Cheadle Heath police station and said she had killed her father 15 years earlier and buried him in her back garden.

The court was told how she lived with her father up until his death, in January 2006.

On the day he died, she had been gardening outside. When she went indoors to get a drink, she found indecent images of children in a box of his possessions.

The defence said she fell into a ‘haze of disgust’ and killed her father with two blows to the back of the head and the neck, with a spade she had been using in the garden.

She then rolled his body in a carpet and buried him in the back garden.

His death was never reported, and Barbara Coombes told her family he had died of a sudden heart and had been cremated.

She continued to claim benefits in his name up until she went to the police. In total, she took £189,125 in tenants allowance and pension credits.

The court was told things started to ‘unravel’ in late 2017 when a care worker turned up at door to conduct a welfare check on Kenneth Coombes.

She was told by Barbara Coombes that he had gone to a Buddhist Convention and would not let the officer in the house.

The officer came back once more and after this visit, reported it to the fraud department and said she would return on January 8th. The day before, Barbara Coombes handed herself in to the police.

At a previous court appearance, in April, she was found guilty of fraud and preventing the lawful burial of a body.

Her defence outlined how, since the age of five, Barbara Coombes had suffered 'persistent and limitless' abuse by her father, to the point she became his 'sex slave'.

The court also heard it was possible he was the father of her first child, a boy who died three days after birth.

The court was told how Coombes was so affected by the years of abuse, she had attempted suicide on multiple occasions, and regularly self harmed.

At sentencing, the judge said the lifetime of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her father must have had been 'devastating' but concluded she had intended to kill her father, and had shown no remorse for his death or for concealing it from people for so long.

He said he believed, had the 'net' not been tightening around her, she would not have handed herself in.