Andrew Chubb apparently had an idyllic, comfortable life. A veteran of the British Navy, where he had served for twenty years, he later became a barrister and by the age of fifty-eight, had become a respected circuit judge. He had even been part of the prosecution team in the infamous trial of Rosemary West. He and his wife of thirty-four years, Jennifer, lived in a beautiful, nineteenth-century farmhouse near Chard, Somerset, England.
Despite outward appearances, though, Andrew had a secret. Since 1999, he’d been carrying on an affair with a thirty-seven-year-old legal officer named Kerry Sparrow.
Jennifer found out about the infidelity when Kerry called the Chubb home one night and hung up when Jennifer answered; Jennifer confronted Andrew about the mysterious caller, and he admitted the affair. At that time, he insisted that he was going to end it and that he had no intention of leaving Jennifer.
On July 27th, 2001, however, it seems he had changed his mind, because that evening, he told his wife he wanted a divorce. Soon after this announcement, shortly after seven-thirty p.m., he put on his gardening clothes and went out to putter around in the yard. His wife later claimed she’d seen him in the garden shed, standing over the lawnmower.
At approximately eight-fifty p.m., Jennifer heard an explosion coming from the direction of the shed, and when she looked out the window, saw a large fireball.
By the time the fire brigade arrived, it was far too late to save Andrew Chubb, who had burned to death. An investigation into the incident found that the explosion had likely been caused by a spark from the lawnmower igniting gasoline fumes in the shed. An inquest in December of 2001 ruled Andrew’s death an accident.
But Andrew’s mistress Kerry Sparrow was certain that Andrew had been murdered, and insisted that the police delve further into the details. To her, it seemed suspicious that Andrew had died only a couple of hours after asking his wife of more than three decades for a divorce. Andrew’s wife shot back by accusing Kerry Sparrow of blackmailing her husband.
Jennifer Chubb was arrested and questioned in May 2002, held on suspicion of murder and perjury, but no charges were ever brought against her, and in 2006, the High Court convened a second inquiry, stating that there was “not a shred of evidence” that Andrew’s death had been a homicide.
Following the inquiry, the coroner changed the cause of death from “accidental” to “unascertained,” but asserted that there was no reason to believe that Andrew Chubb had been murdered, and that it was possible he might have killed himself. Friends disputed this hypothesis, claiming that Andrew was stridently opposed to suicide, but according to Jennifer’s account of the incident, it appeared that Andrew had closed the shed door after the explosion instead of attempting to run out.
Jennifer Chubb, who inherited her husband’s million-pound estate, later moved to Australia to escape public suspicion.
The case of Andrew Chubb is still very much up in the air, with theories of murder, suicide, or accidental death seemingly all equally plausible.
Crime Immemorial 