To neighbours and passersby there was nothing out of the ordinary about the comings and goings at Maureen Rickards’ rented terrace on St Martin’s Road in Canterbury.
It was just another anonymous home on a street full of red-brick terraces, favoured by local students looking for a cheap house-share.
But hidden behind the uniformed wheelie bins and disguised with grimy net curtains was a terrifying house of horrors.
Inside, Rickards’ ‘meek’ husband Jeremy, 65, had been forced to endure horrifying abuse before he was stabbed to death five times in a fit of fury by his wife of 27 years.
Rickards, 50, then stored the body in a cupboard in her bedroom prior to stuffing it in a nylon holdall and burying the bag under grass cuttings in the property’s shabby back garden.
Inside the house Rickards lived in a dingy attic bedroom marked with the number five on the door and every inch of the space was covered in piles of clothes, makeup and rubbish.
She shared the run-down house with four other tenants and her cluttered room overlooked the garden, acting as the initial hiding spot for Jeremy’s body.
After she stabbed him in the chest and heart Rickards, took off his clothes, leaving him in underwear, and stored the body, gushing with blood inside her cupboard for several days – pools of crimson were later found in the cabinet.
Maureen Rickards stabbed her husband and buried his body in the garden of her rented terrace house on St Martin’s Road in Canterbury
Rickards, 50, stored Jeremy’s body in a cupboard in her bedroom prior to stuffing it in a nylon holdall and burying the bag under grass cuttings in the property’s shabby back garden
Every inch of Rickards’ bedroom (pictured) was covered in piles of clothes, makeup and rubbish
Maureen Rickards (pictured) was found guilty of ‘viciously’ murdering her husband, who she violently berated and abused
Police said the room, which resembled a hoarders stash house, ‘smelt of death’.
Two extremely narrow flights of stairs wrapped in a thin black speckled carpet led up to her bedroom.
And one of Rickards’ housemates, Danny Matcham said he heard ‘bumping’ noises before spotting Rickards in the garden.
She would have dragged Jeremy’s body, which weighed little over seven stone, down at least thirty stairs.
His body, which lay in a forced fetal position inside a black and grey holdall from Temu, would have collided with each individual stair, making a thumping sound, before being buried in the garden.
Rickards was arrested after she messaged the couple’s daughter, Chima Rickards, using her dead husband’s phone to say that her father had arrived in Saudi Arabia, where he was working, Canterbury Crown Court heard.
Chima was concerned about the style of messages and asked if her mother had taken over her father’s phone.
When Rickards later messaged her daughter to say that her father had taken his own life, Chima Rickards reported her father to the police as missing.
While he was still missing, Rickard’s then used her husband’s bank cards to purchase items including Vanish carpet shampoo, Febreze air freshener and stain remover.
Police visited her student flat on July 11 and found Mr Rickard’s body after recognising a a distinctive ‘sickly smell’ in the garden.
After a two-week trial, she was found guilty of ‘viciously’ murdering her husband, who she violently berated and abused.
Rickards was living in a dingy attic bedroom marked with the number five on the door (pictured)
Rickards would have dragged the body, which weighed little over seven stone down at least thirty stairs
One of Rickards’ housemates, Danny Matcham said he heard ‘bumping’ noises down the stairs before spotting Rickards in the garden
In the lead-up to the savage murder Rickards physically and verbally abused her husband
Shocking footage show the battered Jeremy, weakly sipping a beer in a Wetherspoons pub in Canterbury before his death.
He had bruises on his face and one of Rickard’s housemates said Jeremy looked as though he had been through ‘ten rounds’ in a boxing ring.
A bar worker at The Thomas Ingoldsby pub in Canterbury, where Mr Rickards was also a regular, described Mr Rickards as ‘frail’ but ‘lovely’.
The woman told MailOnline: ‘He would come in on his own, casually but smartly dressed, pay in cash, always drink the same drink, and was never any trouble to anyone in the pub.
‘I know Ms Rickards tries to paint him as a bit of a drunk, but working in a pub as long as I have done, when people do get too drunk we normally cut them off, but that’d never been the case with Jeremy. He would never cause any problems. He’d just have a couple pints over a few hours and watch the world go by. He wasn’t a heavy drinker.
‘He was so soft and frail. He was just lovely. I want to get the good character of Jeremy out there.’
Describing when he was seen at the pub with injuries, she said: ‘It was very severe. His face was very swollen, especially to his left side, and his arm was swollen and red. And I remember speaking to him at the time, asking him, and he told me he had been in a car accident as a passenger in a friend’s car.
‘Obviously at the time I didn’t really believe him but where he was quite a private gentleman I didn’t want to push him.
‘It has been very hard to hear what he went through. I personally do feel guilt that I didn’t maybe press on his injuries a bit more.
‘I just feel like I wish I’d done more.
‘The pub was probably somewhere he could escape. His safe haven.’
A post-mortem examination revealed on Mr Rickards had been strangled and had been recovering from recent rib fractures.
Neighbours speculated that screams and cries from the house may have been masked by noisy student parties next door.
One resident, Angela Whitfield, 61, who lives across the road from the horror house said: ‘I did hear an animated lady’s voice, I could hear it from my house.
‘But it was nothing you would sort of think of as particularly concerning if you heard it as a one-off. Had I repeatedly heard that noise, I probably would’ve gone out to make sure that everything was alright.
‘I know my neighbours said they heard it a few times, which they thought was a bit strange.
‘But we hear some really strange noises, really odd stuff going on because of the students so we tend to perhaps switch off a little bit more because of that.
A post-mortem examination revealed Jeremy (pictured) had been strangled and had been recovering from recent rib fractures
The body was stuffed inside a black and grey holdall from Temu (pictured), it was in a forced fetal position
Speaking to MailOnline, neighbours speculated that screams and cries from the house may have been masked by noisy student parties next door
Rickards was living in a dingy attic bedroom in the house she shared with four other students
‘Students used to regularly go out on an evening, and call to each other from the other end of the street, so any noises we heard just wouldn’t have been out of the realms of norm for us in this area.’
Speaking about the only time she had spotted the couple, another neighbour said: ‘I had only seen them once walking down the street.
‘I recall him looking very henpecked, dishevelled.
‘My impression when I saw them was that they were not together you know?
‘He was walking a few feet behind her. I just thought he looked very henpecked, and that they don’t belong together.
‘Just the body language was not right.’
The street, which leads to the car park of Canterbury Crown Court, often has noise issues at night due to the presence of student HMOs and AirBnBs.
One neighbour who witnessed the arrest said: ‘There’s a house next door that always has noise complaints that I thought was the reason for the police being there. Because there’s always police next door, holding noisy parties during Covid, all of that.
The street, which leads to the car park of Canterbury Crown Court, often has noise issues at night due to the presence of student HMOs and AirBnBs
Rickard’s attic bedroom overlooked the garden (pictured) and acted as the initial hiding spot for Jeremy’s body
Rickards uploaded a haunting video to YouTube , giving her followers a tour of the garden, where the body was hidden (pictured)
The YouTube video zoomed in on a pile of dry grass concealing Jeremy’s decomposing body (pictured)
‘It’s just sad because you never know who you might have been able to save.’
Another neighbour said: ‘The problem was the house next door to the scene was used by young immigrant students.
‘And it was party central. So you were used to hearing shouts and bawling and screaming and everything at night, so you didn’t really pay much attention to what you heard.
‘I’ve seen lots of murders and things but it’s not often that something will actually touch you mentally.
‘But because he was such a slight guy, and had been beaten for so long by the sounds of it, it really sticks with you.
‘The forensics brought out all this bedding, and it was manky, stained, wet, and they just dumped it on top of the bins.
‘It obviously come from the room at the top of the house where they were.’
In June, eight days after Jeremy was reported missing by his family, Rickards uploaded a haunting video to YouTube, giving her followers a tour of the garden, where the body was hidden.
The carpet in Rickard’s bedroom was stained with her husband’s blood (pictured)
Shocking footage show the battered Jeremy, weakly sipping a beer in a Wetherspoons pub in Canterbury (pictured)
Rickards (pictured) messaged the couple’s daughter, Chima Rickards, using her dead husband’s phone to say that her father had arrived in Saudi Arabia, where he was working
The video zoomed in on a pile of dry grass concealing Jeremy’s decomposing body.
While she points her camera at the neglected patch of land, the student casually complains about her husband, who she affectionately nicknames ‘hubby’.
She said: ‘Hubby is always traveling, so I’m all alone.’
The patch was marked by orange traffic cones, which she blamed on the houses’ proximity to a court.
She then mumbles: ‘put these cones here, like danger.’
The alarming footage shows viewers the entire garden, featuring a clothes horse and freshly mowed lawn.
It also reveals the back of the red-brick house, which has several windows that overlook the makeshift burial ground.
Throughout the video, which she posted from her Rocks Synergy Esq account, Rickard appears to be in a daze.
Alarming footage shows viewers the entire garden, which is better-kept than typical student accommodation, featuring a clothes horse and freshly mowed lawn
The patch where Jeremy was murdered was marked by orange traffic cones, which she blamed on the houses’ proximity to a court (pictured)
Now, the garden has been completely neglected and the spot where the body was buried is covered in weeds, rubbish and overgrown plants
Rickard’s used her husband’s bank cards to purchase items including Vanish carpet shampoo, Febreze air freshener and stain remover
The 50-year-old incoherently rambles about the cost of rent, mowing the lawn and her nightgown, even walking across the garden barefoot thanking ‘Mother Earth’.
But while her state is one of delusion there appear to be no signs of remorse, fear or guilt in her behaviour, even though the garden would have had the distinctly ‘sickly smell’ of a dead body.
Now, the garden has been completely neglected and the spot where the body was buried is covered in weeds, rubbish and overgrown plants.
Current tenant Ahmed Osman, who fled to the UK to seek refuge from war-torn Sudan, said: ‘We only found out last week. We didn’t know anything about it, we weren’t told when we moved in.
‘When you hear something bad happened in the same place that you’re staying, it’s so so sad to hear.
‘The first day when we found out we were scared, we were thinking about the garden, and whether it feels like the person is still here.
‘But then after a few days it became normal to us, because we’d already spent more than three months here.’
