The horrific evidence killer Mike Reader didn’t want the jury to hear

Defence barristers for murderer Michael Reader, who was yesterday been found guilty of murdering his former wife, had asked Her Honour Judge Adrienne Lucking to allow them to keep secret a host of damning pieces of evidence.

It can be revealed for the first time today that before the start of the murder trial, counsel for Reader, 70, had asked that the jury did not hear details of a 2017 offence where he hit his former wife over the head with a mallet.

The brute went to Marion Price’s mother’s home in Earls Barton on May 4, 2017, weeks after she had found the courage to leave him.

She had emailed him to tell him she would no longer pay his utility bills. He came to her house and, in her living room, asked Marion to give him another £60,000 on top of thousands she’d already given him. When she refused, he hit her over the head three times with a mallet, breaking the fingers she’d put up to try to cushion the blows.

He also told her he’d ‘get’ her mother her grandchildren.

He was charged with grievous bodily harm with intent and possession of an offensive weapon. But following a 2018 trial, Reader was acquitted of those charges and walked free, allowing him to kill defenceless Marion eighteen months later.

The defence barrister William Harbage QC argued that this information might unfairly influence the jury, but in a ruling ahead of the eight-week trial, Judge Lucking said: “It’s a significant incident in the course of their relationship.

”It goes to the motive of the murder.”

Just before the trail had been due to start in September, police officers discovered a jacket in Reader’s house that contained gunshot residue - crucial to the prosecution case because Reader had managed to destroy the gun he used and the bike he rode.

The defence team did not want the jury to be told about the jacket because they said they had been ambushed with the late submission of a key piece of evidence, and that the jacket should have been tested earlier for gunshot residue.

For this reason, although they did not know it at the time, on the September day the trial had been due to start, the jury had to be sent home for four weeks before the case could restart in October.

Judge Lucking had also been asked to rule out witness statements given to police which showed Reader’s chilling coercive control over Marion.

He had twice abandoned her on trips to London, had threatened to kill her and had forced her to hand over £54,000.

Reader had refused to allow Marion to be on the electoral roll or to be on the council tax records at his Booth Rise home.

The defence team also didn’t want the jury to hear that Reader had forced Marion to leave her daughter’s wedding early, or that she had told friends that although he hadn’t hit her yet, he was very aggressive and that she was ‘petrified’ of him.

Marion had also told a pal four weeks after she married him that she thought she’d made a ‘big mistake’. And Judge Lucking also thought it important that the jury heard Reader had threatened Marion with a glass bottle when she’d gone to the bedside of her grandchild.

Judge Lucking said that the evidence was vital for the jury to hear because it built a picture of the relationship between the pair. In an unusual step, she also allowed the jury to hear details of the unsuccessful 2018 GBH prosecution because she said that it was evidence that she would have been able to give herself, had she still been alive.

The defence also didn’t want the jury to be able to see a photograph of Marion Price. But Judge Lucking ruled that it was ‘in no way prejudicial’.

Reader's team also didn’t want the jury to hear that in 2019, when the pair attended county court to decide how their finances should be split. Marion had told a supporter: “If anything should happen to me, it will be him”.

She gave evidence from behind a screen and refused to leave a waiting room until she was certain she wouldn’t have to face her bully in court.

In November 2019, after a divorce judge at Northampton County Court in the same building as the murder trial ordered Reader to give her £10,000, she disclosed to her barrister that she was scared of him. She was murdered less than a month later, on December 15, just days after Reader had paid her the money.

Judge Lucking did allow evidence about the screens in court and about Reader breaking golf clubs and hitting a dog to be withheld from the jury.