Tragedy that tore apart a family
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Your support makes all the difference.Rarely have the wounds of a family been so exposed as they were during the retrial of Sara Thornton for the murder of her husband Malcolm. Little had been forgotten and even less forgiven, writes Will Bennett.
A sheet of paper was pasted across the pane of glass which separated Thornton from the small public gallery to stop her husband's family from glaring at her. They had been moved to the back of the court so that the jury could not see their reactions to evidence.
Like the complex Thornton herself, nothing about this case was straightforward and it spawned a tangled web of family alliances. The first witness for the prosecution was Henry Cooper, her father, and the second was her stepmother Juliette. Both painted an unsympathetic picture of her.
Thornton has always blamed many of her problems on her upbringing, portraying her father as cold and uncaring, and her mother, Jane, who died more than 20 years ago, as a brutal disciplinarian.
It is four years since father and daughter have spoken, their always fragile relationship shattered by the publicity surrounding the case. He is angered by the accusations she has made about her childhood, and she has never got over his comment after the first trial that "justice had been done".
Later in the retrial, the Coopers sat in the public gallery immediately behind Jean Murray and Gladys Sothers, Malcolm Thornton's sisters, who have always maintained that he was not violent. It was an unlikely alliance.
In the years following Malcolm Thornton's stabbing, one of the most vociferous voices in his support was that of Moyra Friend. She died last October from asthma which her family say was exacerbated by the stress of the impending retrial.
By contrast the first witness for the defence was Thornton's sister Billi Garver, who now lives in California. She cried as she told the court how she found her sister lying in a pool of blood after a suicide attempt. There was a softness in her voice as she mentioned Thornton's extreme behaviour and mood swings.
A few feet from the Coopers, across the aisle of the public gallery, sat Luise, Thornton's 18-year-old daughter from her first marriage, who lives with Mrs Garver and has always supported her mother. The two factions did not acknowledge one another.
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