Husband who paid hitman to kill wife jailed
A senior health and safety officer who saved money each week to pay a contract killer to murder his wife was jailed for five years at the Old Bailey today.
Ian Glaubes, 45, paid a deposit of £2,500 and agreed a further £2,500 on completion of the job - but the hitman he hired turned out to be an undercover police officer.
Glaubes had beaten his wife, Jane, 43, up to three times a week for many years. She decided to leave him in December 1999, taking their children and demanding a portion of their house and shares worth £130,000.
Glaubes, who worked for British Gas, put aside money every week to fund his murder plan. But the court was told he made the mistake of confiding in a colleague, former paratrooper David Woods. Mr Woods claimed he knew of a suitable candidate but instead went straight to the police, who set a trap using an undercover officer known only as Gary.
Between May and June last year Glaubes, from Stanmore, north-west London, told the officer to kill his wife and make it look like a burglary gone wrong. In secretly taped conversations Glaubes said: "I want her [Jane] topped. There is no alternative but to do her." Glaubes also spoke of having his mother-in-law killed.
He supplied the officer with his wife's new address, her car registration number and told him she worked for the Department of Social Security in Wembley. The murder was planned for the weekend of 3 June but Glaubes called it off at the last moment because he feared one of his daughters was suspicious. He had also made contact with his wife again and wanted more time to consider but police arrested him.
The court heard the couple met in 1982 and married in 1990 but Glaubes began to beat her when his mother died a year later. Simon Smith, prosecuting, said: "He became impatient, domineering and difficult to communicate with."
In January 1998, Mrs Glaubes obtained a non-molestation order but the couple were reconciled and the beatings continued. She
began divorce proceedings and won the children in a custody battle.
Ian Macdonald, for the defence, said: "This is an aberration by a middleaged, middle-class, middleminded man who could not cope with the combined pressures of his work and matrimonial breakdown."
Sentencing Glaubes, who pleaded guilty to soliciting murder, Judge Graham Boal said some may regard the five-year term as lenient. However, he accepted Glaubes was suffering severe depression, which could have diminished his mental responsibility.
The judge told Glaubes his crime was "not a temporary aberration" but a plot sustained over three weeks, adding: "You provided concrete evidence of the seriousness of your intentions by paying the man you believed to be a hitman."
