I was sitting in the hospital waiting room when the doctor walked in and I knew before he said a word. My sister was gone, stabbed seventeen times on the way to meet her fiance. What I didn’t know…

She was supposed to be celebrating her engagement. Instead, Janet Newton was lying in a pool of blood on a quiet street in Hartlepool, stabbed seventeen times. Her sister Lynn had seen her just hours earlier, full of happiness after getting engaged to Malcolm Pearson. Nothing about that night suggested it would end in murder.

Janet had left her parents’ home wearing her best red dress, walking the five-minute route to meet Malcolm. When she didn’t arrive, he called her mother, worried. As he went out to find her, a police officer received a radio message about a hit-and-run. Traffic cop Mick Coverdale arrived first.

He found a young woman’s body and a shoe with no scuff marks. It didn’t look like an accident. Then he found a handprint in red on the back of a parked car. He radioed for CID.

This was murder. Janet Newton was just twenty-three. She was the eldest of four children, studious and kind, the kind of person who bought presents for her whole family with her first paycheck and sponsored a child abroad. She had recently started dating Malcolm Pearson, a confident welder nine years older than her.

Her family worried it was too fast. Malcolm had a past. He’d been in trouble with the law, described himself as a brawler. But Janet was in love.

Malcolm had been separated from his wife Maria. Their relationship had been volatile, stormy, marked by accusations and violence. He’d been fined for attacking her. She’d once claimed he raped her, then went back to his house and slept with him.

She later admitted the claim was false. They had a daughter together, but the child was taken into care. Malcolm discovered Maria was still married to someone else and began annulment proceedings. He wanted to move on.

He met Janet. Maria couldn’t accept it. She became obsessed. She stalked Malcolm, banging on his door and screaming when he wouldn’t let her in.

She turned her attention to Janet, following the couple, shouting at them in the street. She wrote to Janet’s mother, calling Janet horrible names and claiming she was only after Malcolm’s money. She made silent phone calls to the family home. She even called the fire brigade, claiming there was a fire.

She rented a house across the road from Malcolm’s mother and just stood on the doorstep, staring at the house. She put a window through a neighbor’s house by mistake. She went into the Abbey National where Janet worked and threatened to kill her. Malcolm’s niece, Andrea, had been befriended by Maria without knowing who she was.

Maria seemed nice at first. Then Andrea saw flashes of odd behavior. One night, Maria got them all to go to a club. Malcolm was there.

When he saw Maria with his niece, he was furious. He frog-marched Andrea out and put her in a taxi. “She’s dangerous,” he told her. “You need to stay away from her.

”

Janet had started to feel afraid. She asked her sister Lynn to go to self-defense classes with her. Lynn declined. It remains a massive regret.

On October 16, 1986, Janet and Malcolm announced their engagement. Two days later, she was dead. Maria had been out with friends. She picked up a young student in town, pretended to be his girlfriend, and manipulated him into driving her to a street near Janet’s home.

She told him to park across from where Janet lived. She was lying in wait. When Janet left her house, Maria followed her into Grange Road and attacked. She stabbed Janet seventeen times, twice through the heart.

Then she ran back to the car, and the driver took off. He later told police she followed Janet and returned minutes later. When police questioned Malcolm, he pointed them straight to Maria. “She’s been getting stalked off Maria,” he said.

But when detectives went to arrest her, she was gone. She was on the run. A neighborhood beat officer who had met Maria at a New Year’s Eve party thought she might know where she had gone. Her aunt’s friend in Oxford had met Maria at a women’s refuge.

When the officer called, the woman confirmed Maria had phoned and wanted to come stay. But by the time police arrived, she had left. She was heading to London, then to Dover, planning to leave the country. A quick-thinking officer in Reading stopped a late-night bus.

Maria Pearson was on it. She was brought back to Hartlepool and kept under strict surveillance. One policewoman sat with her and remembered Maria smiling at her and casually commenting that Oxford was nice at that time of year, as if she was in for shoplifting. She showed no signs of distress.

In July 1987, Maria Pearson went on trial for murder. She showed no remorse. She had one expression on her face and never changed it. She told lie after lie, insisting Malcolm had killed Janet.

She claimed she saw him do it. The prosecution presented evidence of premeditation: she bought the knife from a hardware store, she was driven to the scene and waited for Janet to leave. The jury found her guilty. The judge called her full of jealousy and bitterness, deeply hostile and resentful.

She was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of twelve years. But it wasn’t over. She appealed, and in 1990 she finally admitted what she had done. She claimed she’d been mentally unstable at the time, citing premenstrual tension, depression, a miscarriage days before.

She blamed Malcolm, used provocation and self-defense. She filed repeated applications citing personality disorder and battered woman syndrome. Every appeal was denied. Maria Pearson has now spent four decades in prison.

She has appeared before the parole board nine times, and each time parole was denied. She remains Britain’s longest-serving female prisoner. The press nicknamed her the forgotten prisoner, but Janet’s family knows she hasn’t been forgotten. Her sister Lynn lives with the grief every day.

Christmas is a nightmare. She feels guilty for enjoying happy occasions without Janet. She’s learned to push the grief back and put on a smile, because that’s all she can do. Malcolm never got over it.

He stayed on his own, became a loner. His family doesn’t really see him anymore. Maria Pearson couldn’t have the man she wanted, and she couldn’t accept that he wanted someone else.

So she stabbed an innocent young woman seventeen times, leaving her family to pick up the pieces forever.