A cheating wife, her lover and his daughter have been sentenced to life imprisonment over a plot to murder her terminally ill husband, which saw him survive being shot in the face.
Mother-of-three Hayley Weatherall cried in the dock as she was handed a minimum sentence of 15 years at Maidstone Crown Court on Tuesday for conspiracy to murder her husband, Raymond Weatherall.
She was sentenced alongside her lover Glenn Pollard, who will serve a minimum of 17 years in prison, and his daughter Heather Pollard, who was jailed for at least 15 years.
Sentencing them, Judge Adele Williams said: “This was cruelty of a high degree. Cold, calculated and chilling cruelty.
“You conspired to murder a man because you believed he stood in your way.
“That man was your husband, Hayley Weatherall; your best friend of over 20 years, Glenn Pollard; and ‘uncle Ray’, your father’s best friend and a man who you had known all your life, Heather Pollard.”
All three denied conspiracy to murder and were found guilty by a jury at Maidstone Crown Court on November 15.
The judge said the motive for the plot was the pursuit of an affair between Weatherall, 32 of Ash, in Kent, and Pollard, 49, of West Stourmouth, Kent, who sent each other sexually explicit text messages and photos.
The first attempt, the judge said, was when Heather Pollard, 20, also of West Stourmouth went to shoot the victim in Rainham on November 20, 2017 under instruction from her father, but was unable to do so.
The judge said Heather Pollard, who was 19 at the time, was “desperate” for approval from her father and joined the conspiracy with “enthusiasm”.
The second attempt was on November 29 the same year, when Heather Pollard took her father’s .22 calibre rifle, again under his instruction, and waited for five hours until she could take a shot at Raymond Weatherall, who was at Sandwich Marina, from across the River Stour.
The victim was shot in the face, narrowly missing his carotid artery and jugular vein, and bled profusely from the mouth, nose and ear.
The judge said Hayley Weatherall knew of the plot to shoot her husband, sending a text to Pollard from the hospital which said: “They didn’t do a very good job, he’s still here.”
Raymond Weatherall still has most of the bullet lodged in his left jaw, as it is too difficult to move it.
The court heard how the third attempt was in December 2017, when Heather Pollard researched insulin overdose on the internet, as the victim is a diabetic who injects insulin daily.
She sent a text message to her father on December 4, which said a method of killing the victim would be to “give him knockout pills and inject him where he injects himself”.
Hayley Weatherall told police that Heather Pollard had given her four sleeping tablets to crush into her husband’s food.
She said he had also given her £500 and told her to inject Raymond Weatherall with a full pen of insulin when he was asleep, but she could not go through with it.
The plot to murder came to light in January this year when a niece of Raymond Weatherall’s, Emma Worsfold, contacted the police and told of her growing suspicions that Pollard and his daughter were involved in the shooting after she became aware of the affair.
The judge said: “By the way in which each of you participated in this conspiracy, I believe that each of you will remain a serious danger to the public for a period which cannot be reliably estimated at the present time.
“I also conclude that such will be the revulsion and horror felt by right-thinking members of the public at this crime that only a sentence of imprisonment for life is justified.”