“The children are asking about mom… Please contact the police or your father and reassure us. Nothing that happened matters, all we need to know is that you are safe. I’m fine”. That call, through tears and with the victim’s father, was the height of cynicism. Garry Malone appeared before the media as a worried and distressed husband after the disappearance of Sharon, his second wife.
However, that face hid a potential murderer, who did not hesitate to flee with his children, live under a false identity on the Costa del Sol and deceive his neighbors for years. When the National Police arrested him and he was extradited, no one suspected the criminal past of that highly educated Englishman.
Sharon Clinch was an intelligent and bright girl, the first in her class at the Queen Elizabeth Girls’ School, in Barnet (Greater London), and with great skills in karate. In fact, it was in martial arts classes where she met her future husband, Garry Malone, a 28-year-old married man with brutal magnetism.
The instructor was a black belt and helped Sharon achieve some of the most well-known championships in the region. However, the relationship between student and teacher grew closer until, in 1988, when Sharon turned seventeen, they began a romantic relationship and Garry abandoned his first wife.
The news came as a splash of cold water for Sharon’s family, especially for her father Harry, who never looked favorably on the relationship between that adult and his daughter. In fact, when the young woman announced the wedding, no one around her trusted that the marriage would last long. She was in 1993.
Sharon and Garry moved to Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, raised their family and became parents to two children. But five years after the marriage, problems began to emerge between the couple. While she dedicated herself to working full-time and supporting the family economy, he stayed at home without providing any income.
Instead of looking for a stable job, Garry exercised absolute control over both the money and his wife, in addition to thinking about the best way to spend the money. One day, Sharon, fed up with the situation, took the children and went to her parents’ house. The woman wanted a divorce.
For his part, Garry, who at that time had a parallel relationship with a close friend of his wife, Paula, collapsed. First, because he had to reach a financial agreement with Sharon and avoid her financial ruin; and, second, because he did not want to lose his children. The solution: get Sharon out of the way.
On Sunday 28 November 1999, Garry lured Sharon to the family home where he assaulted her from behind and beat her to death. He then put her body in the victim’s car and drove to North Mymms Park woodland, near Hatfield.
Before abandoning the body, the husband took off some of her clothes and left her dressed only in a T-shirt, underwear, a watch and a bracelet. After her, he threw her onto the bank of a dry river. Garry then drove back, left the vehicle near the house on Cranborne Crescent and, hours later, went to the police station to report her missing.
Garry stated that he had seen his wife the previous afternoon, but made it clear that he could have left the house that same night. With these data, the agents began the search protocol and located the victim’s vehicle with blood stains. Suspicions were directed towards her husband, but he adamantly denied any involvement in her disappearance.
When the time came, Garry stood in front of the media and made a public appeal asking his wife to return home, to show signs of life. After that appearance in the company of his father-in-law, the grieving husband put his foot down, took his children and fled, assuring that he “was somehow at risk if he remained in this country.”
As he explained to Harry Clinch in a letter, his daughter owed money “to unpleasant men” for an unpaid debt and “needed to fix things.”
In January 2000, Garry and his two children traveled to Spain, more specifically to the Costa del Sol, where the murderer forged a new life under a false identity. He was renamed Ralph Kirque. Two months later, Sharon’s body was found: she had fractures to her face and skull and, in particular, a depressed fracture to the back of her head.
From then on, Garry became the main suspect in a murder case, and even more so when he did not travel for his late wife’s funeral. In addition, Scotland Yard was accumulating different evidence. The key was the positioning of his cell phone, which placed him at the place and time the body was dumped. Likewise, investigators also discovered another revealing fact: Garry had two accomplices, his eldest son Gareth and his lover Paula.
In the summer of 2004, the National Police arrested Garry in Fuengirola for killing his wife and transferred him to Madrid to await his extradition. The victim’s father was dismayed to learn of the arrest of his son-in-law and revealed that, in the last three years, he had barely heard from him or his grandchildren.
In May 2005, an Old Bailey court began the trial of Garry Malone for the murder of Sharon Malone. During the hearing, her husband’s debts, her extramarital relationship and how her eldest son and her lover helped him cover his tracks to hide the crime came to light.
Gareth helped clean the couple’s home in Potters Bar and remove blood-soaked wallpaper, which had been torn from the bedroom wall. As for Paula, the woman was accused of giving Garry a false alibi. Neither of them was ultimately convicted.
Judge Stephen Kramer found the defendant guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison, having to serve a minimum of 17 years in prison. During the reading of the verdict, the magistrate addressed the murderer with the following words: “You are a manipulative, calculating and lying man. He has shown no remorse for what he has done. Only you will really know what happened on the night of November 28, but you have decided not to say anything.”
Sharon’s father celebrated the court ruling and saw the life sentence as the best way to turn the page: “Garry got what he deserved and I don’t think the judge could have done more than he did. I think he has summed up very well what Garry was. It’s a relief that he’s done and isn’t here anymore. He has lost his freedom and his life. “Now we can move forward.”
Of course, Sharon’s brother, Andrew, couldn’t help but feel afraid. “My biggest fear is that she will escape and appear at our door,” he told the press once the trial was over.
