FOR 28 years Gordon Park thought he had got away with murder. As the body of the wife he had bludgeoned to death rotted undiscovered at the bottom of Coniston Water, he very nearly did.

But yesterday, after a ten-week trial at Manchester Crown Court, the retired village schoolmaster from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, was jailed for life after being found guilty of murdering his wife Carol, 30, in July 1976.

There were gasps from relatives in the public gallery as the verdict was delivered and Mr Justice McCombe told Park that, because of aggravating features, he would serve at last 15 years in jail. The judge told him: “There was considerable physical suffering. Her eyes were taped. She inhaled blood and suffered disfiguring wounds.

“She also tried to defend herself from the brutal blows inflicted. The terrible concealment of the body has led to so much suffering inflicted on so many people over such a long period of time.”

Park, a tall figure in silver-framed spectacles, suddenly appeared frail as he picked his way down to the cells while Jennifer Park, his third wife, son Jeremy, 34, and daughter Rachel, 33, had to be supported.

Outside the court Ivor Price, 65, Carol’s brother who collapsed with emotion in the gallery, said that he had no doubt that at long last justice had been done for his sister.

He said: “The last words my mother spoke in her hospital bed were ‘find Carol’. Well, we did and now we have found her killer too. I now have no feelings whatever for Gordon Park. He is an habitual liar.”

For years Park and Carol Ann, also a teacher, appeared to be happily married. Park was a respected teacher and had built his own house for his wife and three children in a village on the edge of the Lake District.

But the marriage was a loveless one. The couple had engaged in wife-swapping and vivacious Carol had several times tried to flee her controlling husband.

She once fled to a new life near Middlesbrough with a lover she met on an Open University course, returning only because she could not stand being parted from her adopted daughter Vanessa, then 8, Jeremy, 6, and Rachel, 5.

Angela Short, a family friend, described Park as an “intense, deep man . . . a very patient man”. But he could cope only so far with his wife’s continued infidelities.

After she disappeared in the summer of 1976, Park insisted that he had returned from a daytrip to Blackpool with the children to discover her missing, telling family and friends that she had walked out on him. Then, by chance, in August 1997, amateur scuba divers found her body trussed up in a weighted package 70ft below the lake surface.

At the time of the discovery, Park was on holiday in France with his third wife. On his return he was charged with murder but the prosecution was dropped because of a lack of evidence. The inquiry was never closed and, over the years, fresh evidence emerged including prison cell confessions, expert analysis of knottying and the testimony of a courting couple who saw a slim, bespectacled figure drop a bulky package from a dinghy into the water.

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