Life for salon killer

Mother-of-two Rena Salmon was jailed for life at the Old Bailey today when the jury decided she was bad not mad when she murdered her love rival in a beauty salon.

After a two-week trial the 10 man two women jury unanimously rejected defence claims that Salmon had been suffering from severe depression, making her responsible only for manslaughter and not murder in the Chiswick High Road salon.

Unknown to the jury Salmon, in firing two shots from a double-barrelled shotgun at virtually point-blank range, had taken two lives because her victim, Lorna Stewart, had been two months' pregnant with the child of her killer's husband.

Salmon, 43, had fired twice in 10 seconds at the heart of her victim in September last year.

As the verdict was returned Salmon gripped the dock rail.

Sentencing her, Judge Neil Denison told her: "You know that there is only one sentence that I can pass for the offence of murder and that is the one I do pass which is the sentence of life imprisonment."

As she was led down the dock stairs to the cells Salmon burst into uncontrollable tears. In court her victim's father, Jim Stewart, and her ex-husband Keith Rodrigues held hands in emotion.

A disturbing pattern of behaviour had already been established by the time of the fateful morning last September when she walked into the salon armed with the shotgun.

Once, after a row with Paul about Lorna, Salmon took some morphine she was using for her back problem, washed it down with a bottle of port as she sat in her Mercedes, and then drove round to Lorna's house and threw the bottle through a downstairs window before passing out.

Then there were the numerous threats she made against Lorna, on one occasion knocking her rival's head against the floor and slashing at her husband with car keys.

She would regularly stalk Lorna's salon, too: a traffic warden spotted her Mercedes parked outside up to three times a week, and once she took her husband's gun in the car to Chiswick but turned back on the M4 after thinking better of it.

In May last year the salon, Equilibrium, burned down and Salmon was the chief suspect, but nothing was ever proved.

These terrifying outbursts were the result of a desperate unhappiness on Salmon's part. She loved her husband, and when Keith Rodrigues revealed that Lorna was having an affair with him her devastation was utter.