A woman is dead and it's all my fault: Lover of wife-murdering serial adulterer reveals her anguish

By Jenny Johnston for the Daily Mail
Updated: 18:08 EST, 24 September 2010

Dangerous liaison: Karen Wilson had an affair with serial adulterer Michael Roberts, who killed his wife when she found out

Any woman who embarks on an affair with a married man must know that things are likely to end badly.

Karen Wilson accepted this — although she admits that her idea of what would constitute badly now sounds woefully naïve.

‘In my mind, there were two risks,’ she explains. ‘We could get found out and someone — his wife, most probably — would shout at me.

‘Or he could leave me and hurt me. And, I’m ashamed to admit this, but in my head that would have been the worst outcome.’

She starts to cry. ‘I knew people could get hurt. But not like this. ­

'Someone is dead and it is my fault. I’m going to have to live with this for the rest of my life.’

While Karen might have been foolish and selfish, who could have ­predicted that her illicit liaison with a smooth-talking colleague called Michael Roberts (known as Mike to his friends) would ­devastate so many lives?

Roberts’s wife Vicky did find out about the affair — the clues included hotel receipts, Facebook messages and incriminating texts.

Most upsetting was the fact they had been married for just three months when the affair began.

When confronted, Roberts refused to end the affair — despite heart-­rending pleas from Vicky to do so.

And when she threatened to tell his parents, he simply killed her, ­throttling her with a dressing gown cord.

Before her body was even cold, he called his lover.

Exactly what does a man say to his mistress when he has just killed his wife? The most shocking thing about Karen’s account of that conversation is its banality.

Short-lived joy: Vicky Roberts with Michael on their wedding day. When she discovered he had cheated on her, he strangled her with a dressing gown cord

‘He asked what I was doing. He told me he loved me. We talked about The X Factor, of all things. It makes me sick now to realise that Vicky was lying dead while we were talking.

‘The next day, we went shopping together, then spent the night in a hotel. I believed — because of what he’d told me — that it was over with his wife and that he was single.

‘I’d left my fiancé, so I was single too. I remember actually jumping on the bed with glee because we were free to be a proper couple.

‘If I’d known the truth, I’d have run screaming down the road.’

This week, Roberts was sentenced to life imprisonment with the ­recommendation that he serve 17 years for the murder of his wife, with the court dismissing his claims that he had killed her accidentally, during a consensual sex game.

So where exactly did 26-year-old Karen fit into Roberts’s tortured plan? She simply doesn’t know.

Police say that he could have been involved with as many as ten women — although they believe it was his ­obsession with Karen that led him to murder.

‘Did he really love me? Does he even know what love is? To this day, I have no idea,’ she admits. 

Sentenced to life imprisonment: Roberts is led away in handcuffs from Chester Crown Court

Even if answers do come, it is too late for Vicky.

A pretty, church-going young woman, she was just 25 when she died. She and Karen never met and, while she was sleeping with Vicky’s ­husband, Karen never gave the other woman much thought.

Now, though, she can’t get Vicky out of her mind.

‘She must have suffered so much and I do blame myself. He killed her but if I hadn’t been seeing him, there would not have been that confrontation.

‘She might be alive today.’

So how did a seemingly sensible young woman like Karen get involved with a man like Mike Roberts?

With devastating ease, it seems.

Both young professionals in the North-West, they worked for Phones4U, had mutual friends and met when Roberts visited Karen’s branch one afternoon. 

Newlyweds: The couple on their wedding day in June 2009

During his trial, the court heard that Roberts was known as cocky and ­popular with the ladies because of his ­flirtatious nature and flashy clothes.

Karen doesn’t remember him as ­particularly showy but she knew he was newly married.

She, too, was involved — engaged to her boyfriend of four years.

Yet when Roberts contacted her via Facebook, she was only too happy to reply.

An online conversation began and quickly progressed to cheeky text messages — dozens, then ­hundreds a day. ‘I should have nipped things in the bud earlier. But things with my fiancé weren’t good. Mike was fun and I was flattered. I didn’t mean to fall in love with him.’

Their first night out together was in August last year.

Karen got horribly drunk — ‘I’m quite a shy person, but a drink or two helps’. She says she spent the evening ­wondering why a man like Roberts — good-looking, with a sports car — would be interested in her.

Did she once think of his wife Vicky?

‘No,’ she says quietly. ‘I should have, though.’

Clues: Vicky is believed to have found out about her cheating husband through Facebook messages. She was 25 when she died

She insists they did not sleep together that night, but Karen was already smitten.

Further texts and online ­conversations followed and a drunken work night out. They ­discussed how unhappy they were in their ­respective relationships.

‘I was completely open with him, ­saying I didn’t know whether to leave my fiancé. He told me that his whole marriage had been a mistake.

‘He said he and Vicky both felt that way — they had discussed it and agreed that they should never have got married. He said they were not ­sleeping together any more.’

Surely she didn’t fall for that one? The wedding photos would barely have come back from the printers by that point.

‘Yes, I believed him,’ she says. ‘When I did actually leave my fiancé, I didn’t know what would happen with Mike. I still thought of him as a friend.

‘The fact that he wasn’t pushing me to sleep with him reassured me that he was a genuine guy. He ­actually cared. I thought we were destined to be together.’

Over the next few months, Karen and Roberts met several times, but she claims they didn’t sleep together until November.

In all, they had sex only three times — twice in hotels and once in his car.

Of course, the fact that they were not living in the same town made it easy for Roberts to lead a double life.

In fact, it may have been a triple life — or worse.

One 13-month affair with another colleague, Kerrie Hall, had pre-dated his marriage and involved ‘gymnastic sex’.

He had slept with Kerrie­ ­immediately after returning from his honeymoon.

Even while he was with Karen, ­Roberts was involved with other women, including a mutual friend Lavinia ­Tolley, a store manager with the company.

‘I had no idea that there were other women — or so many of them,’ she admits.

‘That all came out at the trial. As more and more information came to light, I found myself thinking: “Did I know this man at all?”

‘Every word he said seems to have been a lie.’

In the weeks before he killed Vicky, Roberts was clearly obsessed with Karen.

There were a staggering 5,000 texts and phone conversations between them.

It is still unclear how Vicky ­discovered that her husband had been seeing Karen, but police found print-outs from Facebook ­messages in her laptop bag. 

Under surveillance: CCTV footage showed Roberts buying bin bags, insulation sheets and duct tape, which he used to wrap up his wife's corpse

Roberts was convinced she had accessed his messages. Late in ­November last year, there was a confrontation.

‘I never knew Vicky knew about me,’ says Karen. ‘Now I can’t bear to read the letters that came out in court, when she wrote to Mike begging him to stop ­seeing me.

‘It’s awful to think what she would have been going through.

‘At the time, though, Mike told me he had moved out of the marital home and was staying with his parents.

'I had no reason to doubt him; we spent every night on the phone. The night before it all happened he sent me a text saying: “Good night, beautiful. Sweet dreams.”’

What exactly happened on ­November 28 — the day Vicky died?

No one knows.

In court, Roberts claimed she had asked him to tie a dressing gown cord around her neck during sex and it went horribly wrong.

Yet the forensic evidence showed he had throttled her with ­considerable force.

Karen admits that the nature of his defence left her reeling.

‘I didn’t believe he could have killed her. For months — up until May this year — I was convinced there had been a big mistake. I was so messed up I didn’t know what to think.

‘At one point I ­wondered if it might have been better if he had killed her. The alternative was that he’d had sex with his wife, when he’d promised me it was over between them.

‘I know that’s all mixed up, but I was in a terrible place. I went into denial. I could not process it.’

For days after the murder, life went on as normal for Karen. Completely oblivious to the fact that she was now involved with a ­murderer, she continued to chat to Roberts on the phone.

On the Monday — one day after Vicky died — they went shopping in Chester.

How can he possibly have been ­acting normally, having just killed his wife? ‘Well, he was. That is the ­terrifying thing. We even went bowling. We had a right laugh.’

The next day, Roberts told her that Vicky had run off with another man, taking her passport and all her clothes.

It was a lie, of course — and just the start of the tangled web he was ­weaving to try to cover his tracks.

‘I thought it was a bit odd — why did she have to run off with him, if her marriage to Mike was over ­anyway? — but I didn’t think much more about it. I was so caught up in my own world.’

Roberts’s world, meanwhile, was a particularly disturbed one. While he was plotting how to dispose of the body and making shopping trips to buy duct tape, Roberts was also ­texting Vicky’s parents from her phone, pretending to be her and explaining that she had left him.

‘It was all a charade,’ says Karen. ‘At one point he told me Vicky had asked him to explain everything to her ­parents, which was a bit mad. Why could she not do it herself? But alarm bells didn’t ring.’

On the Thursday — four days after Vicky had died, but with her family still wondering where she was — Roberts called ‘in a state’.

‘He was furious because Vicky’s dad had contacted the police and they wanted to speak to him.

‘He said he thought they were pointing the ­finger at him. I told him not to be ridiculous and just to speak to them.

‘The next thing I knew he was ­ringing to tell me that Vicky’s body had been discovered.
‘He was hysterical. He said “I’m so sorry” and “I know we are not going to work out now”. I just didn’t understand.

‘He also said something about his fingerprints being all over Vicky’s body. I said “what?” and he said: “From before, maybe when I hugged her.”

‘He started going on about how the person who did it might have worn gloves and he was going to be framed for the murder.

‘I should have run a mile then, I know, but at the time I was ­convinced he was innocent.’

Incredibly, she remained so for almost six months. When he was finally arrested, Roberts begged Karen to visit him in prison.

She refused — but only because she could not bear to see him ­languishing there.

For all that time they exchanged ­letters, though, and phone calls.

His letters to her are shocking in their ­ordinariness. In a ­Valentine’s Day card he ­apologises that ‘I know this isn’t what you planned’.

Why did she believe that he was innocent?

‘I think I just couldn’t face the ­alternative. I shut down.’

It was only in May that she realised — ‘and it really was an overnight thing’ — that there was no ­alternative to the fact that he had killed his wife.

‘The facts were there, staring me in the face. I’d allowed my love for him to get in the way of accepting it.’

Did that love disappear overnight, too?

‘Pretty much. I realised that, ­however much he said he loved me, he couldn’t have — not to do what he did to me.’

And then there is what he did to his wife — the ­mention of which sets Karen off crying again.

‘That poor girl. She was a ­trusting, decent person. ­Everything I heard about her in court made her sound so lovely.

‘She didn’t deserve that. If she were here today, I would say: “I’m so sorry.”

‘But it’s too late for that.’

Additional reporting by Liz Hull

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