Second wife stands by husband jailed for murdering his first

The spouse of a convicted killer who escaped justice for the murder of his pregnant first wife for two decades, has said she intends to stand by him.

Andrew Griggs, 62, was jailed for a minimum of 20 years in 2019 after jurors at Canterbury crown court rejected his claim that his 34-year-old partner, Debbie, walked out on him and their three children in May 1999.

While no body was ever found, a judge said at the time that it was likely Griggs, a former sailor, had weighed down her body and dumped it at sea ‘so that it sank without trace’.

Griggs confessed earlier this year that he subsequently asked one of his sons to dig up his mother’s body as part of an elaborate ploy to secure his release from prison.

But despite his admission to perverting the course of public justice, and the discovery of Debbie’s body in the garden of Griggs’s home in Dorset in 2022, his current wife, also called Debbie, remains unconvinced by the weight of evidence against him.

‘I don’t believe any of it,’ she told the Telegraph. ‘It goes against everything I know about him. I know him and I know he could not have done what they said he did.

‘Andrew has told me what actually happened with the whole thing. He’s maintaining his innocence. He didn’t murder his wife. Why wouldn’t I be happy with what he’s told me? The truth doesn’t change, whatever is said in court.’

Griggs killed his first wife at their home in Kent in 1999 and reported her missing. In 2001, he moved into the Dorset property where her body was later found – and where his current wife still resides.

Debbie Griggs, 34, left, was four months pregnant when she mysteriously disappeared from her home in Deal, Kent on May 5, 1999

Her husband Andrew Griggs, above, claimed Debbie had walked out on him and their three young children, but was convicted of her murder 20 years later 

Debbie’s body was eventually discovered by police in October 2022. She had been buried in the back garden of a home in St Leonards, Dorset, that Griggs moved into in 2001

At some point within the first three years of his incarceration, Griggs instructed his son Jake to exhume Debbie’s body before travelling overseas with a lock of her hair, which he was to put in a letter to British police asserting she was alive and living abroad.     

He told Jake he had buried Debbie in the family’s garden in a panic after finding her dead there.

In reality, Griggs had been having an affair with a 15-year-old girl and had told friends he wished his wife was dead.

Even after his imprisonment, all three sons continued to believe Griggs was innocent and that their mother was alive. In 2020, they launched a Facebook page appealing for help in tracing her whereabouts.

But Jake found himself unable to act out his father’s convoluted plan and instead went to the police. His mother’s body was recovered in October 2022.

At an inquest the following March, a coroner said the cause of death would likely never be determined due to decomposition.

Mrs Griggs, 60, said the evidence she heard during her husband’s trial did not tally with what she knew of him, but indicated that his sons wished to move on with their lives.

Griggs will be sentenced for perverting the course of public justice on June 2.