Police and firefighters were called to the couple’s home shortly before 05:00 BST after an explosion \u2013 likened by neighbours to an “mini-earthquake” \u2013 ripped through the property and blew off part of the roof.<\/p>\n
George, who was found lying on the kitchen floor covered in blood, then tried to stab himself with a shard of broken glass while Rook lay dead in the living room.<\/p>\n
During his trial, George admitted he “lost it” in the aftermath of the attack that he had been furious with his partner for keeping a secret from him.<\/p>\n
In his defence, George insisted he did not have a “short fuse”, but Rook’s friends and family of gave evidence of his character.<\/p>\n
Her best friend, Sian Davin, told jurors she believed George needed therapy for his anger issues and described an incident when he pushed Rook against a wall and grabbed her throat.<\/p>\n
She said he had “unreasonable flashing rage” at times and would fat-shame and gaslight Rook.<\/p>\n
In a voice note sent to a friend in May 2025, which was played to the jury, Rook described George becoming angry because she did not clean his knives properly.<\/p>\n
“He kept saying things to me [like] you’re a liar, you’re a liar, Annabel,” Rook said in the voice note. She continued: “I can’t not make him angry, it’s always going to happen.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Police and firefighters were called to the couple’s home shortly before 05:00 BST after an explosion \u2013 likened…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-620117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}