Wife shot love rival with husband’s gun

BETRAYED wife Rena Salmon sobbed in court yesterday as she relived the moment she shot her love rival with her cheating husband’s loaded shotgun.

She told an Old Bailey jury that she had not meant to harm Lorna Stewart but had made up her mind to kill herself.

She explained that she had chosen to end her life at her younger rival’s beauty salon as “no-one would want to use a centre where someone had blown their brains out”.

“I wanted her to feel some of the pain she had put me and my kids through. I wanted her to have some feeling for someone other than herself,” she said.

But instead of killing herself Salmon said she saw salon owner Lorna Stewart lying on the floor in front of her.

She told a hushed courtroom she had held Miss Stewart’s hand and the dying woman had squeezed it.

“She was never meant to die. She paid the ultimate price for something that was not her fault.”

Salmon, 43, has denied murdering 36-year-old Miss Stewart.

Her counsel, Patrick Curran QC, said the court would hear medical evidence that she was suffering from an abnormality of mind at the time which had substantially diminished her mental responsibility.

If that was accepted she should be acquitted of murder and found guilty of manslaughter, he said.

The trial continues.