Overview

• Judge Kristina Montgomery KC handed down the life sentence at Stafford Crown Court after a jury convicted Pugh of murder in June.
• A post-mortem found fatal compression of Kyle Pugh’s neck along with fractures to his nose and eye socket, and he died the next day in hospital.
• The court heard Pugh waited about 20 minutes to dial 999, calling her father several times first, before telling responders she had found her husband hanging.
• In sentencing remarks, the judge condemned her staged narrative as “cynical and cruel” and noted the couple’s volatile relationship, weighing evidence of prior abuse in mitigation.
• West Mercia Police and the Crown Prosecution Service welcomed the outcome, and the court referenced her earlier arson conviction against Kyle’s workshop as an aggravating factor.