Coniston 'Lady in the Lake' killer Gordon Park's inquest to be held next week (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Coniston 'Lady in the Lake' killer Gordon Park's inquest to be held next week

10:05am Wednesday 13th March 2013 in News

AN inquest into the death of Coniston ‘Lady In The Lake’ killer Gordon Park is due to start next week, three years after he was discovered dead in jail.

Park was found in his Leyland prison cell on his 66th birthday in January 2010 - five years after being convicted of murdering his teacher wife Carol with an ice axe and dumping her body in Coniston Water.

The findings of a Prisons and Probation Ombudsman investigation into how he died will be revealed at the hearing, which is scheduled to be heard over four days, starting on Tuesday, at Faraday Coroner’s Court in Preston.

Carol Park vanished in July 1976 after a string of rows with Park.

He always maintained he had taken their children to Blackpool for the day and that she had stayed at their home in the Furness village of Leece and simply disappeared.

Divers pulled her weighted-down body from Coniston in August 1997.

Park was arrested for her murder but the case was dropped due to a lack of evidence.

He was re-arrested six years later and stood trial in 2005 at Manchester Crown Court, where he was found guilty of murder and jailed for a minimum of 15 years.

That same year, in a letter sent by Park exclusively to The Westmorland Gazette from his prison cell in Manchester, he maintained he was not a murderer and revealed his torment behind bars.

He wrote that he could not believe he had been found guilty, adding: “If I knew who (killed my wife), how, where, why, then I would have said so. I did not know then, I do not know now.”

Park lost a bid to challenge his murder conviction in 2008.

His family continue fighting to clear his name and have referred his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in an attempt to have the conviction overturned posthumously.