Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter

Justice Lloyd Hibbert, after commenting on the "gruesome and ugly circumstances" in which 34-year-old chef and former security guard Ralston Baker killed his common-law wife, yesterday sentenced him to life imprisonment.

The judge ordered that Baker must serve 20 years before being eligible for parole.

The judge said that Baker did not even give his common-law wife the dignity of a burial. Consultant forensic pathologist Dr. S.N. Parsed Kadiyala said Dr. Ere Seshiah who did an on-the-spot post-mortem had to order immediate burial because the body, which was stuffed in a barrel, was badly decomposed.

Strangled at home

A Home Circuit Court jury convicted Baker who is also called 'Mr. Merton' on Tuesday of the murder 49-year-old caterer Carol Harrison-Blair who was strangled at the house on Mountain View Avenue, St. Andrew, where she and Baker lived.

After Baker strangled her, with a piece of electrical cord, he bound her hands and feet and placed the body head down in a barrel, stuffed clothes inside the barrel, placed a cover on the barrel and then used masking tape to seal the barrel.

The Crown, represented by Donald Bryan, Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, and Icolyn Reid, Crown Counsel, led evidence that Harrison-Blair was murdered between August 25 and 27, 2003.

The landlady, 89-year-old Lydia Dennis, smelled a foul odour coming from the deceased's apartment on August 27, 2003 and called the police. She said she last saw Harrison-Blair alive on August 25, 2003. Dennis said she saw Baker at the house on August 26, 2003 and he told her that the deceased and her sister had gone to the country to look for their mother who was ill.