A vengeful husband used a pickaxe to murder his wife’s doctor lover and then buried him in the woods near his home. 

Andrew Hill, 63, from Woodall, South Yorkshire, bludgeoned Dr Colin Shawcross, 58, to death with a pickaxe handle after his wife Julie, a nurse, said she was leaving him for the GP in 2009. 

Following the murder, Andrew stuffed Dr Shawcross’s body into the doctor’s beloved Jaguar and buried him 5ft underground in a woods eight miles away from his home. 

Now, 15 years since the brutal murder and two years before Andrew is eligible for parole, UK True Crime Podcast has delved into the shocking details of the case. 

It revealed how Julie noticing that a wheelbarrow and spade were missing from their shed resulted in police suspecting Andrew of using them to bury Dr Shawcross and decided to search local wooded areas, where they eventually found the GP’s body.

The affair between Julie, who was then 47, and Dr Shawcross began in January 2008 after they worked together in the endoscopy unit of the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. 

In August, Dr Shawcross told his wife of 33 years, Carol, who he shared three sons with then aged 25, 27 and 30, about the affair and he moved out of the family home and into a rented house in Aston. 

Julie, who had a 12-year-old son George with her engineer husband Andrew, also told him that she was leaving him to move in with her new lover. 

However, Andrew was devastated and threatened to end his own life if she left, which persuaded her to stay in the family home for the time being. 

In a bid to save his 15-year marriage, Andrew decided to redecorate their house, spending £1,400 on carpets and he even promised Julie a sports car.    

Andrew found Colin’s phone number and called him, in an effort to ask him to stay away from his wife. 

He later told the court: ‘I wanted to know why he had to have my wife. I wanted her back. I implored him to leave her alone. I wanted him to go back to his wife.’ 

Andrew showed suicidal letters to his wife who was ‘taken aback’ by his intense feeling over the breakup. 

Julie met Dr Shawcross alone to ‘iron things out one way or the other’ and when she returned Andrew said she declared the affair over. 

He told the court: ‘It was finished between them. I was overjoyed. I could have forgiven her anything.’

However a fortnight later he came across his wife’s mobile phone bill and saw she had still been calling and texting the GP.

In January 2009, Julie once again told her husband she was leaving him for Dr Shawcross and their marriage was officially over.

Andrew became enraged and smashed up Julie’s phone before he threw her out of the house, along with her clothes, and she went to stay with neighbours.

Julie used her neighbours phone to text her new lover and explain what had happened. She arranged to meet him at 7am the following morning. 

When Julie arrived at Dr Shawcross’s home the next day she was surprised to not see him there, and as she looked around his home she found a large pool of blood on the patio, and also noticed there was blood on his car. 

She called the police and Andrew was arrested on suspicion of the murder.

During questioning, Andrew denied murdering Dr Shawcross but still showed a lot of anger and resentment towards the doctor, even admitting to wanting to ‘punch his lights out.’ 

Andrew’s story was that he paid two thugs £500 to frighten the doctor off and he had nothing to do with the murder, which was later described by the judge as an utter fabrication. 

He said: ‘I fully accept being involved to some degree but I never anticipated the horrendous outcome. The truth is I never gave much thought to what those two men would have done, all I asked of them was to frighten Colin away.’ 

However Dr Shawcross was still missing and police embarked on a huge search for the father-of-three. 

Five months later, Julie noticed that the wheelbarrow and spade were missing from their family home shed. 

After notifying the police, they suspected that Andrew, who as a telecoms worker would regularly dig deep holes to lay cables, could have used them to bury Dr Shawcross and decided to search local wooded areas. 

After weeks of searching police spotted disturbed twigs which drew their attention to a certain area.

They eventually found Dr Shawcross’s body concealed by a large tree stump and at the bottom of a slope in the depths of privately owned Loscar Woods, in Rotherham.

Andrew’s spade and a wheelbarrow were also found in Loscar Woods close to where the doctor’s body was found.

Andrew denied murdering Dr Shawcross, despite admitting to owning the wheelbarrow and spade.

After witnesses had come forward, he admitted that, about three-and-a-half hours after Dr Shawcross was bludgeoned to death outside his home he was with the doctor’s burgundy Jaguar at nearby fishing ponds.

Police suspected Colin even more when Julie Roberts, a specialist in forensic archaeology and anthropology, told them that of the hundreds of graves she’d excavated during her career, this was one of the best hidden and up to three times deeper than the average grave. 

She said, ‘I’ve encountered them dug that deep when machinery has been used, but not by hand. There’d been quite a concerted effort at concealment. 

‘It was a very well-dug grave. It was a very good spot to pick.’ It would have been surprising if that spot had been stumbled upon by chance.’

Police believed that Andrew drove from his house in Woodall, near Rotherham, to his love rival’s home in Aston, Sheffield, and bludgeoned him to death on the patio, fatally fracturing his skull.

Dr Shawcross’s neighbour saw ‘somebody hitting downwards several times and with force with some kind of stick or club or weapon’.  

Police say they believe the killer then dragged Dr Shawcross’s body into his jaguar and drove him away to dispose of the body. 

They thought his intention might have been to set the Jaguar on fire but he was disturbed, therefore he instead drove the car back to the Dr Shawcross’s house and drove his wife’s Honda Civic home. 

Blood and fibre evidence from the Honda Civic led to Andrew being charged with the murder of Colin Shawcross.

Andrew was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 17 years. Judge Mr Justice Wilkie told him he had reacted in a ‘devious, vengeful, cowardly and unmanly’ way to the end of his marriage.

Before sentencing, Dr Shawcross’s estranged wife Carol, who is also a doctor, read a moving statement to the court about the effect of the murder on herself and her three sons, James, then 30, Edward, then 27, and Richard, then 25.

‘It has brought indescribable distress and misery which has been compounded by the concealment of his body,’ said the then 60-year-old.

‘Until his remains were found our lives were sad and our thoughts negative which adversely impacted on our professional, social and family life.’

Carol later revealed that she had forgiven her husband’s infidelity before his death. Describing her husband as a kind, gentle and generous man, Carol said the killing had wrecked their plans to rebuild their relationship.

‘His murder has robbed me of the companionship, contentment and security that Colin and I had planned in retirement,’ she said outside court.

‘Although we were temporarily separated we had discussed his return to the family home and I feel that given time we would have been reunited.’ 

Throughout his sentence Andrew has maintained that he was not guilty of murder. He is eligible for parole in 2027.