'I thought my husband was trying to poison me’

A few minutes after midnight, Joanne Smith woke to find smoke billowing from the back bedroom of her idyllic 19th-century cottage in Lincolnshire. With her husband Ian Price away on business, she raced downstairs, dialled 999 and ran for help.

The fire was put out - but not before it had caused thousands of pounds worth of damage. Joanne was relieved she'd escaped unscathed, but then one of the fire crew discovered the cause of the fire. A heat gun had been left plugged into an extension cable connected to a timer that had been set for midnight. These were next to a blowtorch and gas cylinder - left over from an aborted DIY job. She was lucky the blaze was caught before it triggered an explosion.

As Joanne, 30, mulled over the night's events, she started to worry. Had someone tried to start the fire on purpose? Trying not to panic, she called Ian, 30. His mobile went straight to voicemail, so she left a message and later texted him. She spent that night at her mum's house and, the next morning, Ian returned her calls.

"He didn't seem shocked or in a rush to get home," she says. "He just said he couldn't come back until the evening, but that we'd talk then."

Shocked and upset, Joanne thought it was just a bizarre incident in what had already been a strange year. She and her husband were drifting through life. They weren't unhappy, but she felt he was changing towards her.

Previously, Joanne, a nurse, had thought Ian had been tampering with her vitamin pills because they looked darker and felt different from normal. Then, she thought her food had started to taste strange. And now the house fire. Try as she might, she couldn't help but wonder whether someone was trying to harm her.

"It was like something out of a movie," remembers Joanne. "Deep down, I had a feeling that something wasn't right, but you never really think your husband would do anything to harm you. As far as I was concerned, our marriage was fine, so I couldn't understand why I would even think he was up to something. I felt so confused by it all and, at times, I even questioned my own sanity.

"For years, Ian had been the one who cooked at home. A few times I'd thought my dinner tasted funny, even when it was a simple pasta dish. When I asked him about it, he would get quite spiky. So I actually asked if he'd put anything in it. The taste was so distinct - bitter and smoky - that I just felt it wasn't normal.

"Part of me thought maybe it was just the way he cooked it, but then I wondered if he'd put something in there to harm me. Whenever I questioned him, he always denied it and sometimes laughed at me. Even when I asked him to swap meals with me, he did, so I thought it must just be my imagination. After all, what kind of wife really believes her husband is trying to poison her? I figured I was just being daft and must have had an overactive imagination."

The next day, when Ian came to see Joanne at her mum's, he gave her a big hug and kept asking if she was OK. It was enough for Joanne to put any worries about his intentions down to her irrational fears.

Because of the damage to their house, the couple moved in with Joanne's mother, who lived in a nearby village.

Joanne says: "For the next few days Ian was distant and whenever I asked what was wrong, he just shrugged." But a week after the fire, Ian admitted he'd been having an affair. Shocked, Joanne listened as her husband said he'd been seeing another woman for the past nine months.

"I was numb at first, then really angry," she says. "I told him I wanted him out and said he should go and stay at his mum's."

Determined to get her life back to some kind of normality, Joanne put her husband's betrayal behind her and started trying to organise the insurance claim for the damage caused by the fire.

Ian kept his distance. But then, shortly after the fire, Joanne met with his mum, who told her that Ian had said the fire was started by an electrical fault.

"I was annoyed because that wasn't true," she says. As she thought things through, Joanne worried something more sinister was at play.

So she went to the police to report the bizarre series of incidents to them. "I must have sounded like a crazy woman - even as I spoke I thought I sounded bonkers - but they took statements and said they would look into it," she recalls.

The following day, Ian was arrested and charged with Joanne's attempted murder. During the course of an eight-month investigation, Ian was unmasked as an adulterer with a complex double life.

Despite her initial doubts as to whether Ian had plotted to harm her, when Joanne heard he'd been charged with her attempted murder - which he denied - she was devastated. She could just about cope with her husband's cheating, but allegations of attempted murder?

"We'd grown apart, and I suppose, looking back, we weren't happy, but we had been in love. I just couldn't believe something like that of him," she says.

"If Ian had been an evil, violent man, the charge would have been easier to take in, but he wasn't," she adds. "To be honest, I always thought he loved me more than I loved him because he seemed so vulnerable and needy."

Joanne accepts Ian could be secretive. They'd met in Sheffield in the late '90s, and planned to marry in 2001. A year before they wed, Ian lost his job, but kept his unemployment secret from her.

Joanne and Ian married in 2001

"He didn't tell me about it for a month. Instead, he just kept getting up, getting dressed and pretending to go to his office," she explains. "I only found out when I realised there was no money coming in and we were struggling to pay the bills. I confronted him and he confessed everything. I was so angry that he had hidden it from me, but I loved him and knew we could get past it."

As time passed, Joanne confesses the couple were increasingly unhappy.

"I'd thought about splitting up, but divorce is such an ugly word," she admits. "Instead I tried to be the perfect wife - driving him places, buying his clothes, doing his ironing. And our sex life never died."

But while Joanne was doing her best to be the perfect wife, Ian was also busy - romancing his mistress and using the internet to research home-made poisons.

At his trial this March, Birmingham Crown Court heard Ian had been online in August 2006, using phrases such as: 'How to kill human poison' and 'Making untraceable poison'.

During an organised police search of their house as part of the investigation into Joanne's claims, police recovered a pot of a thick brown treacle substance from their kitchen - revealed at the trial to be a toxic mix of nicotine and caffeine.

Joanne remembered she once questioned Ian about his tampering with her vitamin pills.

"One day I noticed several had gone and that another was full of brown stuff. When I asked Ian, he said he'd taken them and he'd put a nicotine mixture in one to give him an extra buzz. He was quite matter of fact about it. In hindsight, I should have questioned it, but I just put it down to the fact that he was addicted to things like nicotine and caffeine - he was a heavy smoker and used to drink gallons of coffee every day."

The court was also told that wiring Ian had put close to their cast-iron bath - reportedly to make it safe - had in fact been live and was a potential death trap. During his trial, the prosecution maintained the fire was a "premeditated and well-planned attempt to kill an innocent woman for entirely selfish reasons" and accused Ian of hatching the plot to claim almost £200,000 in life insurance and pension payouts.

They also maintained Joanne's death would have left him free to be with his mistress - the woman he spent the night of the fire with and who believed he was a bachelor with his own business in Northampton.

Ian pleaded not guilty and insisted he did not know how the heat gun had become plugged into the timer, and that his internet searches on making poison had been down to his own suicidal thoughts about his debts.

Ian also told detectives he still loved Joanne at the time of the fire and would never want her to come to any harm.

The jury found him not guilty. "I wasn't in court to hear the verdict," says Joanne. "Before it I felt sorry for him - wondering what mental state he must have been in to do such things - but when he was declared not guilty, I felt so angry."

However, Joanne accepts the verdict. She just sighs: "There's nothing I can do but get on with my life and try to put him behind me," she says. "But it will be a long time before I can trust someone again. How can I explain this to a boyfriend?

"The only good thing from all this is that I now feel so much more alive and optimistic about the future," she adds. "I could have been dead or still with Ian. Mercifully, I'm neither, but I feel stupid and gullible. Given his cheating, I've learned that no matter how many years you're with someone, you can never truly know them."

Joanne is now trying to move on with her life

Ian Price was found not guilty

Ian Price on*

THE VERDICT: "I am innocent. All 12 of the jury found me innocent within the space of two hours of deliberating."

THE FIRE: "I was doing some electric work I plugged the timer back in. I reached for the nearest thing which was an extension cable covered by Christmas decorations and general rubbish and unfortunately the heat gun was attached to that extension cable. I thought I had flicked the timer off."

THE VITAMIN TAMPERING: "I was filling the same capsules with nicotine - I was a heavy smoker then."

THE 'POISON' INTERNET SEARCHES: "I was suffering a bit from depression and was thinking there was a way out."

HIS MISTRESS: "It's one of those things that just happened. It wasn't what I set out to do. Just after me and the wife broke up, so did the mistress and me as well."

THE OTHER ALLEGATIONS: "It's been alleged I tried to electrocute her, poison her and gas her. The prosecution were looking for anything that could build a stronger case because they knew [the fire] was an accident and they were looking for circumstantial evidence to incriminate me."

*From an interview on BBC Radio Five Live

Additional words: Ross Slater PHOTOGRAPHY: CLAIRE WOOD HAIR & MAKE-UP: RICHARD AT NEMESIS newspaper cuttings reproduced courtesy of Lincolnshire Echo

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