Mohamed Samak was broke, work-shy and cheated on his wife, Jo. Despite this, she stuck by him, telling friends she worried that the man she fell in love with on holiday in Egypt wouldn’t cope on his own.

‘I would divorce him if I could,’ Jo confided in a friend days before her death. ‘But he would never survive in the UK without me.’

In many ways that was Jo down to a tee, something reflected in the words of those who spoke up for her.

In total, 30 friends bravely gave evidence across the two trials that probed how she came to die from multiple stab wounds, one of which was a fatal blow to the heart.

They described her as a ‘beautiful person’ who was ‘never cross, always calm’ and would ‘help anyone if they ever needed anything’. Others praised her style and grace.

And it wasn’t just from the witness box that they showed their support.

While Samak, a former hockey international, cowered and cried in the dock, every day the public gallery was packed full of those who had loved his wife.

On Wednesday their loyalty was repaid as the 43-year-old was convicted of Jo’s murder.

Judge James Burbidge KC told a weeping Samak he will be sentenced on Friday, adding: ‘It’s beyond comprehension why you would take the life of your wife but that’s what you did.’

After the verdict, Jo’s brother Mark Vale paid tribute to his sister, calling her ‘loyal, kind and caring’.

‘She was deeply loved by us, her family and her many, many friends,’ he said. ‘Most importantly, she was an amazing mum. Her loss has had a devastating impact on everyone who knew and loved her.’

The fact that Samak chose to deny the charge in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming evidence was the true mark of the man.

He smeared her character in court, claiming the 49-year-old devoted mother of a young son was a mentally unstable alcoholic who had stabbed herself.

Samak’s refusal to admit what he had done meant that his dead wife’s family and friends were forced to relive the awful details of her last hours. Ironically, it also meant that he was made to listen to day after day of evidence in which the character of the woman he so badly traduced was vividly brought to life, putting his own inadequacies into ever sharper relief.

While she was the breadwinner, Egyptian-born Samak went from one poorly paid job to another.

While she worried about leaving him, he had been seeing another woman behind her back.

Tragically, she would never know just how unworthy of her concern he was.

Samak stood to gain a £180,000 life insurance payout if Jo died and had been making inquiries about his financial position.

In February, following an initial trial, the jury failed to reach a verdict, forcing a retrial.

This time around the jury at Worcester Crown Court took less than four hours to find Samak guilty of murder.

What role a belated breakthrough in the case ultimately played in his conviction one can only speculate.

For reasons that remain unclear, on October 10 – some 15 months after the murder and in the middle of the second trial – police returned to the house where Jo died. In a search of the property, three bags of Samak’s clothing were found. One of the bags contained items with Jo’s blood on it.

The court heard that police had searched the loft previously but that a list of items they had been instructed to look for did not include clothing.

Quizzed about the blood-stained items while giving evidence, Samak admitted that he had hidden them in the loft, saying: ‘I was scared I would get the blame.’

Quite why it took police so long to find the clothing is a question that will doubtless now be asked. As for what sparked Samak’s brutal attack, that will perhaps never be known.

Neighbours were woken by Jo’s screams shortly after 3am on the morning of July 1 last year.

And yet Samak did not call 999 until more than an hour later.

The court heard expert evidence that suggested, given her injuries, Jo would have survived for between 20 and 30 minutes.

‘Do you want the police?’ a call handler asked when he finally rang. Samak replied: ‘Yes, please, I’m in some trouble,’ before explaining that his wife had ‘got a knife in her tummy’.

He told the operator that he had gone to the toilet, looked inside his wife’s bedroom – they were sleeping separately by this point – and seen her slumped, half in, half out of her bed.

He then described turning her over and seeing first blood then the knife before attempting CPR. But when paramedics arrived, his wife’s body was already cold, his hands bloodless and the knife handle, embedded in her abdomen, without fingerprints.

All despite his claims to have battled to save her.

When challenged about the delay between the scream and the emergency call, Samak – known as Sam – later changed his story and told police that he had seen his wife stabbing herself in the stomach while shouting: ‘Let me do it.’

He had waited an hour to call police because he was in shock.

‘I didn’t make any call and I know I was wrong, but I was panicking… my brain, it was difficult to think,’ he said.

It had been Samak’s case that his wife struggled with her mental health and her drinking, claiming she downed up to two bottles of wine a night, four times a week.

But none of that was true – and she had everything to live for.

While she enjoyed the odd drink, tests on her liver showed no signs of heavy drinking. Samak, a non-practising Muslim, however, did not approve of his wife’s moderate drinking, nor of her socialising.

And with her 50th birthday weeks away, preparations were in full swing. She’d bought a new dress and ordered a cake.

She had also booked tickets to Paris with her best friend. Then there were the presents she’d bought for a baby shower and a planned trip to the theatre.

Her work life was busy, too. An interior designer, Jo had been made redundant the previous March, but she and some colleagues had created a new design firm. The day she died was the day she was due to properly start the job.

Samak and Jo had met at the Hilton hotel in Taba, on the Red Sea, in 2011. Samak, seven years younger than Jo, was in charge of organising activities and sports for the guests.

After that initial meeting, Jo returned a number of times and, in March 2014, surprised her mother by sending a picture of them holding their wedding certificate, which was written in Arabic. 

Samak, who had played hockey for Egypt and would also go on to represent England over-40s, moved to the UK at the end of that year.

He secured work as a coach at £57,000-a-year Malvern College, before moving on to a grammar school in the West Midlands.

Other coaching gigs included a stint with Hockey Wales.

While well-liked by those who knew him, one colleague described him as a ‘poor leader’ who was ‘easily distracted’.

But Samak was growing increasingly concerned about his lack of secure employment, searching online for delivery jobs with Amazon and hotel night shifts.

Earning just £1,400 a month, he could not cover his share of their household bills. The couple lived in what had been Jo’s family house in Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, which she had bought from her mother, Penny Vale, in 2021. 

Under the terms of a legal agreement, if Jo and Samak split up then that money remained hers, while he was only entitled to half of any equity above that amount.

In the month before the killing, Samak had called a financial adviser in an ‘agitated and panicked’ state asking if he would be able to claim on any of his insurance policies if he was unable to work due to stress and depression. Friends said that at times he was so stressed he would binge eat then make himself sick.

The adviser informed him that he did not have income protection in place as he had not signed and returned documentation.

But the court heard Jo had a life insurance policy worth £180,000 of which he was the beneficiary.

Like his finances, his personal life was also hitting the buffers.

He complained to his mother-in-law that he ‘couldn’t understand why Jo needs to go out with her friends now that she is married’.

He also complained about their lack of sex and the fact that they slept in separate rooms.

‘He was depressed, he was unhappy, they didn’t sleep together,’ Mrs Vale said.

Unknown to Jo, since 2022 Samak had been trying to reignite a relationship with an old flame, a French woman called Fadila Fadou, whom he had also met at the hotel in Egypt.

He told friends ‘that she was the one that got away’.

‘Have a lovely night and thank you so much for giving me such a wonderful feeling,’ he wrote in a message to her that year.

The court heard the pair met in June 2024 while Ms Fadou was in London, when they went sightseeing and for dinner, before walking to Samak’s car where they kissed.

Giving evidence, Samak told the court: ‘I should never have done it. It felt weird.’

Friends of Samak also told how while away on hockey trips there had been ‘two or three occasions’ when he had met other women – although he insisted that he had only ever had a drink with them.

In the 24 hours leading up to the murder, Samak had been away for work, coaching in Cardiff.

He returned home on Sunday evening. His wife had been out on the Saturday night with her girlfriends. The following morning she messaged friends at midday to say she was nursing a hangover: ‘I am still in bed with a Fab ice lolly.’

During the night out, Jo had apparently spoken of Samak, with friend Rachel Healey marvelling at how accepting she was of his many failings.

‘You must adore him,’ she said. Jo replied: ‘No, I don’t adore him. I would divorce him if I could.’

But she wouldn’t do that, she said, because he would not be able to cope on his own.

Giving evidence, Samak told the court he had returned home to find Jo lying on her side on the bed. He said she was not feeling well and told him: ‘This is too much, I’ve had enough of this life.’

He then left the room and said he was woken later by a loud scream and got up to find her holding a knife and stabbing herself. He said that he watched his wife take ‘her final two breaths’ and ‘did not know what to do’.

Having moved her from a narrow space between the bed and a chest of drawers he said he noticed blood on his jumper.

‘I was hyper-ventilating, scared,’ he told the court. ‘I was scared that the finger would be pointed at me. I had blood on my clothes.’

He then concealed the bloody garments in bags of clothes that were in one of the bedrooms, got the loft hatch down, and hid them up there.

A young child, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, and who was present in the house on the night of the killing, recalled being woken up by Jo shouting: ‘Put me down, put me down.’

The child was interviewed by specially trained officers and built a Lego replica of the bedroom where Jo had been sleeping that night. 

The child described seeing Jo fall to the floor of the bedroom and Samak picking her up and moving her ‘to the top of the stairs next to the banister’.

To the end Samak insisted he was trying to save his wife’s life – not to take it. ‘I’m not a murderer,’ he said. ‘I’m not a killer. What would make me do that?’

Because of his cowardice, it is a question to which we can only guess the answer.

But at least his attempts to ‘assassinate’ his dead wife’s character came to nothing – thankfully the family and many loyal friends of this much-loved woman saw to that.