Clifton George has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 23 years after a jury found him guilty of murdering Annabel Rook in the couple’s home in Stoke Newington. The sentence was handed down at Snaresbrook Crown Court on 9 June 2026, following a verdict on 3 June.

Rook, 46, was stabbed multiple times before George tried to set the family home alight by triggering a gas explosion. Police arrived shortly after the attack and George later admitted that he had killed her. The killing brought a brutal domestic case back into the open, and the court’s ruling ensures he will spend decades in prison for the attack that ended her life.

The case has also become a portrait of abuse that built up long before the murder. Detectives found personal notes, hundreds of messages and voice notes on Rook’s mobile phone that showed years of emotional abuse, along with a recent decline in the relationship and a deterioration in George’s behaviour before the killing. That evidence gave investigators a record of what was happening behind closed doors, even as the fatal assault itself unfolded in a matter of minutes.

Rook’s family has used the sentencing to describe the woman behind the case. Her father, Peter Rook, said she was devoted to her two sons and worked to help vulnerable women, adding that she was a “much loved mother” and a close friend to many. Detective Chief Superintendent Brittany Clarke said Rook was a much-loved mother, daughter, sister and friend, and said the force would continue to urge victims to come forward and seek help.

There is still one painful gap in the public account: the jury convicted George of murder, but the detailed reasoning that led to that verdict has not been set out. What is clear is that the court has now imposed the longest punishment available in the case, and that both police and Rook’s family are treating the sentence as a warning about the danger of coercive control before it turns lethal.