How a nationwide heroine viciously assaulted me: Christina Schmid gained admiration because the campaigning warfare widow of one in all Britain’s main bomb disposal consultants – however her second husband says her gin-fuelled assaults left him petrified…

Christina Schmid won the nation’s admiration when, standing among a solemn crowd, she determinedly smiled and applauded her husband’s coffin as it returned from Afghanistan.

At his funeral, Mrs Schmid, with her husband’s medals pinned proudly to her chest, urged politicians to ‘fight with his spirit, dedication and integrity day in, day out, for peace’.

Commentators fell over themselves to praise her dignity and remarkable strength. Her powerful oratory, it was said, gave voice to a grieving nation.

It was November 2009 and the death of her 30-year-old husband, Staff Sergeant Olaf ‘Oz’ Schmid, stood out among the relentless roll call of casualties from Helmand Province.

For one thing, he was singularly brave. One of the country’s leading bomb-disposal experts, he was blown up as he attempted to defuse an improvised explosive device on what should have been the last day of his tour.

Nobody was surprised when his eloquent wife became a campaigner for bereaved widows and widowers, speaking publicly about the need for troops to be better equipped and less overworked.

Over time our troops withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq and Mrs Schmid slipped from public consciousness and began rebuilding her life.

How sad and dismaying that this celebrated war widow should then re-emerge 15 years later, shorn of her trademark dignity, to stand before magistrates at Newton Abbot, Devon. She was there to answer allegations that she attacked her second husband ‘like a dog’.

Now 49, she left scratches and a bite mark on property developer Adam Plumb, 43, during a late-night row in September last year at the couple’s £1.6 million seven-bedroom Georgian manor house.

Last week, she was found guilty of two counts of assault by beating and will be sentenced later this month.

All things considered, it was quite a fall from grace. Like many people familiar with her campaigning, Mr Plumb, a vicar’s son, had thought her work impressive and humbling.

Concerns over her behaviour which surfaced early in their relationship were cast aside because – as he tells The Mail on Sunday – ‘I knew she had done all this good for people and thought she had a big heart’.

Still, others might have found it less easy to overlook the innumerable red flags. For instance, she thought nothing of driving to his workplace and, once outside, holding her hand on the car horn to summon him.

‘Once she did this and then started screaming that I had disappeared from the house without saying goodbye,’ he says. ‘This was a typical performance and it was in front of all these people I worked with. I am a quiet guy and I don’t like people knowing my business. It was embarrassing.’

He says the court hearing provided a mere snapshot of their toxic three-year marriage.

‘She was manipulative and controlling and I suffered physical and verbal abuse on countless occasions,’ he says. ‘When she came at me it was relentless, she was like an Alsatian, ferociously biting and scratching at my chest. I couldn’t get her off.

‘There was never reason to it, it always came from nowhere. I don’t hit women but it felt like that was what she was trying to get me to do. I never did.

‘I’ve always considered myself a good judge of character but looking back I don’t know why I ever got involved with her . If I’m honest, I feel sickened that I married her.’

Inevitably, Mr Plumb has been forced to face the simple question: Why didn’t he leave her before? What he describes after all seems unbearable.

Love, he says, sometimes exerts a ‘twisted hold over you’. And he repeats that he always clung to the expectation that things would improve because ‘she had proved through her work to be a good person’.

Ultimately, though, he concedes that he always struggles to deliver an adequate explanation.

Epithets applied to Mr Plumb by his friends include ‘mild mannered’ and ‘easy going’. It is in his nature, he says, to avoid confrontation.

In court, it was stated that the assault for which she was convicted was gin-fuelled, but he claims she could just as easily ‘go for me’ sober, and frequently did.

If he sensed an imminent offensive, he would turn onto his side in bed and tuck his clenched hands under his chin. ‘In this way I managed to perfect a technique for getting to sleep in minutes. It was a way of shutting her out.’

Police were called five times to their house in Ugborough, Devon, but Mr Plumb was reluctant to press charges because ‘the officers told me that, inexplicably, my teenage daughter [from a previous relationship] and myself – not Christina – would have to move out’.

Recalling the early days of their relationship, Mr Plumb says they first met when he took his springer spaniels to her dog-grooming salon in Dorset. During one such visit – ‘after telling me about problems with an ex’ – she suggested going out for a drink and he agreed.

He takes a jaundiced view of even this. ‘Perhaps, looking back and knowing what I know about her now, she was impressed that I was doing OK for myself,’ he says.

‘My spaniels were gun dogs and often when I visited the salon I was dressed smartly for shooting. She also knew that I drove a Range Rover Sport and a Ford Ranger.

‘But she was attractive with a curvaceous figure and I enjoyed her company. We had a laugh. We went to country pubs and on walks with our dogs.’

Soon, however, he was left unsettled and confused. ‘She would make you feel as though you were someone you weren’t and you would spend all your time trying to prove that you weren’t that person,’ he says. ‘Frequently, without the slightest justification, she accused me of using her or of being with other women.

‘She would say that I’d end up leaving her ‘just like the rest of them’ and I’d bend over backwards to demonstrate I wasn’t like that. I don’t think this was born out of insecurity as much as a desire to manipulate me.’

Despite his misgivings, he moved in with her – ‘I know it sounds odd but I had fallen in love’ – but soon fell foul of her uncompromising house rules.

‘I’d come home from being away and she’d have locked all the doors from the inside so I couldn’t get in. She said I couldn’t just come and go as I pleased but I said that I’d finished my work and needed to get in. It was crazy. I’d given up my own house. And it wasn’t even late. She wouldn’t even come to the door, she just texted me.’

Astonishingly, this meant that two or three times a month, he had to sleep in his car.

‘At the same time, I was being told that I wasn’t a man and that I wasn’t going to stick around,’ Mr Plumb says. ‘She said that if you’re serious about me we should get married, you’re on the mortgage. Marriage hadn’t crossed my mind but I wanted to show I was serious.

‘Also, it had been getting better. It was such a rollercoaster, so bad then so good. I normalised it by reasoning that everyone has ups and downs.’

When looking at engagement rings, she picked out one worth £18,000, which he then secretly bought. But, he says: ‘When I proposed and produced the ring she was a bit dismissive, saying that she remembered it as bigger in the shop. I said we could take it back, but she quickly decided to keep it.’

No friends or family were invited to their wedding at five-star Bovey Castle Hotel on Dartmoor.

‘It was rubbish really,’ recalls Mr Plumb. She declined to sleep with him on the wedding night but was ‘as nice as pie the next morning’ – a turn of mood he describes as ‘weird’.

‘We didn’t have a honeymoon, it was business as usual.’

They bought the Devon mansion in May 2021 and Mr Plumb thought it would

herald a bright new future. But Christina refused to move in until it was refurbished by her husband to her precise instructions. In the meantime, they lived apart – he in the new home, she in a house he was working on near Salisbury.

‘She came every weekend to check on progress but she was never happy with what I’d done,’ he says.

‘She wanted more, more, more. And would go off on one about the slightest things, the wrong shade of paint, anything.

‘It was horrible, though I didn’t realise then how bad things had got.

‘I accepted I’d married someone I shouldn’t have, but when we bought the house I thought that it was everything she’d told me she ever wanted.’

But far from being the answer to his problems, the mansion purchase coincided with what Mr Plumb says was the ‘crazy time, the start of the violence’.

He says: ‘It started with scratching. She had these long nails and she would scratch me deeply in the back and chest when I was trying to sleep.

‘It could be anything. Once a friend sent me a joke involving a woman in a bikini and she saw it and asked if I was having an affair with the woman. I told her it was a joke. I couldn’t win.

‘She would push me out of bed and grab me and pull me and sometimes punch me in the face.’

Worse than the punching and scratching, he says, was ‘the biting’. Once he went to work with livid bite marks down his arm. He told colleagues: ‘Don’t ask.’

When it all got too much he stayed in hotels or slept in his car. ‘I’ve slept in every lay-by near my home.’

At other times he sought refuge on his 32ft motor cruiser, Amadeus, moored on the River Yealm. ‘I enjoyed the peace of just sitting on the boat with a cup of tea,’ he says. ‘I’d sleep on it for a few nights until things calmed down.’

This sanctuary was shattered one evening last year. ‘After one nasty row to which the police were called I went to the boat, which was moored in the middle of the river. I was with a friend, Shaun, and my daughter and we took the rowing boat to a nearby pub.’

On their return, Christina had commandeered an inflatable dinghy that she used, pirate-fashion, to board Amadeus.

‘She was screaming in front of all the other boat owners enjoying a quiet evening that I was abusive to her, had beaten her, was a fraud, a money launderer, all these crazy untrue things,’ says Mr Plumb.

He says that she had a predilection for hiding his things, including his phone and car keys ‘so I couldn’t go out’.

‘She hid my computers, too. And much later, after she was arrested, I found that she had hidden all

my white shirts. For some reason she must not have liked me wearing them.’

Last week, magistrates were shown footage, recorded by Mr Plumb on his phone, of Christina cornering him in a 4ft-wide walk-in wardrobe as he tried to leave.

He said: ‘She was just attacking me, I couldn’t have got out of there. She was scratching me and hitting me in the b****, just going at me. When I went to leave, she just beat me. She scratched me and ripped my T-shirt off.’

In a video shown in court, Mr Plumb is seen saying: ‘Get off me – you are a disgusting woman,’ before adding: ‘You f****** bit me. You f****** bitch. You horrible woman.’

In court she claimed her husband attacked her – but, humiliatingly, District Judge Stuart Smith told her: ‘I did not find your evidence credible. I found the manner [in which] you gave your evidence evasive,’ he told her. ‘I find you have falsely made out Mr Plumb to be

the aggressor whilst all the time it was you who was the aggressor.

‘When police did not fall for it, you became hysterical.’

Afterwards, she did herself no favours by ranting about the case, in now-deleted posts, on social media. ‘That’s Christina, she never gives up, has to have the last word,’ says Mr Plumb.

Owing in part to complex criss-crossing court claims and counter claims, Christina remains at the Devon property and her husband rents a property. ‘It’s a situation I hope to rectify soon,’ he says.

He is now rebuilding his life with a new partner and is doing his best to bury the past.

He says: ‘There are always reminders. The other day my daughter was playfully scratching my hand with her nails and it made me recoil because of what Christina did. Some things will never leave me.’

The Mail on Sunday invited Christina to comment.