Christina Schmid was the poster lady for grieving warfare widows – But now, after a gin-fuelled, violent assault on her second husband, pals say her darker aspect was ‘at all times there’

At the height of Britain’s war in Afghanistan, Christina Schmid came to epitomise the sacrifice made by service families everywhere when she fulfilled a promise made to her bomb disposal expert husband. 

If he was killed in the line of duty, she vowed, she would be there to welcome his coffin home.

Who can forget the heart-rending sight of Christina back in November 2009 when, after waiting at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire, she joined the crowds who regularly lined the streets of nearby Royal Wootton Bassett during military repatriations?

Dressed in black and clutching two red roses, she mouthed ‘love you, love you’ and even applauded to show her pride as the hearse carrying Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid passed by.

During the grief-filled months and years which followed, she campaigned for better equipment for troops and improved pensions for bereaved families.

She penned a best-selling memoir, rubbed shoulders with the Camerons at Downing Street and went to Buckingham Palace to collect her husband’s posthumous George Cross.

How on earth, then, did this inspirational woman end up in the dock at Plymouth magistrates court last week, a convicted criminal waiting to be sentenced for violently attacking the second husband she married in the wake of the tragic death of her beloved ‘Oz’?

Handed a 12-week suspended jail sentence, ordered to attend rehabilitation sessions, carry out 150 hours unpaid community work and abstain from drinking for 60 days, the 49-year-old former poster girl for British war widows was accused of ‘spreading lies’ by the judge who sentenced her and chastised her for ‘displaying absolutely no remorse’.

Christina’s attack on 43-year-old Adam Plumb during a late-night row at their £1.6million Georgian manor house in the village of Ugborough in Devon was utterly shocking in its depravity.

According to Mr Plumb, mother-of-two Christina was ‘behaving like a dog’ when, after downing gin, she flew into a drunken rage and kicked, scratched and bit him in September last year. More, in a moment, of the dramatic and violent events which ended her ill-fated second marriage.

Above all, this is the story of an extraordinary fall from grace, the roots of which stretch all the way back to that terrible moment when, just 24 hours before he was due to return home, 30-year-old bomb disposal expert Oz lost his life while trying to defuse a Taliban roadside bomb in Helmand.

This week, the Mail has spoken to those who know Christina, including a close friend of her tragic first husband. He believes she has been ‘irreparably damaged’ by Oz’s devastating death and needed ‘some sort of psychological intervention’ to help her.

‘I am not sure she will ever be able to heal,’ says Siegfried Westphal, who trained and served with Oz in Afghanistan and was with him the night before he died.

‘Her loss is so great and clearly she is struggling to form another relationship,’ adds the 62-year-old former Army officer, who regarded Oz as a brother and supported Christina in the wake of his death on October 31, 2009.

‘I don’t think any other man will ever match up to Oz.’

Others who know former pharmaceutical company account manager Christina are less sympathetic, however, not least her dead husband’s family.

A friend of the Schmids, who live in Cornwall, said Oz’s elderly mother Barbara was upset by her former daughter-in-law’s recent behaviour. ‘She has been absolutely devastated by all of this,’ said the friend.

‘Christina could be a difficult and demanding woman before Oz died and I have no doubt losing him rocked her to her foundations. But things have clearly gone right off the rails now.’ According to another acquaintance: ‘Christina can be very controlling, manipulative and suffers mood swings.

‘She has a real temper on her. She can go from placid to furious in a matter of seconds.

‘I don’t think this is something that has happened since Oz’s death. It was always there.’

Christina, who grew up in Hampshire and studied policy and economics at the University of Portsmouth, was pregnant when she and Oz embarked on a relationship back in 2003.

According to Christina’s memoir, Always By My Side, the father of her baby ‘was a surf dude travelling the world in search of the next big wave.

‘I was a career girl, knuckling down to work with a mortgage and a family to keep me rooted’.

He did, however, act as guarantor for the mortgage on her house in the Hampshire village of Otterbourne.

She and Oz, she claimed, had first met as teenagers on holiday in Cornwall and while he was ‘not my thing’, they kept in touch before meeting up again when she was four months pregnant.

They married in December 2007 and set up home in Winchester where Oz, a former head chorister at Truro Cathedral, raised Christina’s son Laird as his own.

He was, she wrote, ‘my best friend and soulmate’.

As a member of the Royal Logistics Corps, Oz began his military career as a chef but was later trained in bomb disposal.

He became one of the Army’s most respected explosives experts and was said to be able to detect the presence of an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) by the smell of freshly-laid tarmac.

He died on the last day of his five-month tour in Afghanistan while disarming his 65th explosive device and the fourth he had tackled that day.

Witnesses said that, in the moments leading up to his death, he seemed to be hurrying and may have been worried about the fading light.

Christina, then 34, was at home with her five-year-old son and looking forward to her husband’s homecoming when, late at night, two Army officers knocked on her door. 

In her book, she recalls opening an upstairs window and shouting down to them: ‘Tell me I can still talk to him. I don’t care if he’s lost his arms and his legs, just tell me he’s not dead.’

Just six days later she went to meet her husband’s coffin at RAF Lyneham and then waited for it to pass through Wootton Bassett, the Wiltshire town which by 2009 had become a focus for national mourning of Britain’s dead servicemen and women.

At Oz’s funeral in Truro Cathedral, she cut a similarly dignified figure, standing in front of the packed congregation, his medals pinned to her chest and urging politicians to ‘fight with his spirit, dedication and integrity day in, day out, for peace’.

In 2010, Samantha Cameron paid tribute to Christina’s ‘remarkable strength’ when she joined the then Prime Minister’s wife as a patron of Tickets for Troops, a charity offering members of the Armed Forces free tickets to major events.

When, a year later, she found love again with divorced Mark Clarke, also a serving member of the Armed Forces, it seemed she had found some much-deserved happiness. The couple announced their relationship in 2012 with a romantic photo-spread in Hello! magazine.

‘In some ways I have been pigeonholed as a grieving widow and a campaigner,’ Christina said in an accompanying interview.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I was that woman. But I achieved what I set out to achieve and now I want to move forward.

‘I want to leave that woman in the past and look to the future.’

She and Mark had a daughter in 2014 but split in 2019.

When contacted by the Mail this week, Mr Clarke refused to comment on his relationship with Christina.

A family friend said: ‘He never talks about it now but I know that the relationship was a very unhappy time in his life.

‘In public, Christina was a national heroine but behind the scenes she had quite a temper on her. She suffered mood swings which left him withdrawn and stressed and at times made his life unbearable.’

She moved swiftly on to her next relationship, with her future second husband Adam Plumb.

They met when the divorced property developer took his springer spaniels to the dog-grooming salon Christina ran.

He recently told The Mail on Sunday that ‘after telling me about problems with an ex’, she suggested going out for a drink and he agreed.

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

No friends or family attended their October 2020 wedding at five-star Bovey Castle Hotel on Dartmoor in Devon.

The couple bought their mansion in Devon in May 2021 and lived apart while Mr Plumb refurbished it.

He told The Mail on Sunday last month: ‘She came every weekend to check on progress but she was never happy with what I’d done.

‘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 how bad things had become.’

He added: ‘I accepted I had married someone I should not have, but when we bought the house I thought that it was everything she ever wanted.’

Instead, said Mr Plumb, the purchase of what should have been a dream home coincided with ‘the crazy time, the start of the violence’.

When she flew into one of her rages, he said Christina would scratch him with her nails, punch him, rip his clothes and bite him.

At other times, she launched verbal assaults on him in public, accusing him of assaulting her and calling him a fraud.

He also claimed she had a predilection for hiding his things, including his phone and car keys.

In court at the end of last month, magistrates were shown footage, recorded by Mr Plumb on his phone, of Christina cornering him in a 4ft walk-in wardrobe as he tried to leave.

Mr Plumb, the son of an Isle of Wight Methodist minister, is heard saying: ‘Get off me – you are a disgusting woman’ and then adding, ‘You f****** bit me. You f****** b****. You horrible woman’.

In court Christina tried to claim that her husband had attacked her but District Judge Stuart Smith dismissed her counter claims over and over again.

‘I do not find your evidence credible,’ he said. ‘I find that you have falsely made out Mr Plumb to be the aggressor while all the time it was you who was the aggressor. When police did not fall for it, you became hysterical.’

Almost 15 years to the day that she attended Oz’s military funeral, she was found guilty of two counts of assault by beating Mr Plumb and another woman who cannot be named for legal reasons.

In court last Monday, Judge Stuart Smith was forced to tell a sobbing Christina to ‘please be quiet’, when she refused to stop talking and railing against Mr Plumb, who was not in court.

The judge said she had ‘spread lies online’ and ‘carried out a smear campaign before and after your trial’.

In mitigation, her barrister Francesca Whebell said: ‘Her life in recent years has suffered a number of traumatic events which have shaped the way things are.’

She added that Christina realised that, as a result of her actions, she would lose her ‘previous good character’.

She was sentenced to 12 weeks for the assault on Mr Plumb and four weeks for an attack on another woman. Her imprisonment has been suspended for 12 months.

She has also been handed a two-year restraining order, which bans her from having any contact with either victim and from mentioning them on social media.

Oz’s younger brother Torben Schmid told the Mail: ‘We are aware of what happened at the court case but it is not something the family would want to comment on.

‘We have lived our lives very quietly and privately since we lost Olaf and we don’t want to change that now.’

According to Oz’s former Army friend Siegfried Westphal: ‘Losing Oz broke Chrissie. I am not sure whether she will ever be able to put the pieces back together. You would have to be a cold-hearted b****** not to be moved to tears by that. She deserves a break. I hope one day she can find peace.’

As for Christina, she has told the Mail: ‘I intend to appeal the conviction.’

She now calls herself Christina Schmid, not Plumb or even her maiden name, Avis.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that now, at her lowest point, she wants to realign herself with the war hero husband she tragically lost when she was at her happiest. To remind others of the woman she once was.

For had Oz Schmid succeeded in that final, courageous mission – as he crouched over an IED, wanting to get the last job of his tour of duty over and done with so he could get home to his wife – how different Christina’s life might have been.