For nearly 40 years, Brenda Venables’ remains sat in a septic tank behind the remote house she had shared with her husband, David Venables, who was charged with her murder last summer. In a trial that began on Monday, British prosecutors said that now 89-year-old David Venables murdered his wife in 1982 and discarded her body in the septic tank so that he could continue having an affair. The prosecutor described the tank as the “perfect hiding place,” saying that it enabled David Venables, a pig farmer, to “get away with murder” for almost four decades, the BBC reports. According to prosecutors, Venables reported his wife missing in May, 1982, telling police that she suffered from depression and was not home when he awoke. An investigation found no evidence of her body, and some assumed she had committed suicide. Her remains, however, were found in 2019. Venables, whose trial is expected to last for six weeks, has maintained his innocence.