A couple who admitted killing a woman and dumping her dismembered body in a park are facing life imprisonment.

Sarah Mayhew, 38, was found dead in Rowdown Fields in New Addington, south London, on April 2 after police were alerted to human remains.

Gemma Watts, 49, and Steve Sansom, 45, were arrested and charged with murdering Ms Mayhew between March 7 and April 3.

The defendants are said to have known the victim, who lived in New Addington on the outskirts of Croydon.

Sansom is believed to have used the Facebook profile name Red Rum, which is murder spelled backwards.

On March 10, a post appeared on the Red Rum account: “The best friends are the ones who don’t say anything when you show up on their doorstep with a dead body. They just grab a shovel and follow you.”

Sansom, of Burnell Road in Sutton, south-west London, previously admitted committing the murder and perverting the course of justice by dismembering Ms Mayhew’s body, scattering the pieces “in various places” and cleaning up the crime scene.

On Thursday, Watts, of Featherbed Lane, New Addington, pleaded guilty to murder and perverting the course of justice, but denied a charge of making an indecent image of a child, which will be included in the court file.

Following Watts’s plea at the Old Bailey, Judge Mark Lucraft KC deferred sentencing to a date to be determined in January.

The judge said that the only sentence that could be given to both defendants was life imprisonment.

Members of Ms Mayhew’s family attended the brief hearing.

At a previous hearing on behalf of Watts, prosecutor Tom Little KC said: “The prosecution here states that on the night of March 8 the victim was murdered at the co-accused’s (Sansom’s) property, while both defendants were present, and was subsequently killed there. “It was both an important clearing operation and the disposal of the deceased’s body.”

Watts, who was linked to the crime scene with phone evidence, was taken into custody.