Convicted murderer and former Newtown resident John Heath has died.

In October 2013, a Danbury Superior Court jury convicted Mr Heath, who was 72 at the time of his death, of murdering his 32-year-old wife Elizabeth in April 1984 at their 89 Poverty Hollow Road home and then hiding her wrapped corpse in a dry well beneath a barn floor there, where it lay undiscovered until April 2010. Newtown police arrested Mr Heath in April 2012.

Mr Heath was a prisoner serving a 50-year prison sentence at the state’s Osborne Correctional Institution in Somers, said state Department of Correction (DOC) spokesman Andrius Banevicius.

Mr Banevicius said that Mr Heath died on October 15, apparently of health-related causes, adding that no foul play is suspected in his death.

A spokeswoman for the chief state medical examiner’s officer said October 21 that the results of an October 16 autopsy on Mr Heath are pending.

Mr Heath was in ill health during his murder trial. While in court, he was seated in a wheelchair and breathed bottled oxygen through a cannula. The frail-looking Mr Heath had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), among other medical problems.

Following his conviction, Mr Heath filed a legal appeal in seeking a new trial on the murder charge. That appeal was pending.

The state prosecutor at Mr Heath’s trial called more than 30 witnesses to testify. The defense had only one witness. Mr Heath did not testify.

The state’s case was based on circumstantial evidence. No murder weapon was presented as evidence at his trial.

The medical examiner’s autopsy indicated that Ms Heath was bludgeoned to death with a long, slender object.

The evidence in the case indicated that Ms Heath did not run away from the family’s property in the middle of the night on the night of the murder, as has been claimed by Mr Heath, a prosecutor told jury members during the trial.

The prosecutor stressed that after murdering his wife in April 1984, Mr Heath was free for 28 years until he was arrested in April 2012 in Bridgewater, where he then lived.