Helen Bailey killer is found guilty of murdering his first wife in 2010

A husband from hell was today handed a whole life prison sentence after being found guilty of murdering his first wife in 2010 – six years before he murdered his children’s book author fiancée Helen Bailey.

Ian Stewart, 61, killed 51-year-old Ms Bailey in 2016 and dumped her body in the cesspit of the £1.5 million home they shared in Royston, Hertfordshire, together with that of Boris, her brown miniature dachshund.

A judge, sentencing him at St Albans Crown Court in 2017, said Stewart suffocated her with a pillow while she was ‘too drowsy to fight you off’, with the fiend knowing he stood to gain £1.8m from her substantial investment portfolio, which included two properties.  

Ms Bailey met her murderer on a bereavement group and, just before her death, had been planning a wedding with the man she referred to in her writing as ‘the Gorgeous, Grey-Haired Widower’.  

After this conviction, police investigated the 2010 death of Stewart’s first wife, Diane Stewart, 47. The killer had received more than £96,000 after her death, including £28,500 from a life insurance policy. 

Diane’s cause of death was recorded at the time as Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) but today a jury of five men and seven women found Stewart had strangled her too. 

Stewart claimed in court, as his two sons listened to his evidence, that he had returned from the supermarket to the family home in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, and found his wife collapsed in the garden.

He said he thought she had suffered an epileptic fit.

Mrs Stewart had not had an epileptic fit for 18 years and took daily medication, jurors were told, with consultant neurologist Dr Christopher Derry estimating that her risk of having a fatal epileptic seizure was about one in 100,000.

During a 999 call Stewart was instructed to perform CPR on his wife and said he was doing so, but paramedic Spencer North, who attended the scene, said there ‘didn’t seem to be any effective CPR’.

Mrs Stewart’s death was not treated as suspicious at the time and, while a post-mortem examination was carried out, it was not a forensic post-mortem. Her body was cremated. 

As part of the police investigation, following Stewart’s 2017 murder conviction, consultant neuropathologist Professor Safa Al-Sarraj was asked to examine preserved parts of Mrs Stewart’s brain, which had been donated to medical science.

Prof Al-Sarraj said there was evidence that Mrs Stewart’s brain had suffered a lack of oxygen prior to her death, and he estimated that this happened over a period of 35 minutes to an hour.

Prosecutor Stuart Trimmer QC said her death was ‘most likely caused by a prolonged restriction to her breathing from an outside source’, such as smothering or a neck hold.

Mr King said that when Stewart was arrested in 2018 for Diane’s murder, he told officers: ‘You’re joking. Haven’t you got anything better to do?’ 

Pathologist Dr Cary described SUDEP as a ‘diagnosis of exclusion’, adding that ‘an equal diagnosis of exclusion is having been put into such a state by some covert means – smothering or interfering with the mechanics of breathing or some kind of drug use’.

The court heard that full toxicology was not carried out as part of the 2010 routine post-mortem examination, and nor was a neck dissection.

Dr Cary said that, as in the case of Mrs Stewart, there was ‘no injury that was visible’ in the case of Ms Bailey, who was in the cesspit for three months before she was found.

The court heard that Stewart received £96,607.37 after his wife’s death, in the form of £28,500.21 from a life insurance policy and the rest from bank accounts.

Both of the couple’s sons were out on the day of their mother’s death, with then 15-year-old Oliver at school and Jamie, then 18, taking his driving test. 

Jamie Stewart had told the court that he recalled ‘raised voices… between my mother and father’ when he was at home on study leave for A-levels the week his mother died.

Reading from a document of facts agreed between the prosecution and defence, Mr King said that Stewart sold the family home in July 2014 for £530,000.

‘There was only £2,500 outstanding on the mortgage at this time,’ he said.

‘This sum was put towards the purchase of a house where the defendant then moved in with Helen Bailey.’ 

Stewart’s first trial found he had killed Ms Bailey 21 months after being named as a potential beneficiary in her will, putting him in line to gain £1.8m from her investment portfolio, plus her properties in Royston, Hampshire, and Kent. 

‘For f***’s sake, what a load of rubbish’: How double murderer feigned ignorance when officers arrested him for killing his first wife 

By James Fielding for MailOnline  

Swearing and shaking his head dismissively, double murderer Ian Stewart scowls at police ‘Have you got nothing better to do than make things up’ as he is arrested for the murder of his first wife.

A furious Stewart – sitting in the back of a police car – turns to officers and says ‘you’re joking?’ before adding ‘oh for f***’s sake, what a load of rubbish’.

The arrest – filmed by Hertfordshire Police – was released today as Stewart was found guilty of the murder of wife Diane following a four week trial.

At the time of his arrest in June 2018, he was already in prison for the murder of his second wife, children’s author Helen Bailey, two years before. 

Wearing a blue shirt, Stewart is seen being driven out of HMP Whitemoor to Thorpe Wood Police Station in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. 

Officers have no jurisdiction on prison grounds so had to leave through the gates before they could arrest him for the murder of Diane, who was killed at the couple’s home in Bassingbourn, near Cambridge.

Mrs Stewart’s death had been previously classified as a sudden unexplained death due to the epilepsy she suffered.

However, detectives launched a murder probe following the death of Ms Bailey, who had been drugged and suffocated by Stewart and her body dumped in the cess pit of their home in Royston, Hertfordshire sometime between April and July 2016.

A jury today found the father of two guilty of murder at Huntingdon Crown Court in Cambridgeshire.

Following the verdict, Hertfordshire Police, who led the investigation even though Ms Stewart had been killed in Cambridgeshire, also released recordings of Stewart in interview.

After being asked what the caused his first wife’s death, he shrugs nonchalantly and tells the detective: ‘Epilepsy. Well, that’s what the doctors told me.’

He adds that he went to Tesco’s on the day of her death.

In another filmed interview, he ignores the officers and stares ahead, tugging his right ear slightly and rubbing his forehead, as they ask him what he did to bring her round when she collapsed, if he checked her breathing and how long he waited before dialling 999.

After several unanswered questions, he tells officers that he carried out chest compressions. 

Murdered wife ‘loved by everyone who knew her’ met Stewart nearly three decades before he murdered her while they were students at Salford University  

Diane Stewart was a student at Salford University when she first met her future husband, Ian Stewart, more than 28 years before he murdered her.

She was at the start of her modern languages degree and Stewart, two years her senior, was in his final year studying computer sciences.

Asked during his trial how quickly he realised Diane was going to be his ‘companion’, Stewart said: ‘I think almost immediately. I wouldn’t have said that at the time, but, looking back, almost immediately.’

He said they ‘were in love and wanted to spend the rest of our lives together’.

Stewart said he worked for a year after leaving Salford University in 1982, then returned to study for a PhD in computer graphics at Cambridge University.

He said Diane moved to live with him in student accommodation in Cambridge and eventually they bought a terraced house in the city.

He said Diane had several jobs, for DHL, followed by Philips, and then for a company called Kitchen Range Foods, which made products, such as doughnuts, for McDonald’s.

Stewart said that, after his three-year PhD, he took a job at what was then computer firm Olivetti, without completing his PhD write-up, and later moved to Grant Instruments, writing software for scientific instruments.

The pair married in 1986 and went on to have two sons, Jamie and Oliver.

Their elder son, Jamie, was born in 1992 while they were living in Cambridge.

Stewart said ‘Diane was so proud of Jamie she wanted to show him off to her sister’ in Chelmsford, Essex, so they drove to see her days after the birth.

He said they stopped for food at an Asda supermarket on the way back from the visit as Mrs Stewart was hungry, and she suffered an epileptic fit after going into the store.

Stewart said his wife ‘had one fit the day Jamie was born, this second fit in Chelmsford, she didn’t have a third one’.

He said they ‘wanted a bigger house as we wanted another child as well’, so they bought a plot of land in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, to build their own home, living in a caravan on site while the work was carried out.

Stewart said the house was finished ‘about a month before Oliver was born’.

He said he was later diagnosed with the rare long-term condition myasthenia gravis, which he described as ‘muscle weakness’, and said: ‘Diane was my carer – she had to do everything for me at various times.’

Stewart, who was at the time employed by another IT company close to Bassingbourn, stopped working.

He said the firm had a health insurance policy that paid him 75% of his salary for life until he reached pensionable age, adding: ‘I ended up probably better than working, financially.’

Mrs Stewart worked part-time as a school secretary while living in Bassingbourn.

Neighbour Paul Easton, a GP, said the family would attend a yearly fireworks party at their home.

He said Mrs Stewart was an ‘active person who appeared well’ and he ‘wasn’t aware she suffered from epilepsy’.

He said he ‘would describe Ian as a difficult person to read’.

‘They appeared happy enough as a couple,’ he said.

The Stewarts’ sons played bowls competitively and were involved in Air Cadets.

Dr Andrew Pullen, who was at university with Stewart in Cambridge and was a long-term friend, said the Stewarts were ‘just a really nice couple, very caring, just lovely people’.

Dr Pullen’s wife, Sallyann Pullen, said the Stewarts’ marriage ‘seemed very settled, very stable, very happy’.

Mrs Stewart’s younger sister, Wendy Bellamy-Lee, said her sibling was ‘fantastic’.

She said: ‘Diane was helpful, she was happy… she would be the person, if there were people that came to the house, she would go and talk to them, make them feel comfortable.

‘She was loved by everyone who met her.’