Ian Stewart was convicted of two murders by two juries, five years apart, for deaths six years apart. The first was the death of his wife, Diane Stewart, in the Cambridgeshire village of Bassingbourn on June 25, 2010. At the time nobody treated it as a crime. A coroner's post-mortem found no cause, and her death was recorded as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. The second was the death of his fiancee, the children's author Helen Bailey, in the Hertfordshire town of Royston on April 11, 2016. That death was investigated as murder from the start, and in February 2017 a jury at St Albans Crown Court convicted him.
The second conviction reopened the first. Detectives in the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit spent six years on Diane Stewart's death, and in February 2022 a jury at Huntingdon Crown Court found him guilty of her murder. The judge, Mr Justice Bryan, found "striking similarities" between the two killings: planning, a financial motive, and an invented story to explain each woman's death or disappearance. He imposed a whole life order. In July 2022 the Court of Appeal quashed that order as wrong in law and substituted a minimum term of 35 years.
Stewart came from Letchworth, Hertfordshire. He met Diane when both were students at Salford University in the 1980s. A friend who gave evidence in 2022 said he had first known Stewart in the 1980s, when both were students at the computer laboratory of Cambridge University, and that the two couples became close friends who socialized as a group of four. Stewart became a software engineer and is now retired. The detectives who led both murder inquiries would describe him as an intelligent man.
He and Diane married in 1986 and moved to Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, in the 1990s. They had two sons. The family belonged to the local bowls club, and Stewart served for several years as its treasurer. The club's secretary later remembered him as highly competitive but aloof, and careful with money to the point that he once declined to put 10 pounds toward a new water tank.
Diane Stewart was 47 in 2010 and worked as a school secretary. Her sister and brother said after the second verdict that she had been "a very special, caring and capable person" who would always be greatly loved and hugely missed. Her sons said simply, "Our mum was amazing." Mr Justice Bryan described her as a woman who had been full of life, a caring mother and a loving wife.
The vicar of Bassingbourn in 2010 said she had "embodied sunshine," and that her death came as a huge shock to the village. Friends who gave evidence for the defence in 2022 remembered a marriage that seemed very settled, very stable and very happy; one said the couple were very gentle with each other and worked together as a team. One son, who was at home studying for his A-levels in the week of her death, told the 2022 jury that he had heard raised voices between his parents that week, though he could not make out what was said and had not seen his parents argue often over the years.
June 25, 2010, was Diane's day off. Both sons were out that morning; the elder was taking his driving test. Stewart and his wife were alone. He later said that he had been out at the supermarket, and he called 999 to say that she had had a fit. She died that morning.
Mr Justice Bryan found in 2022 that the 999 call was "a concerted, and callous charade," and that the whole account of a seizure had come from Stewart. Diane did have epilepsy, but the condition was mild and well controlled, and the prosecution said she had not had a seizure for 18 years. A consultant neurologist told the second jury that the risk of a fatal seizure for someone in her position was about one in 100,000.
At the time, nothing led anyone to treat the death as suspicious. A paramedic later recalled that he seemed dissociative and simply answered questions calmly. The coroner ordered a routine post-mortem, not a forensic one, and it found no cause of death. Because of her history, the death was labeled sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, and an inquest concluded that she had died of natural causes.
One decision made in the days after her death would matter more than any other. Diane carried a donor card, and with Stewart's consent tissue was donated for teaching and research and kept. A Crown Prosecution Service spokesman later said that, according to the coroner's office records, Stewart had asked that nobody be told about the donation. In 2022 Mr Justice Bryan told him that this donation "would lead to your ultimate downfall." Diane's sister had been uneasy from the beginning and had contacted the coroner herself, the judge recorded, but the inquiry went no further in 2010.
Under the law of England and Wales, a death must be reported to a coroner when the cause is unknown or uncertain, or when it is violent, unnatural or in any way suspicious, and the coroner is required by law to order a post-mortem when a death is suspicious, sudden or unnatural. An inquest follows if the cause is still uncertain afterward. Epilepsy Action, the national charity, describes sudden unexpected death in epilepsy as the sudden, unexpected death of a person with epilepsy who was previously well, a finding that requires the post-mortem to show no other cause; it affects about one in 1,000 people with epilepsy each year. A Home Office pathologist told the 2022 jury that it is a "diagnosis of exclusion." In Diane Stewart's case the post-mortem was not a forensic examination, and fuller tests were not carried out.
Mr Justice Bryan was satisfied that financial gain had been "the major motive" for Diane's murder, though he also accepted that there were other, subsidiary motives that could not now be proved. There was evidence that the marriage was not entirely well and that Diane might have been tiring of it, he said, but it would never be possible to be sure; there was no evidence of an affair.
The money was set out in agreed facts read to the second jury. Stewart received about 28,000 pounds from a life insurance policy and further sums from his wife's bank accounts, 96,607.37 pounds in all. He also took her half share of the family house. In July 2014 he sold it for 530,000 pounds, with only about 2,500 pounds left on the mortgage, and the proceeds went toward the home in Royston that he would share with Helen Bailey. A further 56,059.07 pounds escaped him only because of errors in the probate application, the judge found. The prosecution said his conduct after the death was hard to reconcile with that of a grieving husband: he soon bought a red MG two-seater sports car and began a new relationship.
Helen Bailey grew up in Northumberland and went to Ponteland High School. As a girl, she later wrote, she would sit and stare out of the classroom window, dreaming of anything but lessons, and in her teens she sent short stories and poems to anyone she could think of, sometimes seeing them in print. She moved south to take a degree in physiology at Thames Polytechnic and then went into the media, running a London character licensing agency whose work covered Snoopy, Garfield, the Rugrats, The Simpsons and Nintendo characters. Anne McNeil, senior publisher at Hodder Children's Books, said that work made her understand that what she really wanted was to write characters of her own.
She did, for the next two decades. She wrote 22 books for children and teenagers, among them the Daisy Davenport stories and the five-book series about Electra Brown, a teenage heroine she based on her own schooldays. She was nominated for a Queen of Teen award in 2010, and her work went on display at Seven Stories, the national center for children's books in Newcastle. Its chief executive, Kate Edwards, called her a master at writing work that appealed to teenage girls. McNeil said: "She knew what it was to feel vulnerable and to be able to turn that into humour."
Friends remembered her humor first. "She was just incredibly funny, incredibly witty, very quick-witted," said one. A neighbor in Royston called her wonderful, funny, kind and caring, and recalled an email Helen once sent her about a fence: "I do not like your fence. NOT like it!" A photographer who spent a day with her in August 2015 for the launch of her last book remembered her as sweet, charming, insightful, curious and modest, a woman most at peace at her desk, mug in hand, among the objects she loved. She had spent most of her adult life in London and had once sworn that she could never live anywhere she could not hail a black cab.
In February 2011 Helen's husband of 15 years, her partner of 22, died in an accident while the couple were on holiday in Barbados. She described the change as becoming "a wife at breakfast and a widow by lunch." She began a blog about bereavement called Planet Grief, which drew a wide readership and became her first book for adults, When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis, published in 2015.
Stewart found her through that world. He joined an online forum and Facebook group for widows and widowers, and the two began writing to each other in 2011; he said she had made the first contact. Their emails grew long and then flirtatious. They were together from October 2011 by one account and from 2012 by another. In 2013 they moved into a 1.5 million pound house in Royston, where Stewart's two sons lived with them. In the footnotes of her book Helen thanked "my Gorgeous Grey Haired Widower, Ian Stewart," and called him her happy ending. Early in 2016 they became engaged and began planning a September wedding.
Helen was wealthy. Her assets were well in excess of 3 million pounds, the judge found in 2017, and there was a life insurance policy worth 1.28 million pounds. Stewart had witnessed her will in 2012; by 2014 he had become a beneficiary of it. The will created a discretionary trust in which he was one of several beneficiaries, and Helen had told her executor that she wanted him to have the Royston house, her second home in Broadstairs, Kent, and a capital sum. He also held a power of attorney over her affairs. Prosecutors put the capital payment that would come to him if she died before the wedding at about 1.8 million pounds, on top of the two houses. Her mother told the 2017 jury that she had grown uneasy about the relationship.
The Court of Appeal later summarized what the St Albans jury had found: over a period of months Stewart prepared the killing, and on April 11, 2016, he murdered Helen Bailey for financial gain. Within hours he used his knowledge of her finances to raise a standing order from her account to his own from 600 pounds to 4,000 pounds a month, and he later tried to use the power of attorney to take control of her affairs.
His story was that she had left him a note saying she needed space and had gone away. He told the police so on April 15, four days after her death, and for three months he kept up the story with her family and friends. Officers found him rude, temperamental, uncooperative and dismissive, and had difficulty getting him to take part in formal recorded interviews; the recordings they did make showed him vague and muddled. In conversations with health professionals he slipped into the past tense; asked whether he walked alone or with dogs, he answered, "We had a dog."
Police arrested him on suspicion of murder on July 11, 2016. His first words were "You're joking." He was charged with murder and with perverting the course of justice, and appeared in court within days.
In custody he changed his story. In a written statement in December 2016 he claimed for the first time that two men, whom he identified only by first names, had taken Helen and were responsible for her death, and that he had kept silent out of fear for her and for his sons. He said he had been given a phone in prison and told the men had been dealt with. He admitted in court that he had lied for months.
The trial opened at St Albans Crown Court in January 2017 before His Honour Judge Andrew Bright QC and lasted between six and seven weeks. About 40 witnesses gave evidence, and the legal teams brought some of Helen's relatives from overseas to testify. Stuart Trimmer QC prosecuted; Simon Russell Flint QC defended. Helen's brother attended almost every day. Her mother gave evidence by video link.
Trimmer called the account of the two men a fantasy and part of a "long-crafted cynical and cruel plan to do away with Helen Bailey." He told the jury that Helen, a vulnerable bereaved woman, "was being grossly deceived by someone who was preying on her." The defence argued that Stewart was wealthy in his own right. Stewart gave evidence and denied any wrongdoing. Under cross-examination about the note, he said: "I was stuck with that lie wasn't I?"
On February 22, 2017, the jury of seven men and five women found him guilty of murder, fraud, a further common law offence, and three counts of perverting the course of justice. Charles White of the Crown Prosecution Service said Stewart had "murdered Helen Bailey and then conducted a cynical, deceitful and calculated charade." Detective Chief Inspector Jerome Kent said the case showed how "wicked and despicable that man is," and added that Stewart had lied to everyone, including his own children. Helen's family said there could be no celebration and that "a long shadow of loss" had been cast over the lives of so many; their thoughts, they said, were also with Stewart's family.
Stewart refused to come back into court or to appear by video link for sentence. Judge Bright passed it in his absence the next day. He found that the principal motive was financial: Stewart knew that Helen was a wealthy woman, the judge said, and was not content with having to share in her wealth as her husband. It was "a clear case of a murder done in the expectation of gain," planned in advance, with a calculated and callous series of lies that deceived her family and friends for more than three months. Quoting the statement of Helen's brother, he said that "the world has lost a gifted author." He added: "I am firmly of the view that you currently pose a very real danger to women with whom you form a relationship."
Stewart, who was 56 and had no previous convictions, received life imprisonment with a minimum term of 34 years, less 223 days spent on remand. Concurrent terms ran for the other counts: 18 months, three years, and two years on each of three further counts. Judge Bright noted that Stewart would be 90 before he could be considered for parole, and said he was not inclined to reduce the term.
Two of the charges on which Stewart was convicted in 2017 are common law offences that rarely appear outside the gravest cases. Under Crown Prosecution Service guidance, perverting the course of justice is committed by an act or series of acts that tends and is intended to pervert the course of public justice; the offence is complete when such acts are done, whether or not justice is actually perverted, and it carries a maximum of life imprisonment. Giving false information to the police to frustrate an inquiry is a recognized form of it.
The court then examined what Stewart had gained. At St Albans on July 10, 2017, with Stewart appearing by video link, the prosecution showed that he had received 10,200 pounds through the raised standing order and moved it into a joint account; he had spent 3,154 pounds of it renewing Arsenal season tickets. Judge Bright made a confiscation order for 5,100 pounds, half the money in the joint account, to be paid within 28 days or a month in prison. Charles White, a senior Crown prosecutor, said Stewart "had hoped to make a substantial financial gain from the murder of Helen Bailey." In August 2017 the judge ordered him to pay 98,455 pounds toward the cost of the prosecution, a figure he called a conservative estimate.
On the day Stewart was sentenced for Helen Bailey's murder, police announced that they would re-examine the death of Diane Stewart. Jerome Kent, who would lead that work as well, was careful with his words. It was not a murder investigation, he said, but a "re-examination of a sudden, unexpected death," and it would be quite right to look back. Diane's family said they supported it. The trial had been a difficult time for them, they said, and while they had not known Helen, "our sympathy goes out to all of her family and friends." Her sons asked for privacy at what they called an extremely difficult time.
What made the inquiry possible was the tissue kept in 2010. Stewart had consented to the retention of the tissue samples, and the prosecution later said that without that consent the material would have been destroyed. Three specialists re-examined it. Their evidence, the prosecution would say, contradicted Stewart's account of a seizure and pointed to the involvement of another person in Diane's death.
On Tuesday, August 21, 2018, detectives from the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit arrested a 57-year-old man on suspicion of murdering Diane Stewart and questioned him; he was later released under investigation. The man was Stewart, already serving his life sentence. Told that he was suspected of his wife's murder, he replied: "You're joking. Haven't you got anything better to do?" In interview he answered "no comment" and gave a prepared statement saying that he had come home and found his wife unconscious and called 999.
By July 2020 he had been charged with her murder. He appeared at St Albans Crown Court on July 6, 2020, and a plea hearing was set for September. He then pleaded not guilty by video link from prison. Judge Michael Kay QC said the case would be tried before a High Court judge, and a trial date was set in 2022.
The trial opened at Huntingdon Crown Court on January 18, 2022, before Mr Justice Bryan, and ran for about three and a half weeks. Stewart, 61, sat in the secure dock flanked by four officers. Stuart Trimmer QC, who had prosecuted him in 2017, told the jury that Stewart had "intended to kill Diane Stewart," and that the question for them was whether he was responsible for her death or whether it had been a medical accident. The medical evidence, he said, contradicted Stewart's account, and the explanation of an epileptic fit appeared to have come from Stewart himself, who had been able to fool medical professionals at the time. The jury was told that Stewart had been convicted of murdering Helen Bailey in 2017, and the prosecution pointed to what the two cases had in common: in each, the woman was in an intimate relationship with him, nobody else was at home, he said he had been out, and the first account of the death came from him.
Both sons gave evidence and watched much of the trial from the public gallery with their mother's sister. The younger, who had been 15 when his mother died, described his parents' marriage as "loving, caring, kind, family-orientated," and said his father had been "in bits" afterward. The elder spoke of the raised voices he had heard that week, and said his father had been in tears that day and devastated afterward. On January 25 the jury heard the 999 call; Stewart leaned forward with his head in his hands, shook his head and looked up at the ceiling as it played. Two friends called by the defence described a warm and stable marriage. Asked by the prosecution about Stewart's conviction for Helen Bailey's murder, one of them said, "That's a verdict of the trial," and added that he found it very hard to believe.
Stewart gave evidence with his sons watching. "We were in love, very happy, very much so," he said of his marriage in June 2010. Looking back, it had been "too perfect really, too good"; they argued about chores such as the washing up and the shopping, never had a big falling out, and he had been "trying to save her life." He told jurors he had never seen his wife have a fit, though he had told the 999 operator that she had had one.
On Wednesday, February 9, 2022, the jury of five men and seven women unanimously found Stewart guilty of murdering his wife. Mr Justice Bryan sentenced him the same day.
The judge found that Diane's death had not been natural. He set out the striking similarities with the murder of Helen Bailey: the planning, the financial motive, and the pretense that the victim had died naturally or had simply gone away. He listed the aggravating features: the murder took place where Diane was entitled to feel safe; Stewart knew his sons would come back to it; there was substantial premeditation and planning; the motive was financial; and she would have known terror before she died. He found no mitigation. He spoke of "a series of calculated and callous lies."
Both counsel had told the judge that the case fell under the part of the sentencing law that makes a whole life order the starting point for a murder committed by someone previously convicted of murder, and he agreed. "Your punishment must fit the crime not the vagaries of your life-span," he said, concluding that "just punishment requires that you will be kept in prison for the remainder of your life." He made a whole life order.
After the verdict, Jerome Kent, by then a detective superintendent, called Stewart "a master manipulator" who could "tell lies to create a narrative around those lies," and said he believed him to be a narcissist: "It's all about him." The investigation into Diane's death had lasted six years. Her sons said: "Our mum was amazing," and that it had been really upsetting over those six years to have to relive the toughest time of their lives. Her sister and brother asked to be left in peace. The vicar who had comforted Stewart in 2010 said he felt "absolutely sick." "I'd have given Ian a hug, I'd have done my best to comfort him," he said. "And to think all of that was a sham, a lie, is horrible."
Under section 321 of the Sentencing Act 2020, a court passing a life sentence for murder must either fix a minimum term or make a whole life order, which leaves no possibility of parole or conditional release; for an offender aged 21 or over, a whole life order is required where the seriousness of the offence makes a minimum term inappropriate. Schedule 21 to the Act sets the starting points. A whole life order is the starting point where the seriousness of the offence is exceptionally high and the offender was 21 or over; the normal examples in paragraph 2(2) include the murder of two or more people involving a substantial degree of premeditation or planning, and, in paragraph 2(2)(e), a murder by an offender previously convicted of murder. A minimum term of 30 years is the starting point where seriousness is particularly high, and paragraph 3(2) lists murder done for gain and the murder of two or more people among the examples. Aggravating and mitigating factors may then move the term up or down. The courts have long described a whole life order as a sentence of last resort for cases of the most extreme gravity.
On April 1, 2022, it was announced that Stewart would challenge his whole life order. His case was listed with four others raising the same questions about whole life orders, among them the appeal of Wayne Couzens and Attorney General's references in the cases of Emma Tustin and Thomas Hughes and of Jordan Monaghan. A five-judge court led by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon, with Dame Victoria Sharp, Lord Justice Holroyde, Mr Justice Sweeney and Mr Justice Johnson, heard them at the Royal Courts of Justice on May 4, 2022. Stewart did not attend.
Amjad Malik QC argued for Stewart that the two killings, though planned and financially motivated, did not reach the exceptional threshold, and proposed a fixed term of 36 to 40 years that would still keep him in prison beyond the age of 90. "The irony is that I am asking for a particularly high sentence to take this man beyond the age of 90," he said. "He is in effect this: A man who is going to die in prison." Tim Little QC, for the Attorney General, said the judge who sentenced Stewart for Helen Bailey's murder had been "totally oblivious" to the earlier killing, and argued that had both murders been tried together a whole life order would probably have followed.
Judgment was given on July 29, 2022, in R v Stewart and others, [2022] EWCA Crim 1063. The court held that the judge had been wrong to treat the case as falling within paragraph 2(2)(e). When Stewart murdered his wife in 2010 he had not been convicted of any murder, so he was not then "an offender previously convicted of murder." Nor could the court treat it as a case of two murders: it was sentencing for one murder only, and the earlier sentence for the murder of Helen Bailey could not make the second an associated offence. Viewed in isolation from the later murder, the first "could not ... be regarded as an offence of exceptionally high seriousness." "Grave though the first murder was," there was no sign that Stewart had been planning a series of killings when he committed it.
The court started instead from 30 years, the starting point for a murder done for gain, and moved upward for the premeditation, the domestic setting, the trauma to the sons, and the cover-up that had left him free to kill again. Drawing on an earlier decision about how a new term should reflect a sentence already being served, it took account of the roughly four years Stewart had already served of his 34-year term. "We conclude that the appropriate minimum term was one of 35 years," the court said. The whole life order was quashed and replaced by life imprisonment with a minimum term of 35 years, running from February 9, 2022. The court held that the circumstances of his case did not fall within the statutory provision, and that it was "not one of the rare cases where, nonetheless, a whole life order should be imposed." In the same judgment Couzens's whole life order was upheld, Monaghan's minimum term was raised from 40 to 48 years, Tustin's stayed at 29 years, and Hughes's sentence was increased from 21 to 24 years.
Two days before the appeal ruling, on July 27, 2022, Judge David Farrell QC at Luton Crown Court made a confiscation order arising from Diane's murder. The court assessed Stewart's benefit from her death at 398,761.08 pounds and his realizable assets at 185,173 pounds, and ordered him to pay that sum within six months or serve two years in default. The money was to go to his and Diane's two sons. Amjad Malik QC said Stewart had given "express instructions to accept the confiscation order" and did not challenge either figure. In February 2023 the Eastern Region Special Operation Unit listed the order among more than 5 million pounds its financial investigators had reclaimed for victims and their families in 117 investigations since April 2022.
In February 2023 Stewart was serving life imprisonment, with two minimum terms of 34 and 35 years. Judge Bright had noted in 2017 that the first term alone would keep him in prison until he was 90.
1980s: Ian Stewart and Diane meet as students at Salford University.
1986: they marry; in the 1990s they move to Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, where they raise two sons.
June 25, 2010: Stewart murders his wife, Diane Stewart, 47, in Bassingbourn; her death is recorded as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy and an inquest finds natural causes.
February 2011: Helen Bailey's husband dies in an accident in Barbados; she begins the Planet Grief blog.
2011: Stewart and Helen Bailey begin writing to each other through a bereavement group.
2012: Stewart witnesses her will; by 2014 he is a beneficiary.
2013: the couple move to Royston, Hertfordshire.
July 2014: Stewart sells the Bassingbourn house for 530,000 pounds.
2015: When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis is published.
Early 2016: Stewart and Helen Bailey become engaged.
April 11, 2016: Stewart murders Helen Bailey, 51, in Royston; within hours he raises a standing order from her account.
April 15, 2016: he tells police she has gone away.
July 11, 2016: Hertfordshire Police arrest him on suspicion of murder; he is charged with murder and appears in court within days.
December 2016: he first blames two men.
January 2017: trial opens at St Albans Crown Court.
February 22, 2017: guilty of murder, fraud, a further common law offence and three counts of perverting the course of justice.
February 23, 2017: life, minimum term 34 years; police announce a re-examination of Diane Stewart's death.
July 10, 2017: confiscation order of 5,100 pounds.
August 2017: ordered to pay 98,455 pounds in prosecution costs.
August 21, 2018: questioned in custody on suspicion of Diane's murder; released under investigation.
July 6, 2020: appears at St Albans Crown Court charged with Diane's murder; later pleads not guilty.
January 18, 2022: trial opens at Huntingdon Crown Court.
February 9, 2022: unanimous guilty verdict; Mr Justice Bryan makes a whole life order.
April 1, 2022: appeal against the whole life order announced.
May 4, 2022: Court of Appeal hearing in London.
July 27, 2022: confiscation order of 185,173 pounds at Luton Crown Court, for the couple's sons.
July 29, 2022: Court of Appeal quashes the whole life order and substitutes a minimum term of 35 years.
February 2023: the confiscation order is listed among recoveries by regional financial investigators; Stewart is serving life.