‘MY CLUE SOLVED THE CASE’
Three months after author Helen Bailey disappeared, a clue from her neighbour Mavis Drake unravelled the case. She tells Catherine O’Brien how her tip- off led police to discover Helen’s body and charge her partner Ian Stewart with murder
An exclusive interview with mdeurred author Helen Bailey’s next door neighbour
Mavis Drake’s house has an inviting drawing room and cosy snug, but her favourite place to pass the time of day is upstairs by her bedroom window. Here, perched on a stool, she has a bird’s eye view of her local tennis club courts across the road. At 82, Mavis no longer plays, but she loves to watch, and she keeps a pair of binoculars on the windowsill expressly for that purpose.
One summer morning nearly four years ago, however, it was not the match that commanded her attention, but the comings and goings next door. Her neighbours were moving out ‘and I was in floods of tears because we had lived happily alongside each other for more than 40 years,’ she recalls. Having hugged her friends goodbye, the curious Mavis went to her vantage point for a first glimpse of the newcomers.
Sure enough, before long, an attractive dark-haired woman appeared with a stocky man at her side. ‘I waved, and the woman smiled and waved back. I knew in that instant that we would be friends,’ Mavis says. ‘ The man didn’t make eye contact and he struck me as a bit odd. But still, I would never have guessed in that moment that we had a murderer moving into our midst.’
Today, the whole world knows of the gruesome drama that was to unfold on Mavis’s doorstep. The couple who walked hand-in-hand through the wrought-iron gates of their recently acquired seven- bedroom arts and crafts house that sunny August day were the acclaimed author Helen Bailey and her partner Ian Stewart. Both previously widowed, they had met via an online bereavement group and, for Helen, the purchase of €1.35 million Hartwell Lodge – paid for mostly by her – offered the promise of a fresh start.
Instead, the house was to prove the setting for her brutal demise. Last year Ian drugged Helen with sleeping pills before killing her. That he was convicted of her murder is due, in no small part, to Mavis, who pointed police to the hidden cesspit where he had dumped Helen’s body, along with that of her beloved dachshund Boris.
‘You don’t realise until you are in this situation how important it is to think the unthinkable,’ says Mavis. ‘What that monster did to Helen is beyond horrifying. But at least I know that he will never be free again to murder another innocent, defenceless woman.’
Silver-haired Mavis may not strike you at first glance as a natural confidante for a bestselling writer like Helen. She has lived all her adult life in tranquil Hertfordshire, while Helen, who was 51 when she was murdered, described herself as an out-andout ‘London girl’.
Mavis was old enough to be Helen’s mother and is, indeed, the mother of three adult children and a grandmother of eight, while Helen was childless. And while Mavis was long ago amicably divorced, Helen had
experienced deep trauma through the death of her husband John Sinfield, who drowned in 2011 after being sucked out to sea by a rip tide in Barbados, where he and Helen had married 15 years earlier.
In the aftermath of her bereavement, Helen had set up a blog called Planet Grief, which included such lines as: ‘I don’t want to be the [person] whose husband drowned. I want to be the slightly silly, occasionally shallow woman I was before.’ Her ability to infuse soul- crushing grief with a wry, self- deprecating humour explains her likability – and the instant rapport she established with Mavis. ‘We were both what I call people people,’ says Mavis. ‘She was sad, but she was also feisty, vibrant, funny and clever, and she had that knack of making whoever she was talking to feel special.’
Mavis and Helen’s first proper encounter came a couple of days after the removal vans – Helen’s large, Ian’s small – had departed from the driveway of Hartwell Lodge.
‘She appeared at the front door and I invited her in,’ recalls Mavis. ‘We embraced, I made her a cup of tea and it didn’t take long for us to get to know each other.’
With pride, Mavis told Helen that she is an official Blue Badge tourist guide in nearby Cambridge. ‘It’s my vocation – I’ve been doing it for 42 years and I’ve no intention of ever retiring,’ she says. She introduced Helen to her partner, Geoff Kenzie (they’ve lived together for 30 years) and explained that his memory is failing because of vascular dementia, but that he is otherwise in rude health. And she confided in the tragedy of her 22-year- old granddaughter Natasha, who has been left semi-paralysed and needing 24-hour care after suffering a bleed on the brain.
Helen, in turn, told Mavis about her career – built upon her Electra Brown series of teenage fiction – and talked candidly about the loss of John, a former BBC executive who had run his own licensing agency, and who was known as JS. ‘ They had been together more than 20 years and I could tell that she missed him terribly,’ Mavis says. ‘And yet she was also determined to build a new life.’
Four months after moving into Hartwell Lodge, Helen and Ian issued invitations for a pre- Christmas ‘champagne, cake and coffee’ gathering. ‘She’d asked how she could get to know everybody so I’d suggested a drinks party,’ says Mavis.
Helen served brownies and cupcakes – ‘she loved baking’– while Ian busied himself refilling everybody’s glasses. Also mingling among the 30 or so guests were Ian’s two grown-up sons Jamie and Oliver, who were living at Hartwell Lodge, and Ian’s mother Brenda, who lives a few miles away. ‘She is a lovely woman. We spent a long time chatting and realised we had a friend in common,’ says Mavis.
The party was such a success that Helen made it an annual event – she called them her ‘three Cs’ parties – and it is only with hindsight that Mavis realises that despite attending two more of them and living next door to Ian for almost three years, she barely got to know him at all.
‘I saw Helen all the time. She would pop in for a cup of tea, or I would go next door. Ian might answer the bell but then he’d disappear while Helen and I sat in her study. Sometimes she’d drop by if she was out walking with her dog Boris, but Ian came to my house just the once, and although we did talk, I can’t remember a word he said,’ she recalls.
On her blog, Helen dubbed 56-year- old Ian the Gorgeous Grey-Haired Widower (or GGHW), but it is not a description Mavis recognises. ‘He was a nonentity; he had no personality. She was always smart – she had a wonderful wardrobe of clothes and jewellery – but he was scruffy and looked like he made no effort. I didn’t think they were well suited and it was hard to understand what she saw in him, but it wasn’t my place to tell her that.’
The relationship between Mavis and Helen was one of solid neighbourliness. They were trusted key-holders for each other’s properties and they signed for each other’s parcels. Mavis became an avid reader of Helen’s blog, which was eventually picked up by a publisher and turned into the book When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis (the title came from Helen’s surreal reaction to JS’s death as she lay sunbathing: ‘But I’m wearing a bikini!’). ‘I was thrilled for her,’ says Mavis. ‘But I did worry that thinking about death all the time was stifling her creativity and suggested it might be time to move on to Planet Happiness – because she had so much more to give.’
Another neighbourly task Mavis fulfilled was witnessing the signature of Helen’s will, which Helen redrafted in 2014.
‘I didn’t read it, of course – the contents were none of my business,’ says Mavis. Had she known what was inside, she would have undoubtedly been suspicious, for Helen had decided to leave most of her near €5 million of assets to Ian, instead of to her brother John, her stepson Daniel Sinfield and stepdaughter Jenny Winterbottom, as detailed in her ➤
➤ previous will. She had also taken out a life insurance policy to cover a potential €1.4 million inheritance tax bill should she die before she and Ian were married, which they were planning to do last September.
Mavis last spoke to Helen the week before she died as Helen walked towards the nearby heath with Boris. A few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, she caught sight of her driving out of her gate in her Jeep.
‘She looked anxious and was in too much of a hurry to wave to me,’ Mavis recalls. ‘But I knew she was a worrier, as am I.’ Mavis also knew that Helen had been preoccupied with Ian’s health. A former computer software engineer, he hadn’t worked for years because he suffers from the muscle-weakening condition myasthenia gravis and he had recently undergone keyhole surgery on his intestines.
The following Friday, while Mavis was watching tennis from her window early in the evening, two police cars drove into Hartwell Lodge.
‘My first thought was, “Oh my goodness, I hope there hasn’t been a road accident.”’ Half an hour later, one of the officers knocked on Mavis’s door. ‘I expect you are wondering why we are here – I’m afraid Helen has gone missing,’ he told her.
Helen hadn’t been seen since the previous Monday, when she supposedly left a note saying she ‘needed some space’ and that she had gone to a holiday home she owned on the Kent coast. ‘At the time, it sort of made sense,’ says Mavis, who knew, from reading Planet Grief, that Helen had toyed with the idea of disappearing after JS died. ‘But after a couple of weeks, I knew that couldn’t be right. Helen might have wanted to get away, but she would have let her family know she was safe.’ Uppermost in Helen’s mind, Mavis was convinced, would have been her 88-year- old mother Eileen, to whom she spoke every couple of days.
Mavis went round to offer her support to Ian, but spoke only to someone she didn’t recognise who answered the door and said he was resting. Like all her neighbours, she was asked by police to search her garage and garden shed for clues. She followed the news avidly and read reports of unconfirmed sightings in Kent and elsewhere.
‘We clung on to those because you are constantly pushing the dark thoughts away and filling your heart with hope,’ she says.
One person who accurately predicted the grim truth, however, was Mavis’s daughter Nicola, who lives in Perth, Australia, but had met Helen on visits back home.
‘I was telling Nicola about it on Skype, and she said, “It’ll be murder, premeditated, and Ian will have done it for her money.” I told her not to be silly, but her words were prophetic.’
Helen went missing on Monday 11 April 2016. Her computer records showed that she had spent the morning Googling details about Brocket Hall, where she wanted to have her upcoming wedding reception.
She had also, in the weeks before she died, been searching for explanations of why she felt so exhausted, using phrases in her search engine that included ‘I’m so tired, falling asleep at work’ and ‘Falling asleep in the afternoon’. Ian, it transpired, had been secretly dosing her with his sleeping medication since early February.
By that Monday afternoon he had murdered her, probably by suffocation. Four days later, on the Friday, he reported her missing. For weeks, as Ian took part in an international press campaign and paid for flyers and posters asking for information about Helen’s whereabouts, police pursued the theory that she had made herself disappear.
Only in July, having exhausted all leads and found no evidence of Helen having left Royston, did police openly begin to treat Ian as a suspect. Hartwell Lodge and its acre of grounds, complete with swimming pool and outbuildings, had been searched and the septic tank in the garden was drained, but nothing to indicate Helen’s demise was found. Police discovered that Ian had increased a standing order from Helen’s bank account to their joint account from £600 to £4,000 (€700 to €4,750) the day she purportedly went missing. Ian was questioned about this and on Monday 11 July was arrested on suspicion of murder. He was bailed the following day.
Mavis knew nothing of these developments
What that monster did to Helen is beyond horrifying
because Nicola was visiting from Australia and they were away on a short holiday. They returned to Royston on the Wednesday evening to find that Hartwell Lodge had been turned into a crime scene, with floodlights and a generator parked on the drive. As the full realisation dawned that Helen could have been murdered by Ian, both Mavis and Nicola had the same thought.
‘We knew that house back to front because we had been good friends with the previous owners,’ Mavis explains. Indeed she and Michael Shannon, who sold Hartwell Lodge to Helen, had shared a longstanding joke. ‘ There were two cesspits – one in the garden, which was actually the overflow, and one in the garage, which went down 15 feet. Michael used to banter with me that if I became a rowdy neighbour, he would do me in and no one would ever find me down there. It sounds macabre, but it was just our black humour.’ On her way to play bridge on Thursday, Mavis approached the police and asked if they were aware of the second cesspit. The officers were noncommittal, but first thing Friday morning, a policeman came to Mavis’s home and questioned her directly. She put them in touch with Michael Shannon and, within a couple of hours, Mavis had a return visit from the same officer. ‘He said they’d had an “event” – and I knew then that they had found her.’ Ian’s trial heard that the Victorian cesspit in the garage had been concealed after Ian parked Helen’s Jeep on top of it. Inside, alongside Helen’s body, was a pillowcase that may have been used to suffocate her. ‘She couldn’t have been conscious because she was strong and there is no way she wouldn’t have fought back,’ says Mavis. Also in the pit was the body of Boris and a dog’s toy, which Ian may have thrown in so that Helen’s adoring companion would jump in after his mistress.
‘ This was not a crime of passion. He is a calculated, cold-blooded killer who was jealous of Helen’s success and jealous of the attention she gave to Boris,’ says Mavis. ‘He wasn’t affectionate to the dog and everything about his body language indicated that he didn’t like him.’ Mavis’s only comfort is that, as an unwitting real-life Miss Marple, she has helped put Ian behind bars, serving a minimum of 34 years. DCI Jerome Kent, who led the murder investigation, said at the end of the court case that had Helen’s body not been found ‘it’s difficult to see where a conviction would have come from’.
When Ian was jailed in February, police announced that they were launching an investigation into the death of his first wife Diane, who collapsed and died, aged 47, on the patio of their home in 2010. At the time, the cause was recorded as ‘sudden unexpected death in epilepsy’ but her family remain bewildered that she died so suddenly when she was in perfect health and her epilepsy was under control.
‘My greatest sympathies are with her sons who have not only lost their mother but also discovered that their father is not the man they thought he was,’ says Mavis.
Almost a year on, Mavis remains profoundly shocked by the death of her ‘immensely talented and deeply loyal friend’. Next door, Hartwell Lodge stands empty and the only sign of movement comes from a weathervane in the shape of a dachshund that spins from the garage roof. ‘ That was Helen’s quirky landmark and some of my neighbours don’t like it there now – they think it is spooky,’ says Mavis. ‘But I prefer to think of it as a memorial to her. Helen only ever wanted Hartwell Lodge to be a happy home, and hopefully, one day that is what it can become.’