I found Mum and Dad sitting bolt upright and lifeless in their favourite chairs in the conservatory.
Now police want to know whether the fentanyl murderer drugged me too
EArLY one morning last June, Ellie Baxter answered a knock at the door of the home she shared with her partner and one-year-old son to find two police officers on the doorstep. Dozens of other officers and police vans lined the street.
‘It was around 7am,’ she recalls. ‘I was half- dressed, six months pregnant. They came into the house and said they were arresting me on suspicion of the murder of Carol and Stephen Baxter, at which point I pretty much had a complete breakdown.’
No wonder. Carol, 64, and Stephen, 61, were her parents and two months earlier, on Easter Sunday, Ellie had discovered their bodies after calling at the £1 million family home in West Mersea, Essex.
Finding them stone dead and sitting bolt upright in their favourite chairs in the conservatory, the shock had been so immense that 23-year- old Ellie feared she’d had a miscarriage.
Yet far worse was to come: only after she had been arrested did a devastated Ellie discover that toxicology tests had found the powerful prescription opioid fentanyl in her parents’ systems — placing her and her partner Marcus under suspicion of planning their deaths.
In fact, the culprit was a 34-year- old called Luke D’Wit, who had worked for the couple for nearly a decade, undertaking IT work for the Baxters’ successful fitted shower mat firm, Cazsplash. In the process, he won over the trust of his kindly and wealthy employers.
A search of his home revealed an ample supply of fentanyl alongside a makeshift pestle and mortar, while police subsequently discovered that D’Wit had created a fake will the day after the Baxters were found dead, making him a director of the company.
It is one of many lies heartbroken Ellie and her brother Harry, 26, have since discovered were concocted by a man who described himself to the police as ‘ like a son’ to his former employers.
They now know that for at least two years prior to her death, D’Wit had been slowly poisoning Carol with an overdose of her prescription medication, leaving her with distressing symptoms akin to Parkinson’s disease.
He had also created a vast web of fake online identities — among them doctors and fake ‘patients’ — to persuade her she was being properly cared for.
‘Mum lost her freedom, her will, her ability to function due to her illness — an illness no one could help with or understand because it was contrived by Luke D’Wit,’ says Ellie now, talking for the first time following D’Wit’s double murder conviction last month at Chelmsford Crown Court. ‘Mum felt so alone and lost and there was nothing I could do other than give her my shoulder to cry on and cuddle her.
‘Luke was so manipulative that he hacked his way into our lives and schemed and planned my parents’ demise when they had done nothing but show kindness to him.’
And for what? To this day Ellie and Harry do not really know. While D’Wit had altered their parents’ will to make him the new company director, it was by then in debt and any ultimate financial benefit was negligible.
Sentencing D’Wit, Mr Justice Lavender believed he was motivated by a desire to control.
‘ Deciding whether another person lives or dies is the ultimate form of control,’ he said.
Could this have been his motive? Chillingly, Ellie today reveals that samples of her hair have been sent for testing to see if D’Wit started to administer drugs to her following her parents’ death.
Outwardly, D’Wit came across as a pillar of strength, helping Ellie plan her parents’ funeral and providing emotional support.
She recalls that he would turn up at her house with an open can of energy drink which he would offer her — and because she was exhausted, she would have some of it. Yet every time she saw him she would subsequently feel tired to the point where she could barely get out of bed.
‘I was sobbing down the phone to the GP saying I couldn’t go on,’ she recalls.
‘Whenever I had a break from D’Wit for a couple of days I felt better. And when he was arrested and remanded in custody it went away for good.
‘I now have to wonder whether he was also administering drugs to me. I know that the police are also looking into other deaths that were linked to him.’
They are just some of the many pieces of this horrifying jigsaw puzzle that Ellie is still struggling to figure out.
Tuesday marked the first anniversary of the day Ellie found her parents’ bodies. For a young woman who is also a new mother and breastfeeding her six-monthold daughter Aria, the ramifications are immense.
‘There’s so much pain,’ she says. ‘It was my son’s second birthday not long ago and for his first birthday we had a little party at my parents’ house. This year it’s just so different. They never got to meet their baby granddaughter. I’m still young and there are so many times when I just want my mum. It’s one thing people passing, but for them to be taken like that . . . there are no words really.
‘My parents had worked hard all their lives and saved up and they were really looking forward to retiring — and that got taken away by someone that they cared for and trusted like a son.’
Indeed it would be hard for anyone to find the right words to describe the extent of the betrayal that Luke D’Wit inflicted on this previously happy family.
Carol and Stephen had married in 2000 — it was Carol’s third marriage and she had two grownup children from her previous relationships — by which point Harry had been born. Ellie came along a year later and she remembers a loving family unit in which both parents worked hard, her father in property and her mother in sales. ‘Dad used to say, “There are no shortcuts in life” — he worked so hard to provide for us,’ she recalls.
‘My mum was so full of life and she always pushed me to be better. When I got older we would have girly days out at the spa and plenty of shopping trips. She was my best friend.’
In around 2011 the Baxters moved from Woolwich in SouthEast London to Essex to give the children a more rural upbringing, buying a comfortable detached home. By then, Carol had come up with the idea for a bespoke shower mat business after renovating her house and not finding one she wanted.
‘She figured that if she had to pay extra for a mat that would actually fit, so would other people,’ says Ellie. ‘So then she designed it and [the firm] just grew and grew.’ She pauses. ‘That’s when Luke came in.’
Luke, who was then 24 and, on
‘They showed him nothing but kindness’
‘He claimed he had cancer . . . another lie’
paper, appeared to be a ‘boring computer geek’, had helped design the website for a business run by one of Carol’s friends. Ellie, at the time a young girl, remembers thinking he was ‘weird’.
‘ My mum’s office is on the second floor and so was my bedroom and every time I’d get out of the shower, he’d be in the hallway. It got to the point where I had to speak to mum about it.’
Even so, as the years went by, D’Wit became part of the furniture: despite being officially
employed by the Baxters two days a week, he was at the family home most weekdays. On occasion, he would arrive at 7am and Ellie remembers a mounting degree of friction in the household as the years went by.
‘At one point in around 2020 my parents asked me to try to get all the passwords for everything, because they wanted to fire him,’ she says.
‘But in the end they just thought it was too risky to let him go because if he wanted to, by the power of a few buttons he could shut the whole business down.
‘I think their good hearts won out. He was odd but they felt a bit sorry for him.’
Not least when, in early 2021, D’Wit’s father died after a long battle with cancer.
‘He was literally always at the house,’ says Ellie. ‘We assumed he was lonely. We even let him join us for family dinners and special occasions.’
To this day, Ellie has no idea at what point D’Wit started to hatch his heinous scheme, but her feeling is that it was linked to his father’s death.
‘I think that’s when he started with everything for whatever reason,’ she says.
‘Everything’ being a sprawling and vast web of lies that took police weeks to unravel.
Taking advantage of a pre-existing condition from which Carol suffered called Hashimoto’s disease — an autoimmune condition which attacks the thyroid and made Carol fatigued and prone to lapses in concentration — D’Wit started to overdose her with her prescription medication promethazine, slipping it into ‘healthy’ smoothies.
Over time, this led to horrendous physical symptoms, including immense confusion and tremors.
Knowing that she had previously been in contact with a Floridabased endocrinologist called Dr
Andrea Bowden, D’Wit created a fake account for the doctor which he used to spin lies to Carol, recommending various useless treatments.
He also posed as three members of a fake support group for Hashimoto’s disease, even going so far as to create fake family and friends for them.
‘ Mum started following “Andrea’s” guidelines, and it just went from there,’ Ellie says.
Over time, her mum’s condition worsened to the point where sometimes she barely knew what she was doing.
Ellie recalls one particularly distressing occasion when she found her mum ironing a shirt on the hob as foam spilled from a dishwasher that had been overloaded with detergent. The stink of chemicals was everywhere.
‘My eyes were watering,’ says Ellie. ‘I have no idea what she had been doing but that was one of the worst times I’d ever seen her; she was absolutely all over the place. It was only a few weeks before she died.’
She adds: ‘It took a huge toll on dad, too — he felt so helpless. It was a horrible situation but mum believed she was receiving the best medical care, backed up by her online interactions with her “support group”.’
D’Wit even organised a face-toface meeting with one of these non- existent people, before claiming they’d had a medical emergency and couldn’t make it.
‘Mum and dad had driven two hours to a hotel to meet this person, only to have to drive back. Mum was so upset,’ Ellie recalls.
There was more: D’Wit also invented a fake illness of his own to further play on the family’s sympathies.
‘He claimed that he had been diagnosed with bone cancer, for which he had treatment every Thursday,’ says Ellie.
‘He would come back complaining of headaches and fatigue. My parents and I would support him through this.
‘But once again that was another lie — the closest he’d come to a hospital in the last ten years was after he’d had a paddleboard accident. It was another way to emotionally manipulate us all.’
It is a small comfort that, even as Carol’s health deteriorated, she was able to cradle her grandson, Ellie’s son Axel, following his birth in March 2022.
‘Mum and dad both loved Axel to bits,’ says Ellie. ‘The first time dad held his first grandchild, he said he fitted perfectly in his arms like my brother and I had. He lit up. He and mum were so excited for my new baby.’
A baby they would never have the chance to love because at some point in April last year, D’Wit decided to inflict his final, deadly blow — administering fentanyl he had hoarded from a prescription written for his father, via another ‘healthy’ smoothie.
Horrifyingly, he even rigged up two mobile phone cameras through which he could watch the couple die, before returning later to clean up the scene, rearrange their bodies into a more peaceful position and forge a codicil to the will.
He also used Carol’s phone to move £6,000 from her account into the business account.
‘We also know now that, with my parents bodies alongside him, he used mum’s phone to Google going on holiday to Disneyland,’ Ellie says.
And as Carol and Stephen lay dying, D’Wit took an oblivious Ellie, her partner Marcus and Axel out for an early birthday meal for Ellie.
‘He knew mum and dad were dying and he was laughing and drinking and buying us dinner,’ she says, shaking her head in disbelief.
Next day, concerned that she had not heard from her parents over the weekend, Ellie decided to pop round.
‘When I turned up I saw the blinds were still down and the lights were on.
‘It was 1pm and dad would religiously open the blinds every morning and close them at
‘You could see they were blue, it was horrible’
night — so I instantly knew that something was wrong.’
When she had no answer at the front door, she ran round the house to the conservatory — where she was confronted by the horrific sight of her parents sitting bolt upright, clearly dead.
‘You could see they were blue and it looked like mum had stuff leaking out of her mouth. It was really, really horrible,’ she says, her eyes filling with tears.
‘Marcus smashed the back door to get in and I went to touch them and they were so cold and stiff. I remember stroking mum’s hair, pleading with her to wake up.’
The shocking discovery caused Ellie, in the early stages of pregnancy, to bleed heavily.
‘I’ve never known an emotional pain to physically hurt so much,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d lost my baby daughter but I couldn’t cope with confronting that, so I didn’t go for a scan.’
Thankfully, a subsequent scan showed her daughter was unharmed and over the next few weeks, as police investigations continued into the possible cause of her parents’ apparently inexplicable deaths — initial suspicions of carbon monoxide poisoning having proved unfounded — a grief- stricken Ellie concentrated on planning their funeral.
Chillingly, she says, D’Wit was a ‘tower of strength’ who helped her
to choose the funeral flowers, accompanied her to meet the funeral celebrant and even looked after Axel when Ellie went for a baby scan. That feeling lasted until June, when Ellie awoke to that knock on the door and was taken into custody along with Marcus and D’Wit.
It was during the subsequent intense six hours of questioning — Ellie sobbing throughout — that she learned her parents had died of fentanyl poisoning.
‘It didn’t make any sense,’ she recalls. Nor did the realisation that, while she and Marcus were released, D’Wit was remanded in custody and charged with her parents’ murder. ‘I couldn’t process it.’
Moreover, as a witness for the prosecution, Ellie only learned the full extent of D’Wit’s lies at his trial.
Horrifyingly, she learned during court proceedings that police believe that a metal tack that had been found in her mother’s stomach when she went to A&E complaining of stomach pain in 2021 was also likely to have been administered by D’Wit, as they found a bag of exactly the same tacks at his home.
‘It’s ridiculous to know the extent that this man had gone to. It’s overwhelming,’ Ellie says.
Outside court, Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby, head of the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate, said he had no doubt that if D’Wit, now serving a minimum tariff of 37 years, had not been caught he would have gone on to commit other murders.
Police are now looking into the deaths of D’Wit’s father and grandfather.
Meanwhile, Ellie is left to live with the legacy of her loss — grandchildren who will never know their grandparents and a hundred plans unfulfilled — and to finally grieve.
‘I know it sounds stupid but I’ve got this group chat with mum and dad on my phone and I update it sometimes,’ she says.
‘It helps to think that somehow they’re still here with me, even if I can’t see them.’