SECRET AFFAIR LED TO SHALLOW GRAVE MURDER OF TRAGIC MIDWIFE
÷Married ex-lover smothered her in moment of ‘intense rage’ ÷He sobs in dock as family hear how she was dumped in quarry
‘He put his hands over her throat’
A MIDWIFE who was found dead in a shallow grave with tape wrapped around her face and eyes had been having a ‘long-standing’ affair with her killer, a court was told yesterday.
Samantha Eastwood was killed by her former fiance’s brother-in-law within hours of being seen for the last time as she left a hospital night shift.
Michael Stirling, 32, sat expressionless behind a desk in his remand prison to admit the murder of 28-year-old Miss Eastwood yesterday in a short hearing conducted via videolink to Northampton Crown Court.
Stirling’s wife Katie is the sister of the man Miss Eastwood had been due to marry this summer, John Peake.
The two couples regularly socialised together and were pictured together at the wedding of one of Mr Peake’s relatives. But Miss Eastwood suddenly called off the engagement in January, leaving friends baffled as to what had gone wrong between the pair.
Stirling’s barrister, Charles Miskin, QC, told the court how his client, a fencer and landscape gardener, had been in a ‘long-standing but not particularly intense’ affair with Miss Eastwood.
Miss Eastwood’s mother Carole, 59, sobbed in the public gallery as Mr Miskin said the guilty plea had been entered on the basis that the murder was not a ‘premeditated act’.
He added: ‘The context of the killing was a background of growing tension arising from a long-standing, but not particularly intense affair.
‘On the afternoon of the killing, various things were said between the defendant and Samantha Eastwood which led to him becoming very angry. There was an argument... After a struggle, and while she was on the floor, he put his hands over her throat, her mouth and nose. As a result of that she died.’
As Mr Miskin continued, Stirling began sobbing into his hands. The barrister added: ‘During his intense rage, he originally intended to cause her really serious bodily harm, but matters escalated and he carried out the intention to kill her.
‘He panicked afterwards and buried her in an area of which he had some knowledge.’ Miss Eastwood’s body was found in a disused quarry at Caverswall on the edge of the Staffordshire Moorlands, eight days after she was last seen driving out of the Royal Stoke University Hospital. Her face and eyes had been bound with masking tape and her body wrapped in a duvet in the shallow grave eight miles from her home in Baddeley Green, Stoke-on-Trent.
The day after Miss Eastwood vanished, Stirling was seen in her road knocking on doors asking neighbours if they had seen the missing midwife.
He was later arrested and bailed – and was observed casually cycling to his parents’ home as police continued to hunt for Miss Eastwood – before being re-arrested and charged with her murder when the grave was discovered.
Stirling’s barrister said yesterday that he ‘entirely accepts that he tried, wholly dishonestly, to mislead others in the afternoon after the killing’.
Jonas Hankin, QC, prosecuting, told Mrs Justice Carr that Stirling, who had never been in trouble with the law previously, had a history of depression and had searched ‘methods by which one might kill oneself’ online 48
hours before the murder. A few weeks before her death, Miss Eastwood had advertised her wedding dress for sale on Facebook Marketplace for £400, describing the Alfred Angelo garment as ‘not worn apart from being tried on in the shop’.
Mr Peake, a 34-year-old railway engineer who was with Miss Eastwood for seven years, travelled to Northampton to see Stirling plead guilty yesterday.
He left the courtroom with tears in his eyes and was later escorted to a waiting taxi alongside Miss Eastwood’s mother and sister, Gemma, 26, by police. The case was adjourned for sentencing at Stafford Crown Court in December.
Speaking outside court, Detective Inspector Dan Ison, of Staffordshire Police, said the guilty plea had saved the family from having to sit through some ‘horrendous evidence’ in a trial. He added: ‘It will save a lot of heartache for the family. It has saved an emotional rollercoaster.
‘Obviously Michael Stirling was known to the family and he’s lied to them and lied to police. They haven’t known, on occasion, who to believe.’ Miss Eastwood had been seen at a barbecue at the home her killer shared with his 32-year-old wife and young daughter in the weeks before she died – but their illicit union appears to have been kept hidden from all of those nearest to them.
A close friend said: ‘I knew that Sam and Michael were friendly and would talk on the phone to each other, but I had no idea they were involved in a relationship.
‘I just can’t believe it. I would consider myself to be one of Sam’s best friends but she never confided in me about that.’
It was not revealed in court yesterday what Stirling and Miss Peake had been arguing over in the moments before he killed her. But it is understood that the dedicated midwife had told a colleague she had been threatened in the weeks before her death.
A source told the Daily Mail in August: ‘[After this] Samantha asked one of her colleagues to report it if she didn’t turn up for work.
‘And that is what happened on the Friday night, that is why the police were called so quickly. She must have feared something like this would happen – that’s why she set up this raising the alarm thing with her colleague.’
Miss Eastwood grew up in Macclesfield, Cheshire, but settled over the county border in Staffordshire after studying midwifery at Keele University.
The midwife was last seen driving away from the hospital in her Volvo XC60 just after 7.30am on July 27. The alarm was raised that night when she failed to return for her next shift. Neighbours described hearing a scream coming from the property that afternoon, and noted that the Volvo had been parked at the wrong end of the driveway from where Miss Eastwood usually left it. The vehicle’s keys were inside her home but her purse was found to be missing.
The day before Miss Eastwood’s body was located at Tickhill Quarry, which is now used for monthly off-road motorsport meetings, her sister Gemma made a tearful appeal for information, telling reporters at a police press conference: ‘Without her half of me has gone.’
During the police search, forensic
‘Without her, half of me has gone’
officers spent days combing Mr Stirling’s home and that of his victim, where they spent time examining a garden outbuilding which neighbours said he had constructed for her.
According to at least two neighbours, the Stirlings were seen putting a roof box on their car the night before Miss Eastwood disappeared. At the time, the neighbours took that to mean the young family were about to go off on their summer holiday.
Last night Mrs Stirling was not at the semi-detached home the couple shared in the Northwood district of Stoke.
Her brother declined to comment when he arrived back at the new-build apartment he took on earlier this year after moving out of Miss Eastwood’s home.
A note at their parents’ address nearby asked reporters not to knock last night.