Killer who reminds us: You never really know your partner
THE death of the author Helen Bailey at the hands of computer geek Ian Stewart is a shocker – Midsomer Murders on crack – and it has turned the nation into armchair detectives when it comes to the plot. We think we’ve got the whole thing down – from the set-up (while Helen, 51, was planning their wedding, he was planning her killing), to the denouement (the sicko’s sentence last week of 34 years behind bars).
The pair ‘met’ on a bereavement page on Facebook, less than a year after Helen’s husband drowned in front of her eyes on a beach in Barbados in 2011.
The shattered widow became besotted with the unpromising widower, a grizzled IT expert and bowls (!) enthusiast, while he quickly wormed his way into her life and her will, which was redrafted to benefit him even before they’d become man and wife.
The next bit might even give Agatha Christie nightmares.
After several years of sharing her life and bed, Stewart, 56, started slipping sleeping pills into her morning scrambled eggs. And, on the very same day that she’d been happily Googling posh wedding venues as well as ‘why am I so tired?’ – the new £15,000 engagement ring flashing on her finger as she typed – Stewart murdered her, and dumped her body in a cesspit under their house.
Then he chucked in a favourite toy so that her darling little dachshund Boris (yes, named in honour of our athletic and aerodynamic Foreign Secretary) jumped in after his mistress to his death. Stewart alone stood to inherit the millions Helen had made from her teenage fiction series, her two houses, her £235,000 pension plan and the £1.28million life insurance policy taken out to cover inheritance tax. Indeed, as the Insurance Business website reported with what struck me as alarming confidence: ‘It’s a murder that has sent shock waves throughout the UK – and one that once again had life insurance as a central issue in the perpetrator’s motivation.’ This much we know. When my husband asks me, as is his wont, if I’m keeping up my life insurance payments and how much I’m insured for again, and I answer, ‘Bad luck, still only £200,000,’ and he says, ‘ I mustn’t forget to raise it before I bump you off,’ I assume he is joking, and not calculating (as Stewart really was) whether I am worth more to him dead than alive, but then I’ve always been a glasscompletely-full type. I think I know my husband pretty well by now, you see, and this is the piece missing from this nightmarish jigsaw. What no Poirot, no armchair detective, no Channel 5 shock-doc can ever reveal – at least until the murderer confesses (and Stewart was too cowardly even to attend court for sentencing, so don’t hold your breath) – is what was going on inside his head. What the murder of Helen Bailey tells us above all is that she didn’t know Ian Stewart. She didn’t know that he was a conman who never loved her. It turned out she didn’t have a clue what was going on inside her partner’s lizard brain, and that’s the really scary and sad part of this terrible story. Not knowing – not even suspecting – led to a strong, successful, attractive woman with so much more to give falling prey to a pathetic and evil killer.