Author found dead in cesspit had joked: It’s a good place to hide a body
AUTHOR Helen Bailey joked that the cesspit in her garage was a ‘good place to hide a body’ – three years before she was found dead in it, a court heard yesterday.
Miss Bailey, 51, made the quip as she showed her brother around the £1.5million home she bought with fiance Ian Stewart.
Three years later, Stewart, 56, plied her with sedatives and smothered her before dumping her in the cesspit so he could inherit her £4million fortune, prosecutors allege.
Her brother John yesterday said she made the joke about the cesspit, which he described as a ‘well’, in earshot of her partner during his visit to the home in August 2013.
‘ There was some banter, almost certainly instigated by Helen, that it was a good place to hide a body,’ he said. ‘I asked had they looked in it and I was told, no, it wasn’t that kind of well, by which I sort of thought it was a wishing well.’
Miss Bailey, who wrote the Electra Brown and Daisy Davenport novels for teenagers, was allegedly murdered by her fiance on April 11 last year. Her dachshund Boris is also said to have been killed to give credence to the theory that she had gone missing with him.
Stewart reported her missing four days later and claimed she had left a note saying she needed space and time alone, and was going to their holiday home in Broadstairs, Kent.
Mr Bailey, who joined the futile three-month search for his sister, told St Albans Crown Court he remembered her cesspit joke when police told him they’d found her body. He said: ‘When PC Neil Sutton visited to tell me it was believed that they discovered a body, he told me it was in an old well in the garage my recollection of my discussion in 2013 came back.’
Mr Bailey, 48, said he found a will written by his sister after her body was discovered, which left £1.8million to Stewart. The defendant was also in line to inherit their main home in Royston, Hertfordshire, and a holiday home in Broadstairs, Kent, and was the sole beneficiary of her pension fund of £230,000.
When Mr Bailey could not reach his sister after she disappeared, Stewart allegedly told him about the note saying she had gone to Kent.
‘When I asked him to read me the note, Ian said he couldn’t find it,’ he said. ‘When Ian told me he thought he had thrown the note out, I told him I thought he had better find it.’ Mr Bailey described his sister as ‘highly intelligent... and very witty’.
He said she suffered from anxiety after her husband of 20 years, John Sinfield, drowned in 2011. She started writing a blog called Planet Grief and met Stewart, who was also bereaved, on the internet.
Stewart wept as Mr Bailey said his sister ‘didn’t have a bad word to say about him’. He denies murder, three counts of perverting the course of justice, preventing a lawful burial and fraud. The trial continues.