‘Murdered’ author’s mum: I was uneasy about her partner
Tears in court as jury told of her guilt over writer’s death
The mother of writer Helen Bailey yesterday revealed she was ‘uneasy’ about her daughter’s relationship with the man accused of killing her.
Eileen Bailey said she also worried about the children’s author’s state of mind after she complained of sudden memory loss and drowsiness.
The 88-year-old told a jury about a ‘number of particular incidents’ in the weeks before her daughter’s death.
But she wept as she described her guilt at being ‘dismissive’ towards the writer when they discussed her health concerns. Miss Bailey’s fiance Ian Stewart, 56, is accused of plying her with sedatives before smothering her at their £1.5million home.
Prosecutors say he dumped her body in a cesspit at the property in order to get his hands on her £4million fortune.
Giving evidence via a video link at St Albans Crown Court yesterday, Mrs Bailey described how her 51-year-old daughter snoozed for five hours during the day even though she had enjoyed a full night’s sleep.
And she was ‘almost traumatised’ after leaving her beloved dachshund Boris on the beach by her holiday cottage.
Asked how she felt about her daughter’s romance with Stewart, Mrs Bailey said: ‘I felt uneasy about [the relationship].
‘Latterly I was quite unhappy, mainly because of Helen’s state of mind. I was worried about her, there were a number of particular incidents that concerned me.
‘Helen was having lapses in memory, and she just had such a good memory beforehand.’
Mrs Bailey said her daughter had become ‘highly anxious’ and felt ‘spaced out’ all the time.
The pensioner told how she became worried when the author said she could not recognise her own hands when she was sitting at her computer.
She also said her daughter ‘would fall to the floor’ when she tried to reach an item from a shelf in a supermarket.
Several members of the jury sobbed as Mrs Bailey described a phone conversation with her daughter a week before the alleged murder. The pensioner said: ‘In this panicked voice, she said “I just slept five hours”.
‘That took me by surprise and I said, “You must have needed it” and she said “What, after a night’s sleep?”’ Breaking down in tears, Mrs Bailey added: ‘I feel I was dismissive.’
The writer’s body was discovered in the cesspit alongside her dog at her home in Royston, Hertfordshire, three months after she vanished in April. Traces of the sleeping drug Zopiclone, which had been prescribed to Stewart, were found in her body.
He reported his fiancee as a ‘missing person’ to police four days after the alleged killing. During interviews with officers he behaved in an erratic and rude manner, jurors were told.
Detective Constable Hollie Daines told the court: ‘I found his behaviour generally quite unexpected at times.
‘He had already snapped at me a couple of times when I was asking him to do an interview.
‘I found him rude, temperamental, unco-operative and dismissive of us.’
After officers had concluded the first interview with Stewart, he is alleged to have said: ‘Am I still a suspect? I must be, I must be a suspect.’
The jury was told that Stewart was against the idea of holding a press conference in order to issue
‘She was having memory lapses’
a direct appeal about his fiancee’s disappearance.
DC Daines added: ‘He wasn’t keen on the idea, he felt that the media will twist anything he said.’ During a second interview with police, Stewart told them he had asked Miss Bailey to marry him in 2012 – less than a year after they met.
In the interview, which was played to the court, he said: ‘She didn’t want to tell anyone. She didn’t want to go through another engagement thing, she just wanted another wedding. I asked her marry me about a year after she lost her husband.’
Prosecutors claim Stewart plied Miss Bailey, who wrote the Electra Brown and Daisy Davenport novels for teenagers, with sedatives for more than a month before killing her on April 11 last year. The computer software engineer denies murder, perverting the course of justice, preventing a lawful burial and fraud.
The trial continues.