[imagesource: SWNS]

Double murderer Ian Stewart was given a rare whole-life prison sentence yesterday.

He was initially convicted for killing his fiancée, children’s author Helen Bailey (the couple are above), and hiding her body in a cesspit of the £1,5 million home they shared in Hertfordshire, southern England.

Now he has been convicted of murdering his first wife, Diane Stewart, six years before he killed Bailey.

When he was arrested, footage showed him shaking his head and accusing the police of “making things up”.

But the murderous man can speak all the nonsense he wishes, in prison, where he will now spend the rest of his wretched life.

The Independent reports that Bailey was 51 when she was murdered by Ian in 2016, likely by suffocation while sedated by drugs, according to a trial at St Albans Crown Court.

He was convicted for that murder one year later, after which police investigated the 2010 death of Stewart’s first wife with “chilling” similarities:

Ms Stewart’s [below] cause of death was recorded at the time as Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy but on Wednesday a jury of five men and seven women at Huntingdon Crown Court found Stewart guilty of murder. They took less than two days of deliberation.

The judge, Mr Justice Simon Bryan, said the two women’s deaths were in “chillingly similar circumstances”.

Image: BBC

He told Stewart: “You successfully passed off a murder as an epileptic fit in the circumstance I have identified playing out an elaborate, and indeed sophisticated, charade over a period of time.

“A charade that succeeded at the time, and would have succeeded for all time but for your subsequent murder of Helen Bailey.”

What a thing for a judge to admit.

Sadly, Ian’s two sons were a part of the ruse, providing evidence to his claim that he had returned from the supermarket to the family home in Cambridgeshire and found his 47-year-old wife collapsed in the garden with what he thought was an epileptic fit.

But the jurors were told that she had not had an epileptic fit for 18 years and took daily medication.

In fact, her risk of having a fatal epileptic seizure was about one in 100 000, according to the consultant neurologist Dr Christopher Derry.

Furthermore, Mrs Stewart’s brain had been donated to medical science, which neuropathologist Professor Safa Al-Sarraj examined:

Prof Al-Sarraj said there was evidence that Mrs Stewart’s brain had suffered a lack of oxygen prior to her death [“likely caused by a prolonged restriction to her breathing from an outside source”], and he estimated that this happened over a period of 35 minutes to an hour.

The motive? Money.

Ian had apparently received more than £96 000 (almost R2 million) after his wife’s death – £28 500 from a life insurance policy and the rest from bank accounts.

If not for the money, then the judge reasoned it might have been because he was “tired of Diane”.

Side note: How Bailey had no idea about the first murder is quite something, isn’t it?

[source:independent]