MONEY KILLS: THE TRAGIC MURDER OF AUTHOR HELEN BAILEY
The UK would lose one of their most best selling authors in this heartbreaking murder case. A beautiful and talented woman would go through a tragedy, then try to connect with others to share her experiences and give a space for them to share theirs, just to meet a man who she thought was so amazing… But it was just all an act, to deceive her and kill her out of pure greed.
WHO WAS HELEN BAILEY?
Helen Bailey was born on August 22nd, 1964, in Ponteland near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she lived for most of her life. Her passion for writing started when she was very young, mainly being diary entrees, consisting of mostly sad things. Helen didn’t have many friends growing up, leaving her to feel lonely for most of her childhood. However, she was a very bright and intelligent person, and when she got older she wanted to become a forensics scientist and ended up doing postgraduate research in a teaching hospital. Helen realized that this wasn’t really the right career choice for her, and switched to licensing and marketing in the media. Helen was actually responsible for creating many of the characters that most of us grew up with and loved as a child, including The Rugrats, Garfield, and a bunch of Nintendo Characters. After a couple years she became a secretary for the same business that she had been working in, but now she got to work with a lot of different people in her company. It was here where she met the love of her life and future husband, John Sinfield. John was the head of the licensing rights company, and the two got married in 1996.
John knew how much Helen loved to write, and he encouraged her greatly to write books like she wanted to do for so long. He thought that she was so talented, creative, imaginative and dedicated, and that she could do anything that she set her mind to. With the encouragement she received from her husband, she had written five books in the young adult fiction, and children’s fiction genres, between 2008 and 2010. These books were:
“Crazy World of Electra Brown” series:
Life at the Shallow End (2008)
Out of my Depth (2008)
Swimming Against the Tide (2009)
Taking the Plunge (2009)
Falling Hook, Line, & Sinker (2010)
TRAGEDY IN BARBADOS
By the time it was 2011, Helen and John had been together for 22 years, married for 15. They decided to take a two week trip to Barbados, as a way to just unwind, take a break from life, and to really just focus on connecting more as a couple, spend a lot of time bonding together. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be what happened on this trip. One day they decided to go to the beach, and John really wanted to go swimming, but Helen just wanted to relax and do her own thing on the sand for a while, so John went in without her. After Helen was done doing her thing on the sand, she decided to go and join him in the water, but when she approached the ocean, she saw John struggling to swim and to keep afloat. Helen panicked and notified the nearest lifeguard, but it was too late. By the time the lifeguard got to him, he had already drowned. This was absolutely devastating for Helen, especially because she was stuck on the rest of this trip all by herself. She had to stay there to get paperwork done and everything related to bringing his body back home. Helen did what she did best to try and grieve the loss of her husband, with writing. She started a blog called “Planet Grief” where she would write entries regarding her husband, her life with him, how she’s dealing with her loss, and she would share her experiences. Her blog also made it possible for others to also write about their grief and their experiences as well. It was just a very safe place for people in mourning to feel like they’re not alone. During this time Helen also wrote another book called, “When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis.”
A MAN IN MOURNING
Around seven months after starting her blog, she ended up meeting a man who was also a widower, Ian Stewart. He also recently lost his wife, and had two adult sons. They initially started chatting online about their losses, and then it turned into chatting more often in general, and then eventually they began meeting up and fell in love. Down the line they became engaged and decided to move in together, and bought a home. Their relationship seemed happy and healthy, that was until the police received a phone call on April 15th, 2016. This was a phone called made by Ian to report his wife, Helen, as missing. During this phone call he was acting a little weird, not being able to answer basic questions about his partner that most people would be able to answer, such as, eye color, hair color and hair style, their birthday, etc. The police showed up to the house and they asked Ian when the last time he saw her was, and he told them when he returned home on April 11th, he found a note left for him by Helen, telling him that she was going off to their cottage for a while to work on her new book, and she didn’t want anyone to bother her. He also explained that she hadn’t really been acting weird, just a little anxious and stressed out. Helen’s brother also told police that it wasn’t unusual for her to distance herself sometimes, but she would never just fully disappear without a word for days. She always kept in contact with her family and friends on a daily basis. After a couple days without hearing from Helen, her brother went to the cottage to search for her, but she wasn’t there. He said that it didn’t even look like she’s been there at all recently, and he told Ian his concerns, and that’s when the police were notified. Police even tried to track her cell phone, but it was turned off or dead, and they couldn’t even track any traces of her credit card being used around the time of her disappearance. The police checked around with Helen’s friends and family to see if she had any reason to want to go missing, and they all told them no, that she was very happy and would never leave and disappear without a word.
DAYS TURNED INTO WEEKS, WEEKS TURNED INTO MONTHS…
The police continued doing everything they could to try and locate Helen, but at this point it’s been over two months into the investigation, and they had no leads. They checked all their families and friends’ homes, the neighbors were told to check out their sheds to see if she could possibly be in there. She was just nowhere to be found. Everyone also started to notice that Ian hasn’t really been taking care of himself since the investigation started. He seemed exhausted and rundown, depressed, not shaving or showering, barely eating. It seemed like Helen’s disappearance was really taking a toll on him, which is understandable as she was his fiance. However, on April 16th, five days after she went missing, police noticed that her cellphone was clicked on near her cottage. They were hopeful and drove by to see if she was there, but she wasn’t. They thought it might’ve kicked on when she was driving by, and started treating this case like a runaway case. They put up missing persons posters, and told all the stores, restaurants, gas stations, and hotels around there to look out for this woman, and said she might’ve changed her hair and might be using a fake name.
THE FIRST BIG LEAD
When the police decided to check Helen’s bank records, they found their first big lead. Helen had a personal account set up that took out 400 pounds, and transferred that money into another account, which was a joint account between her and Ian. However, as soon as Helen went missing, the number changed from 400 pounds, to 4,000 pounds. This started throwing up some red flags for investigators, especially when they saw that money had been taken out since she’s been missing, to renew an Arsenal Football Club season ticket, which was in Ian’s name. When the police went to Ian’s home to question him on these findings, he wasn’t there. They went around asking people that he knew where he had gone, and they were told that he decided to go away on vacation. This was sort of another red flag for the police, because who would go away on vacation in the middle of an investigation for their missing partner? This wasn’t just a small weekend getaway either, due to all the stress from worrying about Helen. This was a 2 week planned trip that had been booked months in advance for both him and Helen to take together. This made things look even worse for Ian, as the police found it to be very odd that he would take such a long trip that was meant for them both… alone. It was at this point that the investigation went from a missing person investigation, to a murder inquiry.
When Ian returned from his trip, he was immediately arrested and told that he was a suspect in the murder of Helen Bailey. He was shocked and confused as to why he was a suspect. When they brought him in for questioning, he told the police that he had gone to a doctor’s appointment at 3 PM on the day Helen left, and stated that his appointment was supposed to be for the morning but he was having car trouble and asked to reschedule for a later time. His doctor was interviewed and said that he didn’t really seem abnormal, outside of being a little distant. After his appointment he went to Helen’s solicitors office to discuss a property that she had in Newcastle. The solicitor was also interviewed, and they stated that Ian was very aggressive, and really wanted to push the sale on this property, but was told they couldn’t do that without speaking with Helen, as this property was under her name. He got agitated and told them Helen was sick, and she really wanted this done, but he was still turned down. After that he went to the dump to discard some garbage, and by the time he got home, Helen and her dog Borris were gone, and that’s when he saw her note. Later that night he went to meet up with one of his sons, however, his son had no idea that his father was coming to see him. He just randomly showed up at a place that he knows he frequents, and they had a few drinks and chatted for a while. Ian had also told investigators that he had done his own search one day, specifically on the 5th day of her missing, because he didn’t trust others to do it. This was the same day that Helen’s phone had clicked on, which means that Ian most likely had her phone on him when he went to check on her. This just added another red flag to the list. Police eventually had to let Ian go, as they didn’t have any hard evidence to keep him there, and by UK law you’re not allowed to hold a suspect for over 96 hours, which is four days.
THE NEXT BIG LEAD
The police decided to pull up Helen’s will, which gave them the biggest lead they had, and a hard motive. MONEY. Helen was going to leave every single thing that she had to Ian. Everything she owed, every property, and every dollar. This was definitely the motive that they needed to officially believe that Ian Stewart killed his fiance. However, that’s still not enough hard evidence to convict him, since they still didn’t have a body, or anything to officially incriminate him. In the meantime, they went around and re interviewed family, friends, and neighbors, as they needed to now ask different questions since it’s a murder case now, and not a missing persons case. No one really had anything new to report, besides the elderly lady who lived next door. She told them that she remembered hearing very loud banging noises on the morning she went missing. These noises kinda sounded like a heavy door being slammed shut, multiple times. She went over to her window to look outside, but by the time she got to the window the noise had stopped. That didn’t really give the police anything to really look into, so they decided to go ahead and watch the bodycam footage of when they initially came to question him about Helen being missing. This is when they noticed how strange his behavior really was. Ian kept bringing up the garage, asking over and over again why the garage door was open, who opened the garage door, did anyone see who was near the garage, just paying so much attention to his garage. This made police think that maybe something happened in the garage, and he’s trying to act like he had know idea what was going on, so no one would suspect him of anything they might find.
This is when the police did another search on their home, which took around two days to complete because it was a huge house. They didn’t want to leave any stone unturned, even going as far as checking the water tanks. While the water tank was being drained, this caused the elderly lady next door to ask the police what they were doing, as they were being extremely noisy, and it was very late and she was trying to sleep. They informed her that they were draining the water tank, and it’s something they really needed to do and apologized for the noise. That’s when they finally got the clue to finally put this case to a rest. The elderly lady told them that there’s also a septic tank underneath the garage, and to make sure they check there as well. The police had no idea that there was anything like that in the garage.
DISCOVERY AND ARREST
The next morning the police told Ian to move his car out of the garage, and when he did, they saw that his car had been parked over a big manhole cover the entire time. They removed the cover and began the really disgusting search for Helen’s body. The search took two hours before they finally found the body, along with the body of her dog, Borris. Ian was arrested instantly. The coroner established that the cause of death for both Helen and Boris was suffocation. Unfortunately, they can’t tell exactly how they were suffocated. It could’ve been before they were put in the cesspit, or they could’ve been put in there alive, and just ran out of oxygen. However, they also determined that Helen had been drugged with sleeping pills, and these specific sleeping pills were not prescribed to Helen… They were prescribed to Ian. This new information now makes more sense to investigators, as her search history that they checked at the beginning of the investigation showed Helen asking the question, “why do I always feel so tired?” They didn’t think anything of it at first, but now it all made sense. Ian had been drugging Helen with these pills for several months.
Ian pleaded not guilty even though there was evidence piled up strongly against him, and the trial began in January 2017. Ian decided to be his own defense attorney, which was a very risky move. Some new information came out during this trial, being that Ian had actually known Helen was missing since day one. He told the jury that two men with names of Nick and Joe had abducted Helen, and told him that they wanted 500,000 pounds, or else Helen was never coming back. That’s why he tried to go to her solicitors office and transferred all that money into his account. He didn’t want to tell the police about this earlier because he felt like they would hurt Helen if he snitched. Obviously, the jury wasn’t buying this load of garbage, and the lawyers ended up bringing in two men that Ian had known at some point in his life. One man being from school, and the other man being an old neighbor. He said that he knew these men, but these were not the men who took Helen.
It also came out in court when Helen’s brother took the stand, that when they originally bought their home, Helen was showing him around the house, and when they got to the cesspit she said to him, “wow, that would be a great place to hide a body.” She had a dark sense of humor, and she said this while Ian was around… It’s so heartbreaking that her making this joke could’ve put the idea in his head about where to hide her body when he was ready to put his plan into motion.
In February 2017, Ian Stewart was found guilty for the murder of Helen Bailey, and was sentenced to life in prison with the minimum of 39 years. This means Ian would be 90 years old before he was even eligible for parole.
While he was serving his sentence he was re-arrested in August 2018 for the murder of his first wife, Diane. Investigators knew that his first wife had passed away, and considering he killed Helen, what was stopping him from killing his first wife? Diane had passed away very suddenly from complications with her epilepsy. However, it was only assumed that it was from her epilepsy, and not exactly confirmed. Some people thought it was rather strange, since she never really had issues with it to the point where she’d die from it, but it wasn’t impossible. This investigation and trial went on for a while, and I’m not exactly sure of what evidence they had or how they got it, but Ian Stewart was found guilty of Diane’s murder on February 9th, 2022, and sentenced to life in prison once again, but this time without the possibility of parole.
