A murder victim penned love letters calling a killer primary school teacher with a dark alter ego the “perfect woman” before she stabbed him in the neck and buried his body in their back garden.
A court heard that Nick Billingham, 42, vowed “My body, my heart, my love has been yours since the day I met you and will be yours until the day I die”, as he tried to win back Fiona Beal following an affair.
“You are the most beautiful woman in the world,” he gushed in letters read to the Old Bailey. “You are so kind-hearted in every single way and if there were more people like you around, the world would be a better place.”
The couple reconciled in 2020, but Beal, 50, murdered him “in cold blood” less than two years later. His mummified body lay undiscovered in a “de facto coffin” in their back garden for more than four months while she told friends and family her partner of 17 years had left her for another woman.
Chilling photographs shown to the court revealed the makeshift grave where she entombed Billingham in the side return of their home under layers of sheeting, badly mixed concrete, breeze blocks and compost.
The Year 6 teacher had initially pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter by reason of a loss of control, but denied murdering Billingham between October 30 and November 10 2021 at their terraced home in Northampton.
She changed her plea part way through a trial last month, admitting his murder.
At a two-day sentencing hearing beginning on Wednesday, the court heard that Beal documented the “carefully planned domestic execution” in sinister journal entries discovered by police.
Promising sex after a bath, she lured him to bed and stabbed him in the neck, while he is thought to have been restrained with cable ties.
She told colleagues and they had tested positive for Covid and needed to self-isolate while she disposed of his body.
The journal entries, written in a log cabin in Cumbria in March 2022 before she made an attempt on her own life, said: “I had smoked all day. I had a bath. I left the water in. He had been pushing for sex.
“I encouraged the bath with the incentive of sex afterwards. While he was in the bath I kept the knife in my dressing gown pocket and then I had it in the drawer next to the bed.
“I brought a chisel, bin bag and cable ties up too. I got him to wear an eye mask.”
Prosecutor Hugh Davies KC told the court that the 6cm knife wound to Billingham’s neck – which severed his jugular vein – would not have killed him immediately.
According to her journal, his final word was “why” as he eventually succumbed to blood loss.
Over the following ten days, while pretending to be at home recovering from Covid, she buried his body in the back garden as “if it was building waste” before returning to work “as if nothing had happened”, Mr Davies told the court.
“Colleagues noted her weight loss and good spirits,” he added.
He said her actions were the “controlled execution” and cover-up of the murder of a partner she no longer liked and probably suspected of having an affair, whose body she wrapped up and dragged downstairs – destroying the banister rail in the process.
That Christmas, Billingham’s mother visited Beal at the home to drop off presents, thinking her son had left her for another woman.
In a victim impact statement read to the court, Yvonne Valentine said Beal “spun a web of cruel lies and deceit” as she sent messages from Billingham’s phone pretending he was alive.
“You sat in your front room with me, having a casual chat with me, having a Christmas drink with me and the whole time, you knew that you had killed my son and buried him only feet from where I was sat,” she told the court.
The mother said it was “diabolical and disgusting” that Beal had purchased the materials to bury Billingham with his own money, adding: “You killed my son in the most heinous way. You made sure he was defenceless, then executed him and watched him bleed to death.
“I want you to spend the rest of your life going over what you did to Nick, the pain and suffering that you put him through when you killed him and the total disregarding for him as a human being when you buried him like he was a piece of rubbish in his own back garden.”
The court previously heard that Beal, who regularly used cannabis, had an alter ego she referred to as “Tulip 22”, who was “capable of wholly different and darker conduct than her public persona of committed teacher”.
Beal’s mental health started to deteriorate in late February 2022. The following month, police were called to a cabin in Cumbria, amid concerns for her welfare, where they discovered the journal entries.
The hearing continues.
