The man who killed the children’s author Helen Bailey in 2016 has gone on trial for previously murdering his first wife after a re-examination of her brain showed she had been suffocated.
Ian Stewart, 61, is charged with the murder of Diane Stewart, who died at their Cambridgeshire home in June 2010 in an incident he had initially been able to fool medics into believing was an epileptic fit.
On the opening day of his trial at Huntington crown court, the jury was told most of her remains were cremated. But analysis of her brain tissue, which she had donated for research, undermined Stewart’s account.
Opening the case, Stuart Trimmer QC told jurors: “His explanation for the circumstances of her death can be disproved by the medical evidence. In short, the crown say, he killed her.”
The original cause of death was given as sudden unexplained death through epilepsy, the court heard.
But when scientists and a pathologist were instructed to re-examine her death they concluded it was most likely caused by “a prolonged restriction of her breathing from an outside source”, Trimmer said.
He added: “The account given by Ian Stewart, the only other person on the premises, is directly contradicted by the medical evidence.”
The court heard that Stewart formed a relationship with Bailey, described in court as a “successful children’s author”, after the death of his wife.
“In 2016, this defendant murdered Helen Bailey, killed her dog and dumped both dog and Helen Bailey in a cesspit,” Trimmer told the court. “He was convicted of that murder in February 2017.”
Trimmer said that while investigating that “particularly callous crime”, police officers and scientists began to look again at the death of Diane Stewart.
He pointed out that in each case the victim was a woman in an intimate relationship with Stewart.
The court heard Stewart was at home alone with Diane on the day of her death.
“There had been some arguing between them in the week preceding her death,” he told jurors.
Trimmer said Stewart called an ambulance claiming he had found his wife unresponsive and not breathing. Diane Stewart had no heartbeat when paramedics arrived, jurors heard.
The court also heard that Stewart got “really cross” after his sister-in-law, Wendy Bellamy-Lee, called the coroner’s office about her death in 2010.
She told the court she had suspicions about her sister’s death and called the coroner’s office asking for more information.
Reading from her witness statement, she said Stewart told her that calling the coroner was “inexcusable”. She added: “I think he put the phone down on me, very blunt.”
Bellamy-Lee said her sister had collapsed at the checkouts at a supermarket in 1992, but that her epilepsy “wasn’t a major thing”.
“She didn’t suffer from epileptic fits throughout her life … She was healthy. She was fit. She was active.”
Asked if she could remember Stewart’s demeanour when she saw him in the days after Diane’s death, she said: “Just very calm.”
The trial, set to last up to four weeks, continues.
