Helen Bailey | Truth About My Murder | FilmRise True Crime | Forensic Files

[tense music] - When a murder's committed, it's always a race against time to find the truth, to separate fact from fiction,
to catch the killer, and to make sure that justice is served. What happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?
I'm Dr. Richard Shepherd, and I've spent my entire career as a forensic pathologist
performing nearly 23,000 autopsies, including on some of the most high-profile cases
of recent times. I've learned that the dead don't hide the truth and they never lie.
Through me, you'll be hearing directly from the victim. From a state-of-the-art laboratory
with groundbreaking technology that uses digitally scanned sample bodies. I'll be investigating a series of intriguing murders
where, from the victim's bodies, I'll be revealing to you the truth behind those horrific crimes.
[camera shutter clicking] [gentle music] [phone ringing] - [999 Dispatcher] Hertfordshire Police. How can I help?
- [Ian] My partner has been missing since Monday and has not contacted anyone, so we've just decided we should report it.
- [999 Dispatcher] What's your partner's name? - [Ian] Helen Bailey. - Royston in Hertfordshire is not the kind of place
where well-healed women in their fifties simply vanish. So it was a surprise when Helen Bailey,
a renowned children's author, was reported missing from home. She'd last been seen walking her dog
on the 11th of April, 2016. But why would someone who seemingly had it all and who was planning her own wedding suddenly disappear?
- [999 Dispatcher] Can I get your name please? - [Ian] Ian Stewart. - [999 Dispatcher] We'll be in contact
with you shortly, okay? - [Ian] Okay. Thank you. - People that knew Helen Bailey, her family and friends,
describe her as this very warm, very kind person, but also someone who was very witty, very funny,
with a wicked sense of humor. - There we go. Ready? - She was a hugely successful author of teenage fiction.
Neighbors where she later lived said she's very friendly, very open, invited everybody around for coffee and a cake
when she moved in. Very down to earth, - There he is. You can see that he does exist.
Oh, that wasn't supposed to happen. [laughs] - [Richard] But Helen had been through terrible heartbreak.
Her marriage of 15 years to John Sinfield had ended in tragedy. - Helen's husband John died very suddenly.
He drowned whilst they were on holiday in Barbados in 2011. - She was on the beach, he was in the sea.
She heard him calling for help. She saw him disappear under the waves, and he sadly drowned.
It must have been horrendous for her to go through that. Almost unimaginable. - Helen started a blog online called Planet Grief.
She talked about kind of the difficulty of dealing with really everyday things like buying a single scotch egg
in the supermarket or taking out the bins on your own, week after week, and how lonely that made her feel.
And I think writing the blog was partly a way of her dealing with her own grief and partly a way of reaching out
to other people going through the same thing. And she was able to turn her own experiences of grief
into something funny and also something that other people could take great comfort in.
And I think a lot of that was because of the kind of natural warmth that Helen Bailey had.
[gentle music] - Real life after death is far more bizarre, more complicated, and quite frankly, bonkers
than any fiction plot that I could come up with. For many of us, this reflecting on our relationships
is part of the process of bereavement. - [Richard] Then in October that year, eight months after her husband's death, Helen met someone
through an online support group. He was a widower by the name of Ian Stewart. - Helen met Ian online.
They were both part of a bereavement group, and that's how they came to know each other.
- So he himself was widowed in 2010. He had two sons at that time, would've been teenagers,
so, you know, shared experience with Helen Bailey, both of them widows, so they would've had a lot to talk about.
- I'd like to introduce you to my new book, which is called "When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis,"
subtitled "Life After Death, and a Dog called Boris." - Helen spoke about meeting Ian in her blog
and also in her book. She referred to him as her gorgeous gray-haired widower, and at the end of her book,
she talks about having found her happy ending with him. [gentle music] - [Richard] The fact they both lost a spouse
seemed to draw Helen to Ian. Before long, they moved into a house together in the Hertfordshire countryside.
- Helen Bailey and Ian Stewart bought a very large house together in Royston in Hertfordshire.
It was worth one and a half million pounds, decent amount of land around it, and Ian Stewart's two sons moved in with them as well.
- [Richard] After four years together, they were planning their wedding. But then, on the 11th of April, 2016,
Helen suddenly and inexplicably appeared. - Helen had been Googling wedding venues
because Ian and Helen were planning to get married. All of the people that knew Helen said
it was completely out of character for her to disappear. Her friends and family were becoming very concerned.
They'd said they had tried to contact her and couldn't get in touch with her. And at that point, Ian reported her missing to police.
[phone ringing] - [999 Dispatcher] Hertfordshire Police. How can I help? - [Ian] My partner has been missing since Monday
and has not contacted anyone, so we've just decided we should report it. - [999 Dispatcher] What's your partner's name?
- [Ian] Helen Bailey. - [999 Dispatcher] Did she say anything to you unusual at all?
- [Ian] Nothing before I went out, no. She just asked me to run there for her after I had been to the doctors.
- In the 999 call, given that this is four days after he's last seen his fiance, he sounds incredibly calm,
almost to the point of nonchalant. - [999 Dispatcher] What's her height initially?
- Oh, I'm gonna guess here. Well, she has told me, but she's probably 5' 10. - [999 Dispatcher] And her eye color?
- [Ian] Oh my God, how'd you forget these things? - He sort of is almost making light of the situation.
I think he says he can't remember the color of her eyes. It just doesn't come across as a man
whose fiance has been missing who knows what has happened to her. - [999 Dispatcher] Is she slim?
- [Ian] Slim, yeah, slim. That's easy. Well, she left a note, she said in the note something like,
"I need space and time alone. I'm going to Broadstairs. In Broadstairs, we've got a cottage down there.
- Ian maintained that she had left a note saying that she wanted some time to herself
and that he shouldn't contact her. - [Richard] Ian Stewart's account that Helen had gone to her holiday cottage in Kent
didn't necessarily ring alarm bells. - Her dog Boris had gone missing too, and that was a perplexing part of the puzzle
and played in to the idea that maybe she had gone off somewhere with her dog for some time on her own
because why would the dog also be missing? - She's got a mobile phone, she's got vehicles,
she's got a whole array of support around her, and could she have gone away for a short time on her own?
And the answer is yes, she could. - [999 Dispatcher] And can she interact safely
with other people? Would she be happy going up to someone and asking for directions?
- [Ian] Oh yes. She's very good at talking to people. - However, she would be leaving a footprint.
She'd be leaving a footprint by the movement of her vehicle and movement of her mobile phone, a contact on her computer,
and so on and so on. If she'd gone on the tube or a flight out of the country, she'll be recording a bank transaction, buying a coffee,
getting tickets or whatever, but there was no transactions by Helen on her bank account.
- [999 Dispatcher] Leave that with us for the time being and we'll be in contact with you shortly, okay?
- [Ian] Okay. Thank you. - [999 Dispatcher] No problem at all. Thank you. - [Ian] Okay, bye-bye. - [999 Dispatcher] Bye.
- [Richard] With no sign of Helen a week after she was reported missing, officers from Hertfordshire Police Major Crime Team
interviewed Ian at the house. - That's where an investigation would always start,
with the person who last seen them alive, the time, the place, the location. - It's at this point where
things start to begin to build up. Ian Stewart was not supportive. He was not helping in any way, so that's where
the concerns first start to begin to surface. - The notes allegedly made by Helen could not be found.
That in itself would be a vital clue as to what's happened to her, but it couldn't be found.
- Police had searched the property at the time, didn't find her, didn't find where she'd gone unexplained.
- [Richard] For three months, there was no sign of Helen. No one had seen or heard from her,
and there was no answer on her phone. - Even bizarrely, he went away on a holiday
for two weeks to Spain. Whilst all this is going on now. Is that really the actions
of someone who really cared for his partner? Is that really the actions of an innocent man? Don't know.
- [Richard] With no leads, police went back to the house again, this time, with a specialist search team.
- Some three months down the line, a neighbor has tipped off that there's a cesspit at the house.
- [Richard] The first time police had searched the house, Helen's Jeep had been parked on top of the entrance
to the cesspit, but this time, the car had been moved. And in amongst the human waste,
police made a grim discovery. Police found Helen's body hidden in human excrement
in the septic tank beneath the garage at her house, but she was not alone in that pit.
With her was her beloved dog and a pillowcase. After three months in those conditions,
decomposition can be well advanced. It affects first the skin. The skin begins to become sodden and soggy and to fall off.
Eventually, the underlying muscles are affected too, and that can make a post-mortem examination
really quite difficult. It can eventually result in skeletonization of the whole body.
In this case, decomposition have progressed to the point where the home office pathologist couldn't be sure
whether Helen was alive or dead when she entered the septic tank, but what he could say with certainty
was that she didn't get there through natural causes. - There's no way she climbed in there on her own.
Someone has put her in there. She was murdered brutally. [eerie music] - [Richard] On the 15th of July, 2016,
police found the body of the missing children's author, Helen Bailey, in the septic tank beneath the garage of her house.
The entrance had been hidden under a car and was only discovered after a tip-off from a neighbor
three months after Helen went missing. - Dealing with the actual recovery of the body,
that would've taken a number of days. It would need careful extraction of the fluid
from inside the septic tank and then excavation in and around the actual tank itself,
and then people going into that tank and removing the body. No matter how many murders you've dealt with,
to deal with that would be horrendous. [eerie music] - The body was showing evidence of significant decomposition
after a period of about three months immersed in this excrement. And a postmortem on a body in that condition
can be extremely difficult. What's surprising is that some significant organs like the colon and sometimes skeletal muscle
can be so well preserved, they can be thoroughly examined. The secret of what had happened to her
was still hidden in her body, but the question of how she had ended up in there still had to be answered.
Her fiance, Ian Stewart, was the last person to see her. - [999 Dispatcher] When was the last time you saw her?
- [Ian] Monday afternoon about quarter of three, 20 to three. - [999 Dispatcher] This may sound silly,
but she's definitely not a home, no? - [Ian] No. Last night, I literally checked everywhere.
We have bought quite a large house, but I have literally checked everywhere. - In the early stage of the investigation,
he's a person of interest as opposed to a suspect. - So you're going in with an absolute open mind.
You're trying to to find information and ask questions about her movements, his movements, and all that sort of thing.
In an effort to try to find out what's happened to her. - [Richard] Police examined hours of CCTV footage
and tracked Ian's movements from the day Helen went missing. When Ian was seen at the local dump,
getting rid of items that included what looked like a duvet. - Your fiance is missing
and you are down at the dump getting rid of a duvet. Why would you be doing that?
And why would it happen to be the same day that she was last seen alive? - [Richard] They then started taking a closer look
at the couple's finances. - Helen was a very successful children's author. She was wealthy in her own right.
Certainly Ian's sons always said that money, as far as they knew, had never been an issue
for their dad either. - [Richard] Helen had recently changed her will, making Ian her main beneficiary.
- Ian didn't work himself and Helen was concerned that if anything happened to her,
he wouldn't have means to support himself. So she made in the sole beneficiary to her estate,
which is in excess of 3 million pounds. There was also a huge life insurance payment
that he would be in receipt of should she die. - On the day that Helen went missing, the 11th of April,
Ian Stewart logged on to her bank account and changed a standing order that she had going from her bank account
to their joint account from 600 pounds to 4,000 pounds. - [Richard] But despite the suspicious activity,
it was only when her body was recovered from the cesspit and samples were sent for toxicological analysis
that it revealed the truth about her death. Not much of Helen's body remained after three months in the septic tank,
but the toxicologists were able to identify Zopiclone. Zopiclone is a powerful sedative.
It's only available on prescription and it's usually used to treat insomnia. And this was present in samples taken by the pathologist
at the autopsy from the colon, which is the large bowel sitting in the abdomen, and also for muscles that are present in her thigh
on the front of the upper leg. Also present was Helen's hair. Hair is made of keratin, the same chemical
that's used to make fingernails and toenails. It's incredibly resistant to decomposition.
Hair can also be the pathologist's friend because we know how fast it grows about a centimeter per month in life
and into the hair is incorporated all the drugs and chemicals that are present in the body,
so it can act as a record and a timeline for things that are circulating in the blood.
And the toxicologist report showed that Helen had been exposed to the Zopiclone for several months prior to her death
and at increasing concentrations. Now, Helen didn't have a prescription for the drug Zopiclone, but someone else did.
Ian Stewart. - In the weeks before, Helen herself had done some research on her computer to research the effects
of just feeling drowsy, feeling tired, feeling, you know, that she needed sleep during the day.
What is clear in this case, Ian Stewart had been administering this strong sedative
for several weeks, if not months leading up to this murder. - [Richard] Police also recovered a pillow case
from the septic tank, suspecting that Ian Stewart had used it to suffocate Helen before dumping her body.
- [Richard] Ian Stewart was arrested and his true nature finally came to light. - Ian Stewart is one of the clearest,
most unequivocal examples of a psychopath that I think I have ever come across. He is prepared to do anything
to accomplish the ends that he seeks. This is the definition of a psychopath. - What's intriguing about Ian Stewart
is that I think the potential to carry out these kinds of crimes was always there,
but his upbringing, his social circumstances, were such that it was just never necessary.
But the potential, make no mistake, the potential was always there. - He led the police down the garden path for three months,
watching them conduct a completely futile search for Helen Bailey whilst knowing all the time
that he had put her body in the cesspit underneath their garage. - There is no emotion to this man.
So all he is is calculation, strategy, manipulation to get what he wants. There's no calibration for the impact on others.
Everything is done on an intellectual and strategic basis. - [Richard] Ian was charged with the murder of Helen Bailey
and at his trial in January, 2017, he came up with a bizarre story to explain her death.
- What he told us in court was that two men called Joe and Nick had come to the house
on the day Helen had disappeared and said that they were business associates of her late husband John.
And the story sort of spiraled from there. He said he saw them several times. They would come to the house, they would threaten him,
physically attack him, and that they gave him a phone to contact them on and that ultimately, it was them that murdered Helen
and them that put her body in the cesspit. There were gasps from the public gallery
as he spoke about this in court. - [Richard] The jury didn't believe him. After a trial lasting six weeks,
they returned their unanimous verdict after just six hours of deliberation. In February, 2017, Ian Stewart was found guilty of murder
and was given a life sentence with a minimum term of 34 years. - It's a very challenging inquiry.
The lies and deceit that Mr. Stewart offered during the course of our investigation really did hamper us.
- It was difficult to understand Ian Stewart's motivations. He and Helen Bailey seemed to have a happy life together.
They had a big house. They didn't seem short of anything. She was busy planning their wedding.
They were going to get married. He was busy planning her murder. It was hard to understand
what more he could have wanted from life. - The judge said that it was a financially motivated murder.
He did it for money. And you think how callous that he's killed his fiance. He's put her in his cesspit.
Unimaginable how somebody could do that. - When Ian Stewart's first wife Diane Stewart died in 2010,
no one suspected foul play, but after he'd been convicted of the murder of Helen Bailey, police decided
to reinvestigate the circumstances of Diane's death. - This is, without doubt, the most extraordinary case
I've ever worked on as a news reporter. - In the police interviews, I think he answers a couple of questions
and then is just completely silent and sort of snarls and shakes his head. - Had he not gone on to murder Helen Bailey,
I don't see any reason why we ever would've found out the truth about what happened to Diane Stewart.
[foreboding music] - When the body of Helen Bailey was found in the septic tank at her home, the court concluded
that Ian Stewart had drugged and suffocated her to gain her wealth. But Stewart's first wife Diane had also died young.
And when the police realized that Diane had been married to a convicted murderer,
they decided to start a new investigation into the circumstances of her death. Six and a half years after her death,
could Diane's body still reveal the secrets of how she had died? - Diane Stewart's loved by everybody that she met.
She was helpful, she was happy. She's the kind of person that people would be visiting the house.
She had a wide circle of friends. She worked at the local primary school. She loved being part of the local community.
- Ian and Diane lived in a leafy Cambridge village with their two sons. - The neighbors I have spoken to told me that
they seemed like a very happy family, very quiet. Diane was a very lovely person.
No reason to think anything strange was going on in their house. They had their two sons, very proud of their two sons.
- They were at a stage of their life that they didn't need the money, so they were able to do the things that they enjoyed.
- All that changed when Ian Stewart made a 999 call to the ambulance control. [phone ringing]
- [999 Dispatcher] Okay. Tell me exactly what's happened. - [Ian] My wife's had a fit. I think she's in the garden.
She's in the garden. - [999 Dispatcher] All right. You need to slow down. - [Ian] She's in the garden. She's unconscious.
- [999 Dispatcher] Okay. Are you with the patient now? - [Ian] I'm just indoors at the moment. I'm just going out.
- [999 Dispatcher] Can see her from where you are? - [Ian] Yeah. Yeah. - Ian's account was that he'd been to the supermarket
to get some things for his eldest son who was having a driving test. Hopefully he had passed and they'd be celebrating good news.
They were gonna have a little sort of celebratory lunch. - [999 Dispatcher] Is she awake?
- [Ian] No. No, she's not awake. - [999 Dispatcher] Is she breathing? - [Ian] No, I don't think so.
- [999 Dispatcher] You need to go and check on her, sir, for me please. - He says he got to the supermarket, hadn't got his wallet,
he had to come back home and there he found his wife Diane, unresponsive on the ground.
- [Ian] I've turned her to try and put in recover position, but I can't do it. She just got back. I think she's had a fit.
- [999 Dispatcher] You think she's had a fit? - [Ian] Oh, I think so. She does have epilepsy.
- [999 Dispatcher] But okay, just bear with me a moment. - At that time, he said that she was suffering from epilepsy
and that he believed that she'd had an epileptic fit. - He tried to resuscitate her himself.
When that didn't work, he went over the road to try and raise the neighbor who was a doctor,
but when he got no response there, he came back to the house and again, tried to do CPR on his wife
before eventually dialing 999. - [999 Dispatcher] Please listen to me. We need to help her.
I am organizing help for you now. Stay on the line. I'll tell exactly what to do next.
You need to pump the chest hard and fast at least twice per second. - It was then told by the operator to conduct CPR.
- [999 Dispatcher] All right, you need to start this, sir. - [Ian] Okay. Okay. - [999 Dispatcher] Count out loud
so that I can count with you. - [Ian] Okay, I'll try. 1, 2, 3, 4. - [999 Dispatcher] That's it. Well done.
- [Ian] 1, 2, 3, 4. - This went on for about nearly half an hour before paramedics and the air ambulance
arrived at the scene. - [Ian] 1, 2, 3, 4. - [999 Dispatcher] He's letting you know he is there.
Has he stopped? Have they come? Okay, you keep doing what you are doing until they're ready.
- Unfortunately, when they arrived at the scene, there was no sign of life and Diane was pronounced dead.
- [Richard] Ian told everyone that Diane had died after having an epileptic fit,
but only Diane's body could reveal the truth of what had happened to her. Epilepsy occurs when there is uncontrolled activity
in the brain, and the brain is the controlling system for all of the nerves throughout the body,
through the arms and the legs and the abdomen and the chest. When the brain has an epileptic event, that control is lost.
There's a total random discharge, often resulting in unconsciousness and collapse
and sometimes even resulting in sudden death. That sudden death may on occasions be called SUDEP,
sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. About a half a million people have epilepsy in the UK,
but only about 600 die each year. And most of those suffer from severe, convulsive,
regular epileptic fits. Diane didn't suffer from fits like that. Diane's death was attributed to SUDEP,
but in fact, she hadn't had an epileptic fit for decades. She kept her epilepsy very well-controlled.
This doesn't completely rule out SUDEP as a cause of her death, but it does make it much less likely.
- They were pushed away from murder right from the beginning. The narrative was set by Ian Stewart
that she had suffered an epileptic fit. This story was being pushed and accepted
and it was not challenged. Everybody has fallen for it. - [Richard] Any forensic evidence that may have proved
otherwise was destroyed at the crime scene by the paramedics trying to resuscitate her.
- The difficulty is the 999 call gets put through to the ambulance control. The ambulance control have clearly
got to consider the preservation of life, and that's what their main priority was.
From my perspective, from an investigation perspective, if a person's died, that person themselves becomes a very important crime scene.
The contact, the DNA, the blood distribution, the movement of the body, the movement of clothing,
all those are very, very important to help identify what's happened and identify who's done it.
How was that crime scene treated or was it ever considered a crime scene? Probably not.
- [Richard] Because there was no suspicion, only a routine postmortem was carried out
to determine the cause of death. - A normal hospital postmortem examination is significantly different to a home office
forensic postmortem, which requires much more detailed examination of the scene, examination externally of the body,
and examination internally of the body where every area of the body is very minutely,
closely examined at forensic detail. That's not carried out at a hospital postmortem
where it's more of a routine looking for a cause of death. There is a cost of course,
because a forensic postmortem cost significantly more. - Her cause of death was recorded as
being sudden death in epilepsy, natural causes. You know, that's it. Case closed.
- [Richard] Diane's body was then released back to Ian Stewart, who had her cremated.
- The truth is he got away with murder. - [Richard] But now, six and a half years later,
with the case reopened, Ian's behavior at the time of his wife's death was called into question.
- There were some concerns about Ian's behavior after his wife's death. - Some people talked about seeing Ian at the funeral
in describing him as being almost aloof, just sort of distant, not coming across as a husband whose wife had just died.
Ian Stewart received almost a hundred thousand pounds, both in a life insurance policy that paid out
and from bank accounts. - He even spent a lot of money on an MG sports car. And that's not the attitude that you would expect
someone who's a grieving partner, you know? Why would he act in that way? - People think that psychopaths are so clever
and to some extent, they're right. They are. They've learn intellectually how to carry out every role.
So in some ways, they're better at carrying out those roles than people who are doing it
from any kind of emotional basis. But what they're doing doesn't come from any real place
and somewhere along the line, that always gives them away. - [Richard] Despite all this suspicious behavior
at the time of Diane's death, no one had questioned Ian's account of what had happened.
But he had made one very big mistake. - Diane was a very public spirited person.
She had a donor card when she died that was found. Part of it was she'd requested that parts of her
be left to medical science. Among them were her brain. - He thought he'd covered his tracks.
The body was cremated, but every contact leaves a trace and that trace was left in her brain
that was still in storage. [gentle music] - [Ian] My wife had a fit I think. She's in the garden. She's unconscious.
- [999 Dispatcher] You think she's had a fit? - [Ian] Oh, I think so. She does have epilepsy.
- [999 Dispatcher] Is she breathing? - [Ian] I don't think so, but I've tried. I've turned her to try and put her in a recovery position,
but I can't do it. She's just flipped back. - When Ian Stewart's first wife Diane died in 2010,
no one suspected foul play. It was only after he'd been convicted of the murder of Helen Bailey that the police decided
to reinvestigate the circumstances of Diane's death. [tense music] And there was a part of her body that remained
ready to tell the truth, no matter how much Ian Stewart had tried to cover his tracks.
- Diane's brain was donated to medical science. And actually, it was Ian who allowed that to happen.
It had been stored in the brain bank all that time, over a period of six years. I think the option probably would've been available to him
to refuse that, but that potentially could have aroused more suspicion. So at the time, that wasn't a risk that he would take.
- [Richard] And Diane's brain would hold a secret that to be missed during the first postmortem in 2010.
A first pathologist examined Diane's brain would've found no evidence to suggest she'd died from an epileptic fit.
However, a second pathologist had looked at her brain and found alterations. He'd found evidence that her brain had suffered
from a prolonged period of ischemia. Ischemia is where the brain is deprived of oxygen
for a prolonged period of time. Oxygen normally gets the brains it does to all of the organs
of the body through entering through the mouth and nose, passing down into the lungs through the trachea
and the bronchi, the oxygen is then exchanged in the lungs and gets into the bloodstream, goes to the heart
where it's pumped back up the arteries. These red arteries running up to all of the organs, the arms and the legs.
But that's how oxygen gets the brain. And a blockage in either the blood supply or the entry of oxygen into the body itself
through the mouth and nose, can cause ischemic damage to the brain. Now you don't get ischemia in a normal,
healthy breathing person and you don't get ischemia in an individual who's just had an epileptic fit.
So the pathologist in this case came to the conclusion that Diane had been deprived of oxygen
for a period of between 35 minutes and one hour, and that she had in fact been suffocated.
- Ian Stewart might have thought he'd gotten away with this, but his secret was revealed
only by the examination of the brain, which was absolutely crucial. The body itself was the evidence that convicted him.
- When he's arrested, we see there's apparent faux outrage. We see this indignation at him being arrested.
Ian Stewart does not think like us. There is a genuine reaction there, but it's a reaction of irritation.
It's annoyance at somebody stepping in his way. - The first paramedic to attend the scene
said that when he got there, there were signs of CPR that he'd expect to see if it had been attempted.
He said ribs can pop, ribs can snap. You'd expect to see some injuries, none of which were present.
You're on the phone, you've got the call handler instructing you how to do CPR. You are not seeing her coming back to life.
You would be giving it everything you'd got. But the paramedics saw no signs of injury to her body at all.
- Both Helen Bailey and Diane Stewart are both vulnerable. They have childlike qualities.
They're naive, they're trusting. They are his ideal victims. And he will have had a sixth sense.
He will have been aware that they did constitute his ideal victims in that they were so different from him,
that in some ways they would not have very readily recognized the coldness, the calculated at the heart of this man
because it was just so different from who they were. - [Richard] In 2019, while in prison serving
his life sentence for the murder of Helen Bailey, Ian Stewart was charged with Diane's murder.
He denied it, but in court, the truth came out. - So it was a tense dynamic in the courtroom
because of the stakes involved. There's a man on trial for the murder of his wife.
Their two sons are there in the witness box. Diane's elder sister was there. They'd all been witnesses for the prosecution
and you are hearing this horrible detail. You know, they're members of your family
that you are hearing about and what an awful thing for them. - [Richard] On the 9th of February, 2022,
Ian Stewart was convicted and given a whole life order. - A central part of this second trial of Ian Stewart
was the first trial, the death of his fiance, Helen Bailey. And the two cases were put side by side
so that they could see the parallels in both cases. This was a person in a relationship with Ian.
In both cases, they were home alone together. In both cases, their consciousness had been reduced
and they were then killed potentially by smothering. - [Richard] The critical evidence
was provided by Diane's body. The analysis of her brain tissue indicated her death
was most likely to have been caused by prolonged restriction to her breathing from an outside source.
Suffocation can be caused in lots of different ways, but basically, it's blocking the mouth
and the nose with the hands, or using something soft like a pillow or a cushion.
Sometimes the individual will fight back. There may be injuries to the arms as they struggle and push against the assailant.
If the assailant sits on them, there may be bruising to the chest or other injuries,
but none of those injuries, those defensive injuries, will be present if the person is sedated
and unable to fight back. It had been established during the trial for Helen Bailey's murder
that she had been sedated and suffocated. The fact that there was now evidence in Diane Stewart's case
that she had suffered the same fate wasn't lost on the jury. - So the jury were out for just under two days
of deliberation in the second trial of Ian, and they found him guilty of the murder of Diane.
The second time he's been found guilty of murder. - He has been sentenced to a whole life tariff,
which means he will definitely die behind bars. Whole life tariffs are not given out that often,
and it reflects the severity of his crimes. - The whole life order is the most severe sentence
a judge can pass in a UK court. The perpetrator will go to prison for the rest of their life
and they will die in prison. That's how grave, how serious the whole life order is.
[gentle music] - He's financially very comfortable and yet he's gone on to murder his fiance, Helen Bailey.
You think, why is it that he's done it? He doesn't need the money. Is it greed? Is it something else?
He's, for all intents and purposes, got away with the murder of Diane and yet he's done it again.
Is it arrogance? [gentle music continues] - I think that because he'd gotten away with the first one,
it may give him more confidence in the second one. You know? I really do. - This is the seven bed, 1.3 million pound house
where Helen Bailey lived with Ian Stewart. Helen's brother John told the jury that when he first got a tour of the house from Helen,
she joked that the cesspit under the garage was a good place to hide a body. - [Richard] Ian Stewart might so easily have got away
with murder, not once, but twice, but the bodies of his victims eventually gave up the truth
that had been hidden. [tense music] [tense music continues]

Forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd investigates the murder of author Helen Bailey by her fiancé Ian Stewart, and the murder of his first wife, Diane Stewart.

In The Truth About My Murder, Dr. Richard Shepherd showcases a state-of-the-art digital autopsy table featuring digitally scanned sample bodies to investigate a series of intriguing murders where the victims' bodies help reveal the truth behind horrific crimes.

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Brief Summary

Ian Stewart murdered his fiancée Helen Bailey, then was convicted for the murder of his first wife Diane after new evidence emerged.

Key points

The Disappearance of Helen Bailey. Helen Bailey, a renowned author, goes missing just before her wedding. Her fiancé Ian reports her missing, but things are not as they seem.
The Discovery of Helen's Body. After three months of searching, police find Helen's body in a septic tank, raising questions about her fiancé Ian's involvement.
Ian Stewart's Arrest. Ian Stewart is arrested after evidence reveals he drugged and suffocated Helen to gain her wealth.
The Trial of Ian Stewart. During the trial, Ian concocts a bizarre story to explain Helen's death, but the jury doesn't believe him.
Reinvestigation of Diane Stewart's Death. After Ian's conviction, police reopen the investigation into his first wife's death, suspecting foul play.
Diane's Death Reinvestigated. Six and a half years after Diane's death, her case is reopened, revealing shocking truths.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Real life after death is far more bizarre than any fiction plot.

Dr. Richard Shepherd on the complexities of death.

4:09WatchFeb 5, 2026

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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