A man accused of killing his partner to get his hands on her £3.3m fortune has told a court she was taken by a stranger who threatened him on the day she vanished.
Ian Stewart is accused of drugging successful children’s author Helen Bailey with sleeping medication for several months, before murdering her and hiding her body and that of her pet dog in a cesspit on the £1.5m property they shared in Royston, Hertfordshire.
But on Wednesday he told a jury at St Albans crown court that on the day she vanished a tattooed man called Nick told him “Helen is with us” and threatened that if he told anyone he would never see her again.
The 56-year-old told the court the Electra Brown writer was subject to a campaign of harassment over past business dealings by two men named Nick and Joe.
He said he was set upon on the morning of 11 April last year. “As I opened the door, he [Nick] pushed me back into the hall and he must have tripped me at some point. He said: ‘Helen is with us, she is helping us solve a problem, don’t tell anyone’.”
Asked who he thought he meant by “us”, Stewart replied: “I assumed it was Joe.
He said: ‘Sorry, we have taken Helen and Boris with us’, he said ‘we will be back, we will see you Friday, if anyone asks tell them she’s gone Broadstairs [Kent], don’t tell anyone in any way’.
“He then said: ‘If you tell anyone you won’t see Helen again’.”
Simon Russell Flint, defending, asked: “Did you think he might have Helen or Boris?” Stewart replied: “Yes, I did, yes.”
Stewart said earlier in the day an aggressive man called Joe – who he said was an old business associate of Bailey’s first husband, John Sinfield (who drowned in 2011) – had come to the house demanding to know if Bailey had the paperwork for his business.
He said his fiancee replied that she didn’t, and the man replied, in hushed tones, “just think about this”.
He told the court he had fabricated a cover story about Bailey running away to her seaside cottage in Broadstairs and lied about a note being left. He told the court he was forced to appear calm so as not to cause alarm in those around him.
“He had stressed about being normal, but I didn’t know how normal I was supposed to be, I knew I was seeing Jamie that night, I went into auto mode.”
He added: “I believed Helen would be killed.”
Asked why he had told Bailey’s friends and family that she had left a note saying she needed space, he said: “I don’t know why it came out, I just said it, it wasn’t true. It just came out, I don’t know why I said it, it was a stupid thing to say.”
Bailey’s body was finally found in the property’s cesspit after a police search in July 2016.
Earlier Stewart told the court that his life with Bailey was idyllic and said he was financially secure before her death.
Asked by Russell Flint if there was any reason he would want to kill the 51-year-old or her pet dachshund, Boris, Stewart answered: “No, nothing whatsoever, the opposite to be honest. Our life couldn’t be better really, it was idyllic in many ways. Helen loved the boys.”
Asked if he had killed Bailey for her money, Stewart replied: “I didn’t need any more money. This was one of Helen’s major worries, Helen never thought I had enough money.”
The court earlier heard that an autopsy found Bailey had the sleeping drug zopiclone in her system for several months before she died in April 2016. The prosecution told the court she had made internet searches because she was falling asleep in the middle of the day. Stewart had been prescribed the drug in January 2016.
The 56-year-old told the court he had been prescribed the drug after being diagnosed with suspected cancer. “I just wasn’t sleeping, as was Helen, I wasn’t sleeping and we were getting more and more tired,” he said.
But Bailey had researched the drug and discovered that it was not advised for people, like Stewart, who suffered from the muscular disorder myasthenia. The court heard on Tuesday that Stewart had not worked since being diagnosed in the mid-1990s.
“In this case, she heard what I was prescribed and she Googled away as Helen always did with whatever came along and she almost instantly found that they should not be given to a patient with myasthenia gravis and took the tablets off me and said ‘you’re not taking those’,” he said.
He added: “Helen took them for herself and said ‘this is something I might take’ because she was having problems sleeping as well.”
Asked if the couple ever argued, Stewart told St Albans crown court: “No. I can categorically say that because after we were in a relationship for six months Helen said to me: ‘This isn’t a proper relationship, we haven’t had an argument.’
“She said, ‘I’m scared if we ever have an argument because I don’t know what would happen, but I guarantee we will make up.’”
Stewart told the court he had given an eternity ring belonging to his late first wife to Bailey and the pair had planned to get married in 2016 after she had finished a book.
But he was diagnosed with cancer and told the court he had surgery on 18 March 2016 and was discharged on 25 March.
“My illness made Helen’s state of mind very bad. We were both coping but not coping. Sometimes we were in a mess basically,” he said. “We were still planning the wedding before I went into hospital. We planned this special event knowing that perhaps it wouldn’t happen.”
Asked by the defence how physically fit he was after the operation he said: “I spent a lot of time doing nothing, I stayed in bed or watched TV.”
The scar left by surgery was “a small scar, a bit like a paper cut, but it caused me some trouble,” he said, adding that Bailey had had to drive him around.
The court previously heard that on 11 April 2016 – the day Bailey is thought to have died – a standing order from her bank account to the couple’s joint account had been changed from £600 to £4,000 from a device using Windows 10 connected to the internet. Stewart was the only person living at the address who used a laptop with Windows 10 installed, the court heard on Monday.
But Stewart denied making the transfer, saying Bailey had sometimes used his laptop. “I assume Helen did this [changed the standing order], she was the only person at home,” he said. “I don’t understand why she’d amend a standing order. I can understand the £4,000 amount in some way, the £4,000 she’d allocated on spending on a spare room. She was talking about putting this in the joint account.”
The defendant, of Royston, Hertfordshire, denies murder, preventing a lawful burial, fraud and three counts of perverting the course of justice.
The trial continues.
