‘You’re joking!’: Moment smirking murderer Ian Stewart is arrested for killing wife
Watch: Moment double murderer is arrested for killing wife
This is the moment double murderer Ian Stewart, who was convicted of killing children’s author Helen Bailey in 2017, was arrested for murdering his fiancee six years earlier.
Stewart, 61, killed 51-year-old Ms Bailey in 2016 and dumped her body in the cesspit of the £1.5m home they shared in Royston in Hertfordshire.
After this conviction, police investigated the 2010 death of Stewart’s first wife, Diane Stewart, 47, whose cause of death was recorded at the time as sudden unexplained death in epilepsy (SUDEP).
But prosecutors said it is most likely Mrs Stewart's death was caused by a prolonged restriction to her breathing from an outside source, such as smothering or a neck hold and he was found guilty of her murder on Tuesday.
Video footage of his arrest for Mrs Stewart’s murder shows Stewart smirk as he says “you’re joking” to officers, before telling them: “Oh f*** off.”
Stewart will die behind bars after he was sentenced to a whole life order over his wife’s death at Huntingdon Crown Court on Wednesday.
At his trial for Ms Bailey’s murder in 2017 is was heard that it was most likely she was suffocated while sedated by drugs before her death.
Speaking at Wednesday’s sentencing, judge Mr Justice Simon Bryan, said the two women’s deaths were in “chillingly similar circumstances”.
He told Stewart: “You successfully passed off a murder as an epileptic fit in the circumstance I have identified playing out an elaborate, and indeed sophisticated, charade over a period of time.
“A charade that succeeded at the time, and would have succeeded for all time but for your subsequent murder of Helen Bailey.”
Stewart shook his head at times during the sentencing hearing.
He had claimed in court, as his two sons listened to his evidence, that he had returned from the supermarket to the family home in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, and found his wife collapsed in the garden.
He said he thought she had suffered an epileptic fit.
Mrs Stewart had not had an epileptic fit for 18 years and took daily medication, jurors were told, with consultant neurologist Dr Christopher Derry estimating that her risk of having a fatal epileptic seizure was about one in 100,000.
During a 999 call, Stewart was instructed to perform cardiopulmonary resusitation on his wife and said he was doing so, but paramedic Spencer North, who attended the scene, said there “didn’t seem to be any effective CPR”.
Mrs Stewart’s death was not treated as suspicious at the time. Although a post-mortem examination was carried out, it was not a forensic post-mortem examination.
As part of the police investigation, following Stewart’s 2017 murder conviction, consultant neuropathologist Professor Safa Al-Sarraj was asked to examine preserved parts of Mrs Stewart’s brain, which had been donated to medical science.
Prof Al-Sarraj said there was evidence that Mrs Stewart’s brain had suffered a lack of oxygen prior to her death, and he estimated that this happened over a period of 35 minutes to an hour.
Prosecutor Stuart Trimmer QC said her death was “most likely caused by a prolonged restriction to her breathing from an outside source”, such as smothering or a neck hold.
The court heard that Stewart received £96,607.37 after his wife’s death, in the form of £28,500.21 from a life insurance policy and the rest from bank accounts.
The defendant, flanked by four dock officers, looked towards his two sons who sat in the public gallery as he was led to the cells.
The two boys did not make eye contact with him.
Watch: Ian Stewart found guilty of murdering wife in 2010
