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Ian Stewart to spend rest of life in prison after murders of wife then fiancee
A man convicted of murdering his first wife six years before he went on to murder his fiancee, children’s book author Helen Bailey, will die behind bars after he was sentenced to a whole-life order. Ian Stewart, 61, killed 51-year-old Ms Bailey in 2016 and dumped her body in the cesspit of the £1.5 million home they shared in Royston in Hertfordshire. A trial at St Albans Crown Court heard it was most likely she was suffocated while sedated by drugs, and Stewart was found guilty of her murder in 2017. After this conviction, police investigated the 2010 death of Stewart’s first wife, Diane Stewart, 47. Her cause of death was recorded at the time as sudden unexplained death in epilepsy (SUDEP) but on Wednesday a jury of five men and seven women at Huntingdon Crown Court found Stewart guilty of murder. They took less than two days of deliberation.
