The British “master manipulator” who killed children’s author Helen Bailey has also been convicted of murdering his first wife — and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, authorities said.
Ian Stewart, 61, was found guilty Wednesday of the 2010 killing of his wife at the time, Diane Stewart, 47, who was found dead in the garden of their home in Bassingbourn, UK police said.
Steward is already behind bars for the 2016 murder of Bailey, whom he had drugged and dumped in a cesspit under the garage of the home they shared in Royston, police said.
He had met the popular author in 2012 through a Facebook group for widowed people, having tricked authorities into believing his first wife died from an epileptic seizure.
Police re-examined that earlier death after Stewart’s first murder charge — and found striking similarities between both of his lovers’ deaths, Cambridgeshire police said in a statement.
Ian Stewart (right) and author Helen Bailey. Stewart murdered his first wife in 2010 and Bailey in 2016. Alice Boagey / SWNS.comTests on Diane Stewart’s tissue and brain samples proved that she’d actually been suffocated for up to an hour, the Times of London said.
He was sentenced in the second murder Wednesday to a whole-life sentence, the UK term for life without the possibility of release.
Detective Superintendent Jerome Kent — who led the investigations into both murders — called Stewart a “master manipulator.”
Ian Stewart’s first wife, Diane Stewart, was found dead in their Bassingbourn home in the UK. SWNS“He is a calculated killer who planned his attacks to coincide to times when others were away from the house, and he was alone with his victim,” the cop said.
“He had the ability to convince agencies of his innocence and kept the truth of what happened from family and friends, keeping those lies going over months and years as well as through the court process.”
Bailey, who penned a series of kids’ books, met Stewart on the forum for widows after losing her husband of 22 years, John Sinfield, after watching him walk into the sea in Barbados in 2011, the UK Times previously noted.
Ian Stewart appeared at Huntingdon Crown Court, where he received a life sentence for the murder of his first wife in 2010. Julia Quenzler / SWNS
Ian Stewart was interrogated by police over the disappearance of his wife, Helen Bailey. SWNSHer grief became the subject of her last book — the only one of 22 written for adults — 2015’s “When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis.”
It was named after her shocked reaction at seeing her husband vanish, as she thought, “This can’t be happening! I am wearing a bikini!”
When she met Stewart, she referred to him in her writing as “the gorgeous, grey-haired widower,” the UK Times noted.
When the author disappeared, Stewart initially told her family friends that she was in her holiday home in Broadstairs, an idyllic seaside town on the Kent coast.
Police searched the woodlands near the home of missing children’s author Helen Bailey after she was reported missing for nearly a week. Rex Features via AP ImagesAfter her body was found three months later — buried alongside that of her dachshund, Boris — he claimed that she had been kidnapped by two men who demanded $680,000 and ordered him not to alert police, the UK Times noted.
But toxicology tests showed that he’d used his insomnia medication to drug Bailey — burying her when she may have still been alive, the paper noted.
He was sentenced to life for that murder, and ordered to spend at least 34 years behind bars — with that possibility of release removed after Wednesday’s second murder conviction.
