The master manipulator snared by the brain sample his first victim had donated to science | Daily Mail Online
There was always something suspicious about the way 47-year-old Diane had died in the garden at the couple’s home in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, in June 2010.
With no witnesses around on that hot summer’s day, Stewart was able to fool paramedics and police into believing that former school secretary Diane, who had previously suffered from mild epilepsy but had successfully controlled the condition for 18 years with medication, had suffered a fatal fit.
A coroner recorded a ‘sudden unexpected death in epilepsy’ and, at Stewart’s request, mother-of-two Diane was cremated.
No one noticed at the time that he had given differing accounts to neighbours of the events leading up to her death, telling some he had seen her through the window hanging out the washing moments before she collapsed, and others that he had ‘popped out for ten minutes’ to Tesco and returned home to find her lying half on, half off the patio.
For Diane’s family, who noticed his strange behaviour throughout this time, nothing quite added up. And when, in 2017, Stewart was convicted of murdering his new partner, 51-year-old Helen Bailey, Diane’s mother Noreen Lem said she wanted police to reinvestigate her eldest daughter’s death.
She told the Mail at the time how uneasy she had felt after the death of her ‘happy and healthy daughter’ and spoke of the ‘terrible shock’ of learning her former son-in-law had killed the woman due to become his second wife.
Yesterday, at Huntingdon Crown Court, 61-year-old Stewart was found guilty of murdering school secretary Diane. But it is one of several agonising features of this terrible case that 88-year-old Noreen passed away in 2019 before se
