It was to be the house where bereaved author Helen Bailey could rebuild her life with her “gorgeous grey-haired widower”, the man she had fallen in love with while still in the throes of her deepest grief after the death of her husband.

But Hartwell Lodge, the seven-bedroom mansion they had shared for three years, now stands empty and neglected, some roof tiles missing and its facade discoloured. On a cold and windy February day, a small weathervane in the shape of a dachshund is about all that moves in the grounds.

It was here, in the 100-year-old Victorian cesspit hidden underneath the property’s garage, that Bailey’s body, and that of her pet dachshund Boris, were found. Three months after she was last seen alive, and following mass searches, appeals and a police investigation, it finally became apparent that Bailey was not missing, but dead: murdered by the man she was planning to marry, her body dumped among filth.

Hartwell Lodge. Photograph: Terry Harris/Rex/Shutterstock

Bailey had thought she had found contentment again. She had been with her husband John Sinfield for 22 years before he died, drowning when the couple were on holiday in Barbados in February 2011, when she was 46.

She threw herself into writing a blog, Planet Grief, which sketched the mundane agony of life as a widow – from buying a single scotch egg to putting out the bins on her own. She had written or collaborated on 22 books, mainly teenage fiction, but the blog developed into her first work of non-fiction: When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis.



In it she described meeting Ian Stewart, referred to as the “gorgeous grey-haired widower”, in October 2011, just eight months after the death of her husband. They met through an online group for people who had lost their spouses; Stewart’s wife, Diane, died in 2010.



They started out as friends, becoming closer and finally moving into a home they bought together in Royston, Hertfordshire, in 2012. Worried that Stewart would be left vulnerable if she died, Bailey changed her will so he would inherit almost all of her £4m fortune, and gave him power of attorney.

Helen Bailey’s body was found in a cesspit under the garage. Photograph: Terry Harris/Rex/Shutterstock

Neighbour Mavis Drake described how the couple had their arms round each other on the day they moved in. “I had no doubt they were happy with each other,” she says. “But what the hell she saw in him God only knows. Gorgeous grey-haired widower? He was anything but. But I think she was besotted with him.”



While Bailey was “a wonderful person, funny, clever, cheerful”, Stewart rarely made eye contact, she said. While Bailey would pop round for a chat, Stewart kept his distance. “I never got to know him, he was a bit of a nobody, he didn’t have anything going for him.”



Another neighbour described them as “just an ordinary couple”. And yet, three years after they had moved in and while Bailey was planning their wedding, Stewart was plotting her murder.

Helen with her first husband, John.

He had begun secretly drugging his partner with zopiclone, the sleeping medication he had been prescribed. She became worried about feeling exhausted, telling her mother she had left her beloved dog behind on the beach at Broadstairs, where she had a holiday cottage. Her internet history revealed the Google search: “Why do I keep falling asleep?”

It was this concern – and his fear that it would lead her to the doctor – that perhaps pushed Stewart to carry out his plan.



On Monday 11 April, Bailey spent the morning Googling details about Brocket Hall, where she wanted the couple to have their wedding. She emailed her close friend Tracy Stratton, but by midday was not answering calls. By 3pm, Stewart was at a doctor’s surgery to have a dressing changed after keyhole surgery, having already killed his fiancee, probably by suffocation, and dumped her body with that of her dog, a dog’s toy and a pillowcase into the cesspit under their garage.

CCTV footage showed him dumping a large white object, described by lawyers as “probably a duvet used in the business of either killing”, at the Royston tip. He went on to attend a meeting with Bailey’s solicitor. She was too unwell to join him, he said, but he wanted to push through the sale of a house that she owned in Gateshead.



Later he went to watch his eldest son, Jamie, play in a bowls match, before the pair went back home and ate a Chinese takeaway. Then, knowing Bailey was already dead, at 10pm he texted her: “xx”.



Stewart and Bailey met in October 2011, and it was a whirlwind romance. Bailey wrote a will in 2012 in which she left her fortune to her brother John Bailey, stepson Daniel Sinfield and friend Jenny Winterbottom.

But in July 2014 she changed it so that her fiance would inherit most of her assets. Bailey also took out a life insurance policy to cover a potential £1.2m inheritance tax bill should she die before they were married.

Bailey with her beloved dachshund Boris, whose body was found with hers in the cesspit. Photograph: Mary Turner/Rex/Shutterstock

When Bailey met Stewart, her friends and family were happy for her, says her friend and bereavement coach Shelley Whitehead. Sitting in the house in Finchley, north London where Bailey had spent many hours trying to work through her grief, she describes the author as “authentic, very bright, funny”.



“Of course I was happy for her, everyone was, the family was. I met him, he was here. There was nothing that worried me,” says Whitehead.



Bailey was a person who wanted to feel “secure and safe”, like she had with her late husband, says Whitehead. “And it’s bizarre to say, she felt very safe with Ian as well. The way things have turned out … fact is stranger than fiction,” she pauses, and brushes away a tear. “There was never any inkling or sign that she was anything but safe.”

When the author went missing, Stewart paid for flyers to publicise her disappearance. In an appeal to Bailey, he said: “Together we learned to live with our grief and move forward with our lives but never forgetting. Now it feels like my heart doesn’t even exist.”



Posters published when Helen Bailey was missing. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

DCI Jerome Kent, who led the investigation for Hertfordshire police, now calls him “the most bizarre, manipulative, greedy and self-centred man I’ve ever met”, who laid out “a carefully planned deception” from the beginning.

While Stewart did not behave like a typical family member of a missing person, he appeared to blame this on how unwell he had been, having recently successfully undergone surgery. Yet a month after killing Bailey he renewed Arsenal season tickets using her bank account, and two months later went on a two-week holiday.

Stewart was arrested shortly after 7am on 11 July. Police carried out a further search on the couple’s property, and on 15 July they discovered Bailey’s body in the hard crust surface of the house’s cesspit. “This was calculated and pre-planned,” says Kent. “He set a date and put her in a cesspit where he knows every time he uses the facilities in the house that’s where it is going. That’s an incredibly cruel and cynical way to dispose of someone you claimed to love and were set to marry.”

Could the police have found Bailey sooner? It took three months and many hours of police time before she was discovered in the four-metre-deep pit, which police only found after speaking to the house’s former owner. Kent says “everyone was duped in the early stages”, but adds: “There were many lines of inquiry, and I’m immensely proud of the painstaking investigation that found [Bailey].” Had the body not been found “it’s difficult to see where a conviction would have come from”, he says.



In the dock Stewart cut a shabby figure: fast-talking, dressed in untidy jeans and a rumpled shirt. He had not been able to work since the mid-90s because of his health and seemed, as one neighbour put it, “nothing out of the ordinary, a bit drippy”.



During his murder trial, Stewart rambled about making money on a vintage MG, but when talking about Bailey appeared to choke on tears that never surfaced. Comparing himself with Bailey’s first husband, he said Sinfield was “very sophisticated, smooth and suave” and added: “And I’m not.”



He claimed – somewhat outlandishly – that Helen had been taken by two men known only as “Nick and Joe”, who had assaulted and threatened him, saying he would never see Bailey again if he spoke out. He said he had “never stopped loving Helen”, but all the evidence suggested that was very far from the truth.



Police said after Stewart’s conviction that they would look again at the death of his first wife, Diane, who died suddenly in 2010. An earlier inquest ruled she had died of natural causes and police said there was currently no evidence to suggest her death was suspicious.

The Electra Brown series of books Bailey wrote for teenagers

At the end of Bailey’s memoir, there are perhaps a few hints of discontent. She complained good-naturedly that the house smelled of the remains of chicken madras, her artisan cheese was eaten like plastic cheddar, she admitted to missing London terribly. She wrote of being afraid of loss: “If things don’t work out then it will be heartbreaking. If they do work out and we live happily ever after the cruel reality is that one of us will be widowed again.”



But the overall impression she gave was of a woman who had learned to live, and love, again. In the introduction she promised grieving readers: “However you feel right now, however bleak your life is, however much despair you are in, you won’t always feel this way; on my dog’s life, I promise you.” And on the very last page, after honouring her late husband, she dedicated her book to her “gorgeous grey-haired widower”. “BB, I love you,” she wrote. “You are my happy ever after.”