Ellie Baxter, the daughter of millionaires Stephen and Carol Baxter murdered with fentanyl, relives finding them dead in their home as killer Luke D'Wit is jailed for life.
Early one morning last June, Ellie Baxter answered a knock at the door of the home she shared with her partner and one-year-old son to find two police officers on the doorstep. Dozens of other officers and police vans lined the street outside.
Yet far worse was to come: only after she'd been arrested herself did a devastated Ellie discover that toxicology tests had found the powerful prescription opioid fentanyl in her parents' systems – placing her and her partner Marcus under suspicion of planning their deaths.In fact, the culprit was a 34-year-old man called Luke D'Wit, who had worked for the couple for nearly a decade, undertaking IT work for the Baxters' successful fitted shower mat firm, Cazsplash Ltd.
'Mum lost her freedom, her will, her ability to function due to her illness – an illness no one could help with or understand because it was contrived by Luke D'Wit,' says Ellie now, talking for the first time following D'Wit's double murder conviction last month at Chelmsford Crown Court. And for what? To this day Ellie and Harry do not really know. While D'Wit had altered their parents' will in order to make him the new company director, it was by then in debt and any ultimate financial benefit was negligible.
Yet every time she saw him she would subsequently feel tired to the point where she could barely get out of bed. Tuesday marked the first anniversary of the day Ellie found her parents' bodies. For a young woman who is also a new mother and still breastfeeding her six-month-old daughter Aria, the ramifications are immense.
Indeed, it would be hard for anyone to find the right words to describe the extent of the betrayal that Luke D'Wit inflicted on this previously happy family. In around 2011 the Baxters moved from Woolwich in South-East London to Essex to give the children a more rural upbringing, buying a comfortable detached home. By then, Carol had already come up with the idea for a bespoke shower mat business after renovating her own house and not finding one she wanted.
Even so, as the years went by, D'Wit became part of the furniture: despite being officially employed by the Baxters two days a week, he was at the family home most weekdays. Taking advantage of a pre-existing condition from which Carol suffered called Hashimoto's disease – an autoimmune condition which attacks the thyroid and made Carol fatigued and prone to lapses in concentration – D'Wit started to overdose her with her prescription medication promethazine, slipping it into 'healthy' smoothies.
D'Wit even organised a face-to-face meeting with one of these non-existent people, before claiming they'd had a medical emergency and couldn't make it. 'But once again that was another lie – the closest he'd come to a hospital in the last ten years was after he'd had a paddleboard accident. It was another way to emotionally manipulate us all.'
Horrifyingly, he even rigged up two mobile phone cameras via which he could watch the couple die, before returning later to clean up the scene, rearrange their bodies into a more peaceful position and forge a codicil to the will. 'He knew Mum and Dad were dying, and he was laughing and drinking and buying us dinner,' she says, shaking her head in disbelief.
'You could see they were blue, and it looked like my mum had stuff leaking out of her mouth. It was really, really horrible,' she says, her eyes filling with tears. 'Marcus smashed the back door to get in and I went to touch them, and they were so cold and stiff. I remember stroking Mum's hair, pleading with her to wake up.''I've never known an emotional pain to physically hurt so much,' she says.
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