In my 30 years as a journalist, few cases have been as disturbing and troubling as this one. It’s a tale of deliberate and heart-wrenching deceit, unraveling within a close-knit family and culminating in a brutal double homicide.
The harrowing events began in April 2023 when Ellie Baxter paid a visit to her parents at their residence in Mersea, Essex. What she encountered was nothing short of nightmarish: her mother and father, Carol and Stephen Baxter, lifeless in their cherished armchairs in the conservatory. The shock of discovering her parents’ lifeless bodies nearly caused Ellie, a mother herself, to lose her unborn child.
As if that weren’t enough, the nightmare continued. Just two months later, as Ellie answered a knock at her door, she was met by two police officers standing outside, accompanied by a swarm of law enforcement officials. Before she could fully grasp the gravity of the situation, she found herself taken into custody under suspicion of being responsible for the brutal deaths of her own parents.
And there was a further shock in store. As Ellie, now 24, was being questioned by detectives, so too was close family friend Luke D’Wit, the man her parents had hired to help with their business and had come to treat like a son.
Hours later this young man, who had inveigled himself into their family over several years, was charged with their murders. Last April, following a trial which laid bare the lengths to which D’Wit had gone to ruin the Baxter family, he was sentenced to life in prison after poisoning them with the powerful opioid fentanyl.
So extraordinary was this case that in the wake of the trial I met up with Ellie and she told me her devastating story, which was featured at length in this newspaper. In it, she recalled the horror of realising that D’Wit had poisoned her mother over such a long period prior to her death that Ellie was convinced she had some form of degenerative disease.
She recalled, too, how D’Wit had taken her out for a cheerful birthday dinner at the very time he knew her parents were dying and her fears that she had also been poisoned by him while pregnant. It was a mesmerising encounter with someone who, a year after her loss, was still clearly struggling to process what had happened.
Which is why, some weeks later, I met Ellie again and, over several harrowing hours, learned about her ordeal in even more detail.
The senior detective on the case described Luke D’Wit, pictured, as ‘cold and calculating’ and ‘one of the most dangerous men I have come across’
D’Wit murdered Stephen and Carol Baxter (pictured) in April 2023 by slipping a fatal dose of fentanyl into their drinksÂ
Ellie Baxter found her parents’ dead bodies sitting upright in their armchairs at the family home in Essex
The result is our compelling three-part podcast On The Case: The Fentanyl Murders, the first part of which is available now for free wherever you get your podcasts. Or you can get the whole series right away by joining our new Crime Desk Club at thecrimedesk.com. This will give you access not only to our vast archive of The Trial podcasts but The Trial+ which this week has three fascinating bonus episodes on the ever-intriguing Lucy Letby case.
In the podcast, Ellie discloses for the first time the full extraordinary web of lies and deceit woven by D’Wit, 35, to assume control over the family’s lives and her battle to come to terms with his heinous crime.
‘You hear about these stories, and you never think it’s you,’ as she puts it. ‘But actually, that was my family. I’m not sure how you ever really deal with that.’
Not least because how can you ever predict that such evil will be visited upon a couple who had done nothing more than work hard to create a happy life? Both raised in council houses, Stephen, 61, and Carol, 64, had spent years building up a successful business and were on the verge of retirement when they were killed.
Their dedication had bought them a beautiful £1 million Essex house, where they raised Ellie and her younger brother Harry – in a loving home that was full of music and laughter. ‘They were just really fun, loving people,’ Ellie told me. ‘We’d have barbecues that would always end up in a campfire, or a little bonfire, and the guitars would come out and we’d have a really lovely time.’
Prior to moving to Essex from their native London, Carol had founded CazSplash, a bespoke shower mat business which she had grown from scratch, starting out peddling samples locally on her bicycle.
It was this business that, ultimately, enabled the family to move to that dream Essex home with its five bedrooms and large garden, and it was the business that brought them into contact with D’Wit, who in around 2013 was recruited by the Baxters to help design a new website.
He came recommended, as Ellie recalls – a reliable, well-known figure in the community who volunteered in the soup kitchen and had once been Santa at a Christmas event. Even so, the then ten-year-old Ellie recalls thinking he was odd.
Ellie (centre) and Carol Baxter (right) pictured sat with Luke D’Wit, the sinister killer who would go onto murder both Carol and her husband
The home of the millionaire tycoon husband and wife in Mersea, Essex, where their bodies were discovered
Ring doorbell footage captured the horrifying moment the Baxters’ daughter arrived at their home to discover her parents dead Â
On The Case: The Fentanyl Murders, part of the Mail’s new true crime podcast network, tells a story with more plot twists than any TV drama. Join here
‘Quiet, a bit weird, although not a double murderer weird,’ as she told me, with one of the flashes of black humour that has helped sustain her over two grim years.
Nonetheless, he wheedled himself into the Baxters’ lives, working almost full-time in the business and becoming increasingly present at family events, particularly after the death of his own father in 2021. ‘We just thought he was lonely,’ Ellie recalled.
Later that same year Carol started to become unwell. She had already been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease in which the body produces antibodies that attack the cells in the thyroid and that could, on occasion, leave her fatigued and prone to lapses in concentration.
It was managed with medication – although Ellie now knows that the apparently ever-solicitous D’Wit was overdosing her with the very drugs that were meant to help her. He also persuaded Carol to drink herbal remedies via which, Ellie thinks, he was smuggling more drugs into her system, resulting in her becoming increasingly befuddled.
Unsurprisingly, healthcare professionals were baffled by her declining health – leaving Carol to turn to the internet for answers.
She contacted a – genuine – endocrinologist in America called Andrea Bowden and had an initial chat about her condition. Little could she or her family have predicted how D’Wit would exploit this connection, creating a fake Andrea Bowden online with whom Carol then communicated and via whom she was fed evermore toxic information, from bogus explanations for her ill health to useless treatments.
D’Wit created profiles for other Dr Bowden ‘patients’ too – Marnie, Cheryl, Jenny – with whom Carol would interact online. ‘He went to extraordinary lengths to create this kind of web of lies,’ Ellie recalls in the podcast, adding that she was sucked into this web, too.
‘I must have literally been sitting there a metre away from him and he’s on his phone messaging Mum – and me – from God knows how many accounts.’
Luke D’Wit wheedled himself into the Baxters’ lives, working almost full-time in the business and becoming increasingly present at family events
D’Wit, 33, was called to the scene by the Baxters’ daughter because he was so trusted – he is seen here speaking to police, captured on their body-worn camera
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.
Of course, none of this so-called advice helped: Ellie, her brother and her father could only watch helplessly as Carol continued to deteriorate before their eyes, becoming more confused and at times unable to speak. ‘She didn’t die in March last year, she died a long time before that,’ as Ellie puts it. ‘And that is what I find heartbreaking. Because Luke had taken away from her the very essence of who she was. And it was so hard for Dad.’
The business, too, was in freefall and D’Wit apparently also had his own issues. ‘He claimed he had been diagnosed with bone cancer, for which he had treatment every Thursday,’ says Ellie. ‘He would come back complaining of headaches and fatigue. 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.’
In April 2023, D’Wit enacted the last part of his dastardly plan: he administered a vast overdose of fentanyl he had hoarded from a prescription written for his father to both Stephen and Carol via another ‘healthy’ smoothie.
Horrifyingly, he even rigged up mobile phone cameras on 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 their will, making him a director of the business. He also used Carol’s phone to move £6,000 from her account into the business account.
That was not all: as Carol and Stephen lay dying, D’Wit took an oblivious Ellie, her partner Marcus and toddler son Axel, out for an early birthday meal for Ellie.
‘He was cheerful, laughing, all the while knowing what was happening,’ she says. ‘How do you get your head around that?’
How could she have imagined that her beloved parents were dying just a few miles away?
She discovered the horror the following day when, concerned that she had not heard from them, she decided to pop round and saw the house shuttered up as if it was still the middle of the night.
Luke D’Wit in police custody shortly after his arrest on suspicion of murder. He was convicted following a five-week trial at Chelmsford Crown Court
She raced round to the back of the house where she was confronted by the hideous sight of her parents’ bodies, bolt upright in their armchairs.
Marcus smashed the door in and Ellie raced to their aid, knowing that it was too late.
‘They were so cold, so stiff. It was really horrible,’ she recalls. ‘I was just screaming, pleading for my mum to wake up… I’ve never known an emotional pain to physically hurt so much. And that did not go away for quite a while.’
The shock was such that Ellie, who was then in the early stages of pregnancy with her second child, started to bleed. Happily, she later gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
Carol and Stephen’s deaths were not initially deemed suspicious. Carbon monoxide poisoning was briefly considered as a cause of death – until large doses of fentanyl were found in their systems.
Again, Ellie was oblivious, focused on planning a funeral and trying to come to terms with her grief while pregnant.
And – chillingly – it was D’Wit who was her tower of strength. He helped her plan the funerals, looked after Axel and even went with her to antenatal appointments when Marcus couldn’t make it. ‘He was very willing to help… and it was easy to have him there,’ she recalls.
Then, two months later, Ellie received that knock on the door from the police and found herself accused of her parents’ murders.
After discovering the bodies of her parents at the family home, Ellie felt emotional pain so severe that it ‘physically hurt’
Only after six hours of questioning was she released without charge to find that D’Wit, who had also been questioned – the police initially thought they were in cahoots – had now been charged with a double homicide. ‘I couldn’t process it,’ she says.
In a way, she still can’t. Not through the trial – where the extraordinary extent of D’Wit’s lies became manifest for the first time – or even when we spoke.
‘To be honest with you, I really don’t think I have processed a lot of this even now. It’s hard. I’ve got two young children,’ she told me. ‘There’s closure, as in he’s out of my life and I’m safe and my children are safe.
‘But I’ve lost my mum and I’ve lost my dad, and that’s going to take a lot of time.’
As too is confronting the possibility that while D’Wit was ‘helping’ her with her grief and to make arrangements for her parents’ funerals, he was also administering poison to her too. Every time after she saw him she was left so tired she could barely get out of bed.
Outlandish? Far from it: in a speech outside court, Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby, head of the Kent And Essex Serious Crime Directorate, said he had no doubt that if D’Wit, now serving a minimum tariff of 37 years, had not been caught he would have gone on to commit other murders.
Indeed, they are now looking into the deaths of D’Wit’s father and grandfather.
A spokesperson for Essex Police said: ‘As with any investigation of this magnitude, everything we have uncovered is being reviewed and should anything suggest this has been the case we will not hesitate to act.’
And for what? D’Wit did not stand to gain a great deal materially from the Baxters’ deaths, given what had happened to their company. For Mr Justice Lavender, who presided over his trial, it was something even more sinister: the desire to control.
Ellie agrees. ‘The ultimate control is taking someone’s life isn’t it?’ she says. ‘I think he liked having power over them.’
It is a horrifying notion – but then, in this incredible true crime story, nothing seems too outlandish.
For more exclusive, behind the headline coverage of this case – listen to The Fentanyl Murders , available now on the Mail’s brand-new true crime podcast network – The Crime Desk. Sign up for a free 7-day trial by clicking here.Â
