The Sunday Times February 13, 2022 2GN 7
NEWS
No other
case has
found
evidence
like this
one
breathing from an outside source”. Stew-
art has never confessed, so it is not
known how he suffocated Diane. How-
ever investigators believe he either put a
plastic bag over her head or used a choke
hold. Then in a “lying charade” he
claimed she had suffered a fatal fit.
While handing down a whole life sen-
tence to Stewart after he was found
guilty, the judge, Mr Justice Bryan, toldProfessor Safa
Al-Sarraj found
that Diane
Stewart, far right,
had been
suffocated by
husband Ian,
right with Helen
Bailey, whom he
murdered in 2016using a technique called amyloid beta
precursor protein (App) staining. Ischae-
mia happens only when blood flow and
oxygen to the brain are restricted.
He told the jury in the trial of Ian Stew-
art for the murder of Diane that the dam-
age was likely to have occurred over a
period of 35 minutes to an hour before
death, meaning it was not consistent with
a fatal epileptic fit, where people die
much more suddenly.
“Epilepsy can cause alterations in the
heart rhythm so you expect the death to
be quick. You don’t expect the death to
be later on,” he said. “I remember saying
to the police I don’t think this is straight-
forward epilepsy. Then they told me that
she hadn’t had epilepsy for 18 years and I
said: ‘Well, this is now extremely unu-
sual. I don’t believe this is right’.”
Diane’s brain had been examined by a
neuropathologist in 2010 who concluded
she died of “natural causes”, brought
about by a condition known as sudden
unexpected death in epilepsy (Sudep). A
full toxicology report was not done and it
will never be known whether Stewart
had drugged his wife, as he did to Bailey
in the months before her murder.
Al-Sarraj has sympathy for the pathol-
ogist who examined the brain initially,
admitting epilepsy was the “perfect rea-
son not to expect foul play”.
He said: “I don’t think I would criticise
their practice. I think if somebody would
have alerted them and said something is
unusual they probably would have gone
to the second level of examination. I was
at an advantage having been alerted this
is something unusual, then I have to put it
in a different gear and look at it in a differ-
ent way than my colleagues 12 years ago.”
At Stewart’s three-week trial at Hunt-
ingdon crown court, the jury was told
there was no signs of an epileptic fit, such
as tongue biting or injuries from her sup-
posed collapse. Another expert told the
trial that the chances of her suffering a
fatal seizure were “one in 100,000”.
Stuart Trimmer QC, for the prosecu-
tion, told the court Diane’s death was
caused by “prolonged restriction of herhim: “It no doubt never crossed your
mind that the donation of Diane’s brain
for teaching and research would lead to
your ultimate downfall, as it was to do,
and your conviction today for the murder
of Diane Stewart.”
Detective Superintendent Jerome
Kent, of Hertfordshire police, who led the
investigation in both cases, was delighted
with Stewart’s conviction.
He said: “I know no other case where
police have gone back to recover material
that has been left for medical research
and subsequently found the evidence.”
Kent thinks it could prove to be a land-
mark case. “I’d certainly be encouraging
other police officers to think about
samples that might have been taken by
the coroner and during those initial
pathology examinations and just seeing if
they still exist,” he said.
“But also I think it’s really important
for police to be very open minded when
we go to these sudden deaths when there
isn’t an obvious cause, in a similar way
that we deal with child death. I would
encourage other police officers and
investigators to think about lots of differ-
ent possibilities and not to be blinkered.”
There are 10 brain banks in the UK. In
the past three years 1,516 brains have
been donated to them, according to the
UK Brain Bank Network.
Its director, Professor Colin Smith, a
neuropathologist at Edinburgh Univer-
sity, said the use of a donated brain in a
criminal conviction was “very rare, if not
unprecedented”. Most are donated by
people with brain conditions such as Alz-
heimer’s or Parkinson’s.
He said: “If there’s any suggestion of an
unusual type of death, the coroners
become involved very quickly, and when
they become involved those brains can-
not be released for research until they are
happy there has been no foul play.”
Al-Sarraj, who is also the director of
the London neurodegenerative diseases
brain bank at King’s College London,
hopes the case will promote the impor-
tance of brain research, which he says is
badly underfunded in the UK.I looked at her brain tissue and
knew she had been murdered
When he examined the brain of Diane
Stewart, it did not take Professor Safa
Al-Sarraj long to notice something was
wrong. Since her death in 2010, Stewart
had been thought to have succumbed to
natural causes after an epileptic fit.
Al-Sarraj, a consultant neuropatholo-
gist, was asked to look at the case in 2017
by detectives investigating Diane’s hus-
band, Ian Stewart, over her death in the
back garden of their home in Bassing-
bourn, Cambridge. The unexpected
demise of the 47-year-old, described as
healthy by those who knew her, had
come under police scrutiny after Stewart
was convicted of the 2016 murder of his
fiancée, the children’s author Helen Bai-
ley, whom he met after Diane died.
Bailey, 51, was drugged and suffocated
by Stewart, who dumped her body and
that of her dachshund, Boris, in a cesspit
under their home in Royston, Hertford-
shire, in a plan to inherit her £4 million
fortune.
After Stewart was jailed for life in 2017,
police discovered that Diane, a mother of
two, had donated her brain for medical
research. It was stored at the Cambridge
brain bank at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
Detectives then asked Al-Sarraj to
examine the brain. He said it had been
stored in two ways — in tiny samples kept
in paraffin wax on microscope slides, and
larger “wet tissue” components, kept in
formalin (formaldehyde).
“Both of them were available to me. I
think if it had not been kept and had been
disposed of, nobody would have been
able to find out what happened, but this
was the only objective thing in the case
where we had a platform to start looking
at a different cause of death.”
Al-Sarraj, 63, who works on about 100
criminal cases a year with the police, had
never worked on anything like it: “This is
very unusual. I cannot recall a case simi-
lar to this where it was solved after the
brain was donated to medical science.”
He identified ischaemic changes in the
hippocampus region of Diane’s brain,Hugo DanielFor years, Diane Stewart’s death was blamed on epilepsy. Then a pathologist got to work — and her husband’s lies were exposed
ALICE BOAGEY/SWNS; SUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE; PAbre
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