Police arrest alleged double murderer, Luke D'Wit, accused of poisoning a married couple with opioid painkiller fentanyl and rewriting their will. Stephen Baxter and his wife Carol were found dead by their daughter Ellie at their home in West Mersea.
Read the exclusive Mail investigation - including the killer's strange bedsheet arrangement with his motherOne thing is certain – no one who knew Luke D’Wit had the slightest inkling that a man they described as ‘kind and gentle’ and a ‘boring computer geek’ was capable of one murder, let alone a double killing.
And it is D’Wit who Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby, the head of the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate which investigated the couple’s macabre deaths, this week described as both ‘cold and calculating’ and ‘one of the most dangerous men I have come across.’ This allowed him to watch the oblivious couple dying in front of his eyes from the fatal dose of fentanyl he had administered, before sneaking back into the house to remove any incriminating evidence such as contaminated glasses.
Certainly, D’Wit had failed to make much of his life by the time his path crossed with that of the Baxters. It was dissolved 17 months later. ‘They designed a logo and that was it. I don’t think they even found any clients,’ one friend who knew D’Wit at the time told the Mail. 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
He used his skills to help others, creating a Facebook page for the Mersea Island Lions Club – a community group that helps the ‘less fortunate’ in the area – as well as doing website work for the charity’s annual road run event.Heidi Cornish, a character witness for the defence, also told the court he had helped at a soup kitchen, adding: ‘He loved to be involved where people need help.’
Her husband, whom she married in 2000, was a fellow director of Cazsplash, as well as being a senior executive with multi-million-pound international property firm Jonas Lang LaSalle, which has its headquarters in Chicago. It was via these smoothies that, the prosecution suggested, D’Wit administered his fatal dose of fentanyl.
The defendant claimed these inventions were masterminded by Stephen Baxter to encourage his wife to take her medication. They assumed this was in order to get the Baxters’ sympathy but it was a claim that was demolished in court where it emerged no hospitals had a record of him receiving treatment.Even so, quite when he began to formulate the plan to murder them is unknown - although in court the jury learned that, in a curious twist, a 17mm metal tack had been found in Mrs Baxter’s digestive system in 2022 after she complained of pain.
Given the apparent lack of suspicious circumstances, detectives initially suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.
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