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14th March 2023
07:24am GMT
A jilted primary school teacher stabbed her cheating boyfriend to death before mummifying his body and burying it in their back garden, a court has been told.
Fiona Beal, 49, is accused of killing Nicholas Billingham, 42, at the couple’s home in Northampton after finding out he was having an affair.
A court heard she had chillingly wrote about carrying out a murder in a notebook using an alter-ego called Tulip22 prior to the attack in November 2021.
Police found the diary after Beal attempted to take her own life in the bath at a lodge in Windermere, in the Lake District -over 200 miles from her home.
She wrote: “I thought about leaving but the things he said and did fuelled my dark side – I call her Tulip22, she’s reckless, fearless and efficient. Ruthless.
"I started plotting as Tulip22 after he’d gone to bed.”
Beal was arrested in March last year after the notebook was found while she was recovering in hospital.
Detectives at Northamptonshire Police were alerted and a murder probe was launched, declaring Billingham, a builder, as a high-risk individual.
Officers then found a bloodstained mattress in the basement of the couple's terraced home before the victim's remains were discovered in the garden on March 17 last year.
Prosecutor Steven Perian KC said Beal had stabbed her partner once in the throat before wrapping his body in bin bags and a rug and binding it with ties.
On Monday, Beal went on trial at Northampton Crown Court accused of murdering her long term partner during the evening of 1 November 2021.
Perian said: “The defendant by the end of October 2021 was unhappy with her partner Nicholas Billingham and had decided to kill him.
"She believed he was cheating on her again.
“The prosecution suggests from the evidence gathered it is very likely, she killed Nicholas Billingham during the evening of November 1, 2021 in their bedroom."
Perian said after Beal's suicide attempt, she was detained under the Mental Health Act and her notebook was discovered.
He said it “detailed a chilling account of how she had planned and killed someone but it did not contain the name of the person she had killed."
Perian said police eventually found Billingham's body in the back garden.
“There was an area of interest in the back garden; when it was dug up, a partially wrapped and partially clothed human remains was found beneath a carpet and patterned fabric.
“The partly mummified body was later identified through dental records as Nicholas Billingham.”
The court heard in her notebooks Beal wrote: “My mental health had been deteriorating.
"He was f**king around again (possibly Sophie from GN?). Whenever he was cheating he would up the ante on belittling, moaning and criticising.”
She also complained about Billingham’s behaviour and how it was the driving force behind her decision to carry out the murder, jurors were told.
In the days after the killing, Beal was said to have purchased multi-purpose compost, landscape bark and decorative stones to cover the garden burial plot.
The court heard a post mortem investigation indicated Billingham died as a result of a single stab wound to the neck. Perian added: "The track from this stab wound travelled through the neck from right to left cutting the right jugular vein and slicing the oesophagus and trachea.
“There was a sleep mask over the eyes. The internal aspect of which was printed ‘this is my morning after face’. “From the level of decomposition present it would be in keeping with Nicholas Billingham having died a number of months before being found."
Beal, of Kingsley, Northampton, denies murder. The trial continues.
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