Statement from Detective Sergeant Spencer Bailey following the sentencing of Fiona Beal

We welcome the sentence handed down today to Fiona Beal who will now very spend many years behind bars for the cold-blooded murder of her former partner Nick Billingham.

Nick was a hard-working 42-year-old father who died at the merciless hands of Beal who had calculatedly planned his murder and then the subsequent burial of his body in the back garden of their Northampton home.

For months afterwards she carried on living a life as if nothing had happened. But she was really living a lie.

Using Nick’s phone she kept him in touch with family, friends, and work colleagues all of whom must have thought he was moving on with his life.

But eventually, the pressures of her guilt overwhelmed her. The journal outlining what the jury was told was her “chilling execution” of Nick meant there was never any doubt she had killed him.

Working with colleagues in the Crown Prosecution Service, we were able to put Beal on trial for murder. The first trial, lasting almost four months at Northampton Crown Court placed an extraordinary toll on Yvonne and her husband Russell, so there was huge relief when Beal, finally realised the game was up and she changed her plea to guilty of murder just days into her retrial.

This has been an extraordinary case in many ways and the media interest has perhaps reflected this. But our job, both as police officers as well as the wider investigation team, was to ensure Beal was eventually convicted for this most serious of crimes.

This was pre-planned, cold-blooded murder after which Beal tried to cover up her tracks. We’ll never quite know if that wholly unconnected visit by a PCSO to her home in February 2022 was to signal the beginning of the end for her, but it has brought us to today and the long-awaited sentencing of her to life imprisonment.

I would like to thank Nick’s family and his mother Yvonne for the extraordinary courage they have shown over this dreadful chapter in their life. We sincerely hope they can now begin to find some closure and move forward to happier times ahead.