Helen Bailey: The 'wildly funny' author killed by the man who was meant to be her 'happy ending'
Video report by ITV News Anglia's Chloe Keedy
To those who knew Helen Bailey, she was witty and wise … with a wicked sense of humour.
To a generation of young readers she was the creator of characters such as Electra Brown and Daisy Davenport, in stories that were drawn directly from her own schooldays and which captured the trials and tribulations of teenage life.
Latterly, she was known as the author of ‘Planet Grief’, a blog about bereavement set up after the death of her husband in 2011.
Helen’s friend, Tara Simms, told ITV News it was important that Helen’s legacy wasn’t defined by grief: "There was so much more - she was just incredibly funny, incredibly witty - very quick witted, wildly funny.
"You just really felt you could get on with her and that was her way - that was her gift actually."
It was a gift that enabled her to connect with millions of young readers.
Helen admitted that her most popular character, Electra Brown, was based on her own experiences of being of at school.
She wrote that she used to “sit and stare out of the window, dreaming of anything but lessons, then go home and write pages and pages in my diary of who did what to whom and (usually) why wasn’t I part of it.”
She spent her teens sending short stories and poems to ‘anyone she could think of’, and sometimes found herself in print.
After a degree in science, Helen worked in the media, running a London-based character licensing agency.
While she was handling the licensing for internationally renowned properties such as Snoopy, Nintendo, Rugrats and The Simpsons, she began to create her own characters in the books she had started writing.
Helen’s editor, Anne McNeil, Senior publisher at Hodder Children’s Books, remembers the day she went for lunch with Helen more than a decade ago, when Helen told her she wanted to write children’s books.
Together they went on to publish fifteen titles.
Helen’s skills as a writer later enabled her to connect with a very different audience through her blog Planet Grief.
After losing her husband John in a drowning accident in Barbados in 2011, Helen wrote about the shock of being - in her own words - ‘a wife at breakfast and a widow by lunch.’
Followers found comfort in Helen’s honesty and humour, and the blog became so successful she turned it into a book called ‘When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis’.
In the book Bailey described meeting and falling in love with Ian Stewart, whose wife had died in 2010.
She referred to him as ‘GGHW’ (The Gorgeous Grey Haired Widower) and together they moved to Royston in 2010.
Helen spent most of her adult life living in London. She wrote about the challenge of adapting to life in rural Hertfordshire, having ‘sworn she could never live anywhere she couldn’t hail a black cab’.
The couple’s next door neighbour, Mavis Drake, described Helen as funny, kind and caring.
She said Helen’s beloved pet dog Boris was always at her side, and that she would peer over the fence and wave whenever the pair of them walked past.
In an interview with ITV News, she described Helen’s reaction when Mavis had the old, dilapidated garden fence replaced with a new, taller one.
"The first day it was up she emailed me or texted me and said ‘I do not like your fence. NOT like it!", Mavis said.
"Then she sort of softened the blow and said ‘only because I cannot now wave to you as I walk past!’’
Helen said she had found happiness in her new life in Royston.
In a footnote in her final book, she thanks ‘my Gorgeous Grey Haired Widower, Ian Stewart: BB, I love you. You are my happy ending.’
It was, of course, an ending anything but happy for a woman who helped so many to make sense of their own losses, and whose murder has left them struggling to comprehend hers.