How killer primary school teacher Fiona Beal tried to cover her tracks: ... trends now

A primary school teacher who murdered her 'cheating' partner sent a string of text messages from his phone and claimed they were isolating with Covid after stabbing him to death. 

Fiona Beal, 50, lured 42-year-old builder Nick Billingham to their room for sex before tying him to the bed with cable ties, stabbing him in the neck and burying his body in their garden at their home in Northampton on November 1, 2021.

Mr Billingham was found by police shortly after officers discovered a notebook with a 'chilling' confession inside following a suicide attempt in March 2022.

On the day of the killing, Beal told her teacher colleagues that her and her partner had both tested positive for Covid, ensuring she would not be disturbed while she buried him in the garden and painted over the blood on the walls.

In another chilling act to cover her tracks, the 'highly capable' teacher texted Mr Billingham's mother Yvonne Valentine on December 30, 2021, pretending to be her deceased son.

Beal fooled Yvonne into thinking Mr Billingham had moved to Essex and started a new life with a fictitious woman called Faye, promising to contact her again 'once things had calmed down'. 

Speaking after the guilty plea, Mr Billingham's mother Yvonne also revealed that just before Christmas, months after her son was murdered, Beal had offered a drink and chatted with her, all while knowing he was dead in a makeshift grave metres away.

She said: 'Nick was my firstborn and he was very loving little boy, cheeky, mischievous, things that boys are like. He had friends, he loved his football.

'How you could hate someone that much to do what she did I can't believe it, and apparently his last word was 'why' when she stabbed him in the neck.'

Recounting an occasion after her son's death, she added: 'I walked into the house and in the living room and the first thing I thought was, "ooh you've turned all your furniture round".

'Fiona offered me a Christmas drink, and I said thank you, so I sat there with this drink, but then it always gets to me because Nick was buried in the garden just a few feet away and I didn't know he was there.

'I try not to think about it too much but I do, it's horrible.'

Mr Billingham's body went undiscovered for four months before police found Beal's journal, in which she wrote how her lover asked 'why?' when she knifed him.

In it, she had written about her 'dark side' which she described as 'reckless' and 'ruthless' - before describing how moving a body is 'harder than it looks on TV.'

They then dug up the garden and uncovered his mummified remains wrapped in sheeting in a makeshift grave filled with compost and ten 22.5kg bags of Cotswold Stone that she bought from B&Q especially for the purpose.

Beal had initially pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter by reason of of a loss of control, but denied murdering Mr Billingham between October 30 and November 10 2021.

Her defence team argued at the first trial: 'Fiona Beal is unable to recall many of the details of the actual act itself. The notes, the scribblings, are clear evidence of a disturbed mind.'

But a jury at the Old Bailey heard today that she had changed her plea.

It can now be revealed that a notebook found by police revealed how Beal, writing as Tulip22, described hiding a knife in a bedside drawer and getting Mr Billingham to wear an eye mask before his pre-planned murder.

It was also said the notebook contained a claim that Beal had been spat on and threatened during sex and subjected to cruel and belittling treatment.

Beal's crimes were unravelled when she was found at a lodge near Kendal in Cumbria in March 2022 after suffering superficial wounds and writing 'what read like a suicide note'. She was then taken to the local hospital and detained under the Mental Health Act.

According to the initial trial, police officers recovered a notebook from the place where she had been renting that 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.

The trial heard that Northamptonshire Police were then contacted and visited Beal's home to find a bloodstained mattress in the basement and an apparent blood stain on the bed frame in the master bedroom.

Judge Mark Lucraft told Beal on Friday: 'You have this morning pleaded guilty to murder, which as you have no doubt been told, carries a sentence of life imprisonment.'

As the jury left the courtroom, a tearful Beal wiped her eyes with a tissue.