An IT worker has been found guilty of murdering a married couple by poisoning them with fentanyl, before changing their will to make himself a director of their shower mat company. Luke D’Wit, 34, who was friends with and worked for Stephen and Carol Baxter, created fake online personas to manipulate them before he killed them.
These included pretending to be a doctor from Florida and members of a fake support group for the thyroid condition Hashimoto’s, which Mrs Baxter suffered from. The Baxters were found dead at their home in West Mersea, Essex, by their daughter Ellie on Easter Sunday last year.
D’Wit arrived soon after and told a 999 call handler he was a “friend”, before giving a false account. Prosecutors said he made a fake will on his phone the day after the Baxters were found dead, making him a director of their shower mat company Cazsplash.
He also pretended to be a solicitor in connection with the new will. Tracy Ayling KC said in her closing speech that D’Wit murdered the Baxters “calmly, coolly and in a way which had been entirely planned, maybe for some while”.
He was found guilty at Chelmsford Crown Court of murdering the couple following a trial lasting more than a month. The Baxters’ daughter Ellie said in evidence that her parents thought D’Wit was “weird, but nerdy weird”.
She mentioned that he was initially involved in their shower mat business around 2012 or 2013 to “help build the website” and eventually started visiting their house “every day”.
Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby, from the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate, stated outside court that D’Wit was “without doubt one of the most dangerous men I’ve ever experienced in my policing career”.
He said: “I have absolutely no doubt that had he not been caught, he would have gone on to commit further murders.”
Mr Kirby declared that “justice has been served today”, adding that D’Wit “rightly belongs behind bars”.
The defendant “fooled everyone”, he added.
“He befriended people, came across as a very amenable, helpful person but in the background he was a cool, calculated killer who spent years planning the demise of Carol and Stephen Baxter.”
He portrayed D’Wit as a “loner” who “spent hours of his time creating false personas, all there to create control over the Baxters”.
“The level of deviousness he went to was phenomenal,” Mr Kirby said.
When asked about a possible motive, Mr Kirby said it was “unclear what was going on in D’Wit’s mind”.
“Certainly he stood to benefit financially from the death of the Baxters and we believe that certainly this played part of the role in his motive,” he said.
He continued: “D’Wit’s downfall was the arrogance that existed within him. He didn’t cover his tracks properly and he was deluded in thinking that he could use fentanyl to kill two people and that wouldn’t be found to be suspicious.”
D’Wit was nabbed at his workplace with a bag full of opened and unopened fentanyl patches. The prosecutors doubted his story that he was returning these to a pharmacy after his father’s death in 2021.
In court, D’Wit denied killing Mr and Mrs Baxter. He claimed that he made up fake identities on Mr Baxter’s orders and to give Mrs Baxter “someone to talk to and air all her grievances to”.
