Police are reportedly investigating whether a man convicted of murdering a married couple last year with fentanyl may have previously killed his father and grandfather.
In March Luke D’Witt was sentenced to a minimum of 37 years in prison for the poisoning of Stephen and Carol Baxter with a synthetic opioid painkiller at their home in West Mersey, Essex, on Easter Sunday 2023. He changed the couple’s will the following day to become a director of the company they ran.
Essex Police did not deny a BBC report that detectives are looking into whether D’Wit may have also killed his father, who died in 2021, and his grandfather without being detected.
A statement from the force said: “Until the conviction and sentence of Luke D’Witt, our determined focus has been on securing justice in relation to the murders of Carol and Stephen. As with any investigation of this magnitude, everything we uncover is being reviewed and if anything suggests this may have been the case, we will not hesitate to act.
During D’Wit’s sentencing, Detective Constable Rob Kirby, who was in charge of the investigation, noted that he “went to great lengths to cover his tracks. He deceived all who knew him.” He also couldn’t rule out the possibility that D’Witt had killed other people without being detected.
During the trial, Chelmsford Crown Court heard that D’Witt had siphoned large amounts of fentanyl from a pain patch originally prescribed to his father.
In his sentencing remarks, the judge, Mr Justice Lavender, said D’Witt had “made some attempts to secure indirect gain” for himself but it was “obviously possible that what really motivated you was the desire to control others’.
The court heard D’Witt befriended the Baxters over several years and began creating a series of fake online identities to manipulate them in 2021.
They included a Florida doctor he named Andrea Bowden and several members of a fictitious support group for Hashimoto’s, a thyroid disease Carol Baxter had. D’Witt also drugged Carol Baxter, making her look like she had dementia or suffered a stroke, the jury was told.