- In their early sixties, Carol and Stephen were looking forward to retirement
- They had loving children – and an honorary son called Luke who had been hired by them, but had long become part of the family
- Then Carol became sick – and their children couldn’t contact them
- Police were shocked to find Carol and Stephen were drugged in a twisted ploy
Carol and Stephen Baxter had worked tirelessly all their lives.
Stephen, 61, had been a senior executive at a property firm, and Carol, 64, had worked in adult education.
Then the couple started a business of their own.
Cazsplash sold bespoke mats to fit around corner showers and baths.
Now approaching their retirement, the pair often spoke of their plans to spend more time with their family.
They had two adult children together, Harry and Ellie, and doted on their young grandson.
They also had something of an ‘honorary’ son. Luke D’Wit, 34, had been hired by the couple around 2014 to design a website for their business.
He was a loner and comic book nerd, and the Baxters took pity on Luke.
Eventually hiring him as the company’s IT consultant, they allowed him to be more involved in the business.
After Luke’s dad died two years later, he grew closer to the Baxters, attending family dinners and helping care for Carol.
She’d been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s in 2005, an autoimmune disease that was slowly getting worse.
By 2022, Carol was suffering fatigue and confusion, had lost weight and suffered tremors.
It seemed her disease was stripping away her ability to function.
She’d also been hospitalised due to abdominal pain.
The couple’s loved ones regularly checked in on her, including Luke, who’d help administer Carol’s medication and mixed up ‘health tonics’, that’d been recommended to Carol by a specialist, Dr Andrea Bowden.
On April 9, 2023, family grew concerned when their texts and calls to the couple went unanswered.
At midday, Ellie and her partner Marcus went to check. Through a window, Ellie could see her parents sitting upright in their armchairs, unresponsive.
Panicking, Ellie and Marcus broke into the house but it was too late – Carol and Stephen were dead.
Distraught, Ellie was thankful when Luke stepped in to help with funeral arrangements. He even looked after Ellie’s eldest child Axel when she went for a scan for her second pregnancy.
But two months later in June, when postmortem blood tests revealed Carol and Stephen had died of an overdose of the opioid drug fentanyl, police suspected foul play.
Ellie, by then six months pregnant, Marcus and Luke were arrested on suspicion of murder. But after questioning, it was clear there was only one real culprit – Luke D’Wit.
When cops searched the couple’s home, they found an update to the Baxters’ will, stating that should they die Luke D’Wit should be made director of Cazsplash. D’Wit denied murdering his bosses. But searching his home, police found packets of fentanyl patches, promethazine – which can cause side effects such as disorientation – and multiple mobile phones.
At his trial, prosecutors revealed D’Wit’s electronic devices proved he had up to 20 different identities he’d used to communicate with the Baxters, including posing as Dr Bowden, the specialist who’d been pushing Carol away from conventional treatment, and encouraging her to drink ‘health tonics’.
He had also posed as other patients with Hashimoto’s that Carol connected with online, using these to convince her the tonics were the best treatment.
‘My mum lost her freedom, her will, her ability to function two years prior to her murder due to her illness. An illness no-one could help with or understand because it was contrived by Luke D’Wit.’
Carol and Stephen’s daughter Ellie
CCTV from the Baxters’ home showed D’Wit arriving on the afternoon of April 7.
Prosecutors claimed that, on this visit, he mixed fentanyl in health tonics and gave them to Stephen and Carol, poisoning them.
His motive was to take over the business.
D’Wit had written the will update, using the false identity of a solicitor in an attempt to assert its authenticity.
Sickeningly, D’Wit had also set up a surveillance camera in the couple’s home, and connected it to his phone, so he could watch them after he left the property.
As they were dying, he’d taken Ellie and Marcus out to dinner as a decoy.
In March 2024, in Chelmsford Crown Court, Luke D’Wit, 34, was found guilty of the murder of Stephen and Carol. He was sent to prison for life for a minimum of 37 years.
In his remarks, Justice Nicholas Lavender called D’Wit’s actions ‘cruel and senseless’.
‘You ended Carol and Stephen Baxter’s lives and you brought grief and misery to the lives of others, especially their children,’ he said.
Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby said Luke D’Wit was ‘one of the most dangerous men I have come across’.
In a statement released through Essex Police, Harry Baxter said he had lost his mother ‘a long time’ before his parents were found dead.
‘I refer to the day Luke began his foul games torturing and drugging her,’ he said.
‘I feel great sadness looking back on the videos of her when she was acting strangely and seeing him in the background giggling and smiling knowing he’s the one inflicting this pain.’
Ellie added, ‘My mum lost her freedom, her will, her ability to function two years prior to her murder due to her illness.
An illness no-one could help with or understand because it was contrived by Luke D’Wit.’
The following month, Ellie told Daily Mail she still speaks to her parents on their group chat.
‘It helps to think that somehow they’re still here with me, even if I can’t see them,’ she said.
