The mum of a murdered man unknowingly shared a ‘Christmas drink’ with her son’s killer just a few feet away from his buried body. Nicholas Billingham, 42, was stabbed to death by his girlfriend Fiona Beal, 50, who buried him in the back garden of the house they shared in Northampton in November 2021.
Nicholas had been in a relationship with Beal, a Year 6 teacher at Northampton’s Eastfield Academy, since 2004. Yvonne Valentine, Nicholas’ mother, told the BBC: “Fiona offered me a Christmas drink. I said, ‘oh thank you’. So we sat there with this drink.
“But then it always gets to me because I think Nick was buried in the garden just a few feet away and I didn’t know he was there. It just seemed normal, like I’d been to visit them before.” She added: “How you could hate somebody that much to do what she did? I thought she loved him.”
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Yvonne started to notice things were “a bit unusual” when in late 2021 she received an uncharacteristically long text from his phone. It said he was at a football game and was now living in Essex and working with cars. The message was not sent from Nick.
It was later heard in court that Beal was using his phone to send messages to friends and work colleagues to keep up the facade that he was alive. She also told her friends and colleagues Nick had left her after running off with another woman which the prosecution said was “completely false”.
Diary entries written by Beal reveal she had actually stabbed Nick in the neck after she promised sex following a bath “when he was wearing a sleep mask and was probably cabled-tied on their bed,” prosecutor Hugh Davies KC said. The diary also talks of a split personality alter ego Beal called Tulip 22. “She’s reckless, fearless and efficient. Ruthless,” the diary reads – a dark side to her public persona as a Year 6 school teacher.
After the killing, Beal told her school that she had tested positive for Covid and so was absent from work between 1 and 12 November 2021. On 13 November, she was caught on CCTV buying two trolleys of compost and stones in B&Q, helped by staff to load it into her car. Mr Davies said that the Covid infection was a “cynical lie” to ensure she had the house to herself and the items at B&Q were bought to “enable her to dispose of his body”.
Mr Davies described how Nick’s “grave” comprised of concrete Beal had mixed and a “de facto coffin” made of breeze blocks, timber and sheets. He called it a “major job” which required planning.
In her recovered diary, an entry read: “I got him to wear an eye mask. It was harder than I thought it would be. Hiding a body was bad. Moving a body is much more difficult than it looks on TV.”
It was not until March 2022, four months after Nick’s murder, that Yvonne was told by Northamptonshire Police that he was a missing person. ” I couldn’t believe it, just couldn’t believe it,” she said.
The police became involved after Beal was absent from work and they tracked her down to a rented lodge in Cumbria. There she was detained under the Mental Health Act and it was here where the diaries were found which prompted the investigation into Nick’s disappearance which had gone unnoticed since November 2021 due to Beal’s fake texts on his phone.
In the journal, it was claimed that Nick spat on and threatened her during sex and was manipulating and controlling – belittling and being cruel to her. This was an explanation as to why she killed him, the prosecutor said in court.
Beal was put on trial in Northampton Crown Court in 2023. She accepted the killing but denied murder, instead pleading guilty to manslaughter by a loss of control. Her trial collapsed after a legal error when a key witness was found to have conducted welfare checks on Beal in jail.
Shortly before her retrial at the Old Bailey on Friday, April 26, Beal pleaded guilty to murder. She is due to be sentenced next month on May 29.
Speaking after Beal’s guilty plea, senior investigating officer at Northamptonshire Police, Detective Chief Inspector Adam Pendlebury, said: “We are pleased Fiona Beal has now taken the decision to admit she did indeed murder Nick Billingham and hope that it brings the start of some closure to his family who have faced a torrid time for more than two years, including sitting through the original trial in Northampton in 2023. Today’s news will have come as a great relief as they await her sentencing next month.”
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