Nerdy double killer Luke D’Wit created a cast of up to 20 phantom characters during his two-year plot to poison a millionaire couple and steal their business.
D’Wit, 34, ingratiated himself by doing chores for Carol, 64, and Stephen Baxter, 61.
He prepared medicine for the mum-of-four, who had an autoimmune condition and a pacemaker, and also made them ‘herbal remedies’ – which he laced with fatal doses of the opioid fentanyl and other drugs.
Using a secret camera, he watched them die before returning to hide evidence and plant a fake will.
D’Wit denied their murders but was found guilty at Chelmsford Crown Court on Wednesday, following a trial that lasted more than a month and on a third day of jury deliberations.
The killer, who used a wheelchair throughout the trial, did not appear to react in the secure dock of the court.
The oddball created the characters on his phone and voice notes played to the jury
One of those had a made-up sister called Jenny, who claimed to be a theatre producer who could help the couple’s daughter, Ellie Baxter, 22, with her career as a vocalist.
D’Wit can be heard in one recording perfecting Jenny’s high-pitched voice, saying: ‘Hi Carol, it’s Jenny. It’s Gerald’s sister. Yes, so nice to finally speak to you after all these messages we’ve been doing.’
In text messages, Jenny asked Ms Baxter to send her recordings of herself singing, which she then recorded at her parents’ house with the help of D’Wit using his microphone.
Ms Baxter broke down in court as she told jurors how ‘embarrassing’ it was to have believed the deception.
‘Jenny was a trusted person, I thought that she was there to help, I thought she was a real person,’ she added.
They even continued to speak after her parents died.
Jenny responded to news of their deaths with a message saying ‘Oh no my darling sweetheart I’m so sorry’.
The court heard D’Wit visited the couple almost daily, taking Mrs Baxter to the gym and making sure she took so-called Energy Bomb smoothies recommended by another of his personas, a doctor from Florida named Dr Andrea Bowden.
The concoctions, which included lemon, iodine and turmeric, would have masked the taste of other drugs that he added, making Mrs Baxter feel tired and increasingly confused.
Prosecutors said D’Wit had been preparing drinks for the couple since 2022, including the ‘final cup’ on the day of their deaths.
Jurors were told a toxicology report indicated that fentanyl was a factor in both deaths.
Mrs Baxter was also found to have the antihistamine drug promethazine in her system.
Prosecutor Tracy Ayling KC said: ‘It’s difficult to imagine any scenario when two individuals who are not prescribed fentanyl could accidentally contaminate their food with this drug.’
She said D’Wit installed a ‘mobile security surveillance application’ on his phone which allowed him to monitor a camera from another device.
Jurors heard that police who analysed his phone found images of Mr and Mrs Baxter ‘in their armchairs’ on the afternoon of April 7 last year, with one timed at 5.14pm.
She said that the couple ‘did not move at all’ after the images were taken.
Once the couple were clearly ‘incapacitated’ he then went back in and ‘made everything pristine, cleaning up the cups and not leaving any trace’.
Ms Ayling said D’Wit was ‘the last person to see them alive’ and told jurors he then ‘watched them dying on his phone’.
The Baxters’ daughter Ellie and her boyfriend found her parents dead when they went to visit the couple on Easter Sunday, April 9.
Jurors heard D’Wit was so trusted by the family that he was one of the first people she messaged for help and rushed around pretending to help while she frantically called 999.
Chillingly, he took the phone from her and calmly conveyed the situation, and later spoke with a police officer at the scene.
Body worn footage from one of the responding officers captured him trying to cover his tracks already, claiming Mrs Baxter was prone to accidentally taking overdoses of medication, and sometimes took the same pills ‘six or seven times’.
D’Wit claimed Mr Baxter asked him to invent the characters as a means of encouraging his wife to take her medication but jurors saw through the lie.
Ms Ayling said she would be submitting the starting point for sentence should be a whole life order or minimum term of 30 years ‘because of the death of two people and other aggravating factors’.
The couple’s son Harry Baxter said in a statement he had already lost his mother ‘a long time ago’ before his parents were found dead.
‘I refer to the day Luke began his foul games torturing and drugging her,’ he said.
‘Unbeknownst to me, I had already lost my mother a long time ago.
‘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 as we were all dolls in his dollhouse, victim to his manipulation.’
Police said they believed D’Wit got a kick from exercising control over people and would have become a serial killer targeting more victims, had he not been caught.
Detective Superintendent Rob Kirby said in an interview 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.’
The senior officer described 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.
The judge, Mr Justice Nicholas Lavender, said he would sentence D’Wit on Friday.
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