A Teacher Lured Boyfriend with Sex and Then Killed Him: How Chilling Journal Entries Helped Convict Her

A primary school teacher admitted Friday to killing her partner and burying his remains in their garden, police in England say.

In a news release Friday, Northampton police say Fiona Beal pleaded guilty to murdering her partner Nicholas Billingham, who was found dead in the couple’s garden in March 2022, roughly four months after he was last seen.

Beal, 50, had lured Bellingham with the promise of sex and tied him to their bed before she “stabbed him in the neck when he was wearing a sleep mask,” Prosecutor Hugh Davies KC said at her trial, according to the BBC.

Davies said Beal then “wrapped her dead partner up and dragged him down the stairs” before burying him at their home.

Then after killing Billingham, Beal used her boyfriend's phone to send messages to their family members, telling them they had both contracted COVID-19 and needed to be isolated for an extended period of time, the BBC reported.

In the police press release Friday, Davies called the act a "chilling execution." And at the trial, Davies called Beal’s deceptive cover up “as heartless as it was self-serving," according to the BBC.

Jurors heard conflicting accounts of Beal and Billingham’s relationship.

Beal’s defense told the jury that Billingham had cheated on her previously, while the prosecution said allegations that Billingham had run off with another woman outside their relationship was “completely false,” according to Sky News.

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After Beal murdered her boyfriend, police say the former school teacher then rented a cabin in Cumbria, roughly 230 miles north of their home in Northampton, where she explicitly journaled about the murder and her efforts to clean up after the crime.

“Hiding a body was bad. Moving a body is much more difficult than it looks on TV," she wrote in one journal entry, according to the BBC.

Davies, the prosecutor, said the journal entries made it hard to argue against Beal’s guilt in the case.

"They certainly do contain some unambiguously clear declarations of what she had done. These parts were not just her truth, but the truth. What was this?” the prosecutor told the courtroom during Beal's trial, according to the Manchester Evening News. "The short answer is that she had planned to, and had, killed him in cold blood.”

Beal's sentencing hearing is set for late May.

A murder charge automatically carries a life sentence in the United Kingdom.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.