News about Robert Berdella

There was no reason to suspect Fiona Beal might have murdered her boyfriend Nicholas Billingham - nor, indeed, that Billingham had even gone missing. After Beal killed the 42-year-old in November 2021, she sent messages to his family and friends from his phone, purporting to be him and claiming they'd split up. She even invited Billingham's mother for tea as her son's decomposing body lay feet away. She might have got away with her crime had police, concerned over reports of her mental health, not visited Beal, a respected primary school teacher, at a rented chalet in Cumbria, where they found her diary - and in it what amounted to a confession. 'While he was in the bath, I kept the knife in my dressing gown pocket and then hid it in the drawer next to the bed,' Beal, 50, had written, before describing her attempts to dispose of her controlling boyfriend's corpse, which 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'.