A man who poisoned a couple with fentanyl having spent years creating a series of fake personas to manipulate them has been given a life sentence with a minimum term of 37 years for their murders. Luke D’Wit killed Stephen and Carol Baxter with the synthetic opioid at their home in West Mersea, Essex on 9 April 2023. He then amended their will the next day to make himself a director of the company they ran. “I have never known an emotional pain to physically hurt so much,” the couple’s daughter, Ellie Baxter, told Chelmsford crown court as she delivered her victim impact statement on Friday. Referring to the moment she found her parents’ bodies, she said: “It was like my insides were on fire. I screamed and I screamed.” D’Wit had befriended the couple over the course of several years. He began creating a series of fake online personas to manipulate them in 2021. These included a doctor from Florida he called Andrea Bowden and several members of a fictitious support group for the thyroid condition Hashimoto’s, which Carol Baxter had. The couple’s daughter told the court: “I tried to push her to go to the doctor’s, which she did. But she was completely brainwashed by Dr Andrea Bowden. “Luke D’Wit, who was behind the persona Dr Andrea Bowden, thought sending videos of my mum for Andrea to see would be a good idea. But, in reality, Luke just wanted to see and watch the outcome of his twisted, abominable actions, sometimes even filming my mum himself and laughing.” She said he had initially been brought into her parents’ business selling shower mats in about 2012 or 2013 to help build its website. He eventually visited their home regularly. Ellie Baxter said her parents had looked after him. “They just decided he was lonely, especially after Luke’s dad died. They took him under their wing and would let him join in,” she said. But the court heard that in the background D’Wit was carefully constructing a false reality in what the prosecutor Tracy Ayling KC described as “quite an extraordinary long-term case of manipulation”. He also drugged Carol Baxter, causing her to appear as if she had dementia or had suffered a stroke, the jury was told. The pain he was inflicting on her “was for Luke D’Wit’s own satisfaction”, Ayling said. He eventually murdered the Baxters “calmly, coolly and in a way which had been entirely planned, maybe for some while”, she told the court in her closing speech. Sentencing D’Wit on Friday, Mr Justice Nicholas Lavender said he was sure he had extracted the fentanyl from patches prescribed to his father before his death. He said their contents were crushed into a powder and given to Stephen and Carol Baxter in a drink, which they took because they trusted D’Wit to prepare “supposed health drinks”. The judge told D’Wit: “It’s distinctly possible what motivated you was a desire to control others.” D’Wit, who wore a patterned blue short-sleeved shirt, appeared to show no reaction as he sat in a wheelchair in the secure dock.