Midwife killer 'laid false trail' for police by putting her engagement ring and wedding dress on her bed

The killer of a murdered midwife left her engagement ring and wedding dress on her bed as a 'false trail' for detectives investigating her disappearance, a court has heard.

Married Michael Stirling had an affair with Samantha Eastwood, who had been due to marry his wife's brother.

But during a row at her home in Stoke-on-Trent this summer, he killed Ms Eastwood, before dumping her body in a shallow grave on the edge of the Staffordshire Moorland.

Stirling's sentencing hearing this morning heard that he had laid out items from her cancelled wedding on her bed to make it look like she was depressed and had 'gone away'. 

He then texted her sister, saying: 'Please leave me alone x', which prosecutors said was meant to suggest she was having some kind of breakdown.

It also emerged today that:

• Stirling had an evening meal with his family while his victim's body lay in his van outside. 
• He went back to his victim's house under the guise of appealing for information, while secretly checking he wasn't on neighbours' CCTV footage.  
  
• The killer accidentally gave away the location of her body by returning to check it was undisturbed, while being followed by police. 
• He hugged the victim's sister after the murder of the midwife, as he pretended to offer her family support.
  
  Stirling's wife Katie is the sister of John Peake, the man Miss Eastwood had been due to marry in the summer of this year. 
  

The two couples regularly socialised together and were pictured together at the wedding of one of Mr Peake's relatives. 

But Miss Eastwood suddenly called off the engagement in January, leaving friends baffled as to what had gone wrong between the pair. 

Stirling, a fencer and landscape gardener, had been in a 'long-standing but not particularly intense' affair with Miss Eastwood, his barrister has previously said.

MailOnline