When Lesley Bailey sat with her dearly loved older sister Nicola as she lay dying from a brain tumour six years ago, she made her a promise that she ‘would be happy and live my life to the full, carrying her with me in my heart,’ says Lesley.
One can only imagine the joy Nicola, who died at the age of 56, would have felt to see her little sister blissfully happy when, three years later, Lesley began a life with farmer Andrew Bailey and her teenage daughter on a seven-acre smallholding in rural Cheshire.
‘I really thought we’d be happy for ever,’ she says. ‘I was totally in love with this lovely man who adored me, cared for me and looked out for me. It was idyllic. I thought I was living the dream.’
She shakes her head. ‘You know, at times I still can’t believe what happened to me.’
This week, Bailey was found guilty of assault by beating at Warrington Magistrates Court for throwing Lesley to the floor in a rage and pouring a large bottle of beer over her face. She said she felt she was being ‘waterboarded’ and struggled for breath.
Lesley Bailey: ‘He became increasingly bad-tempered. I had to get out’
In court, Lesley described her ex-husband as a ‘psychopath’. He was originally charged with coercive control but cleared after a trial.
READ MORE: SHEEP FARMER, 65, THREW HIS WIFE TO THE GROUND AND POURED BEER ON HER
Lesley said in evidence that the attack, in February last year, was one of numerous assaults that began within months of the couple moving into an idyllic converted barn together. She points to photographs from their wedding day the following year that show bruising on her neck and shoulders.
‘Two nights before, he’d grabbed me by the throat during an argument.
‘The next morning, he took me to the hotel with the cake and the dresses. As we got in the car, he stroked the bruising on my neck, tutted at me and shook his head. I felt he was insinuating I’d made him do it.
‘The meal I had that evening with my family and friends is a blur. One of the bridesmaids asked what the bruising was on my shoulder. I just said it was the sheep.’
Lesley is in pieces as she talks about this. In the days after Bailey’s arrest she couldn’t stop shaking and was continually in tears. She has since been diagnosed with PTSD and prescribed anti-anxiety drugs, as well as receiving many hours of therapy.
She tells me she has pains in her chest and ‘tingling’ in her arms as she recalls those three years with Bailey, from whom she is now divorced.
‘I have nightmares where I see him over me. I can’t go in certain places because I went there with him. He almost destroyed me — the person I really am.’
Bailey denies a pattern of violence and says there was just the one isolated incident for which he was convicted.
Convicted: Andrew Bailey outside court in Warrington
Hopes and doubts: The couple on their wedding day in 2021
Lesley is an educated, strong-willed woman who had a successful career as a design manager for John Lewis that included regular presentations and travel to the Far East.
When her sister was diagnosed with a brain tumour, she left her job to spend as much time as possible with her. A year later, their mother died of cancer.
‘We lost my mum and my sister in the space of 18 months,’ she says. ‘That was devastating — and that’s when Andrew Bailey met me, when I was vulnerable.’
Lesley was 49 years old when she began dating Bailey and, alongside a freelance career in design, was studying to be a palliative care nurse, after being inspired by those who had cared for her mother and sister. The couple met on an online dating app.
‘I was independent and strong so it wasn’t a case of being needy,’ she says. ‘But you know those evenings when you have a child and they go to bed? You’d like to meet somebody who understands you, someone who’s fun — someone to share things with.’
Bailey, who was living in a bedsit on a farm and working as a feed salesman after a recent divorce, was the first to message Lesley. They communicated online for several months, then met for lunch.
Andrew Bailey, 65, threw his wife to the ground and poured beer over her, leaving her with injuries and PTSD, a court heard
‘We seemed to have mutual interests in animals, children and horses,’ she says. ‘When we met he was very charming. He kept looking at me, then looking away and acting as if he was blown away by me.’ Lesley says Bailey told her he had been divorced twice, but she has since learned there was a third marriage before he met her.
‘I believed him,’ she says. ‘It’s like the part he plays as this farmer, how he made out in court I was some sort of “townie” who didn’t understand rural life.
‘He worked as a salesman and grew up in Bury, about half an hour from where I lived. His father ran a stall in Bolton market selling porcelain and glassware. Now I can see all the red flags that were there. He was very pushy in terms of wanting me to move in with him after we’d been seeing each other for a month. I said I had a daughter and wasn’t going to make any quick decisions.’
The relationship became sexual after they had been dating for two months. Bailey booked a room at the luxurious Hawkstone Hall and Spa in Shropshire, where the bed was sprinkled with rose petals and there was champagne on ice. He continued to woo her with flowers, expensive meals, weekends at swish hotels and gifts. Then in December 2019, when they had been seeing each other for only three months, he bought her a £10,000 engagement ring.
She said it was too soon; finally agreeing to marry him two months later when he went down on one knee in his bedsit in February 2020.
‘I was falling in love with him. He said that, following his divorce, he had put his money into savings and was looking to buy some land and start again. I thought this was my happy-ever-after.
‘He was great with my daughter, too, playing silly games with her like how long can you keep a lemon in your mouth. I now think it’s all part of the game he played at the start.’
The former couple are said to have met on a dating app and bonded over buying sheep at market
Lesley was, she says, oblivious to Bailey’s darker side and truly happy when they moved into the smallholding just days before the first Covid lockdown in March 2020. They existed ‘in a bubble’, enjoying sunny months on the land without the pressures of work.
But as lockdown relaxed, Bailey began going to auction to buy livestock — largely, she says, with her money. Today she is pursuing him for £20,000 through the civil court.
‘He bought cattle. He bought sheep. I wasn’t allowed to use any of the stables. I began thinking, “Crikey, I didn’t sign up for all this.” But there was a lovely side to it, too. I love being with animals and I loved being with him.’
The first verbal assault, she said in court, came on her 50th birthday. ‘We were meant to be going for lunch but he’d forgotten he had a suit fitting for the wedding. I took my daughter shopping instead. He left me some really unpleasant messages saying he couldn’t believe I’d just gone off with her.
‘When I got home he flew into a verbal rage. It was my birthday. I burst into tears. He left and later that evening I got hundreds of apologetic messages saying “I didn’t mean it”, “I’m stressed”, “I’m worried about money.” It plays with your mind. You think, “Is that the case or is this who he is?” It makes you doubt yourself.
‘After he’d flown into a rage, he’d be back to the person I thought he was. He’d make me dinner, buy me flowers or write a note and leave it on the table.’
At court, Bailey said it was ‘inappropriate’ of his wife to have gone away during the lambing season and called the callous attack a ‘tussle’
Andrew Bailey, 65, attacked private nursing assistant Lesley (pictured) in February 2022
Now, suffering from PTSD, Lesley struggles to recall exact dates. She remembers he became increasingly ‘domineering’, was ‘unwelcoming’ to her friends and plain ‘rude’ to her 80-year-old father. In one incident, she said, he grabbed her by the throat in a row over his phone — and when her father, who was snoozing on the sofa, woke up, he saw Bailey’s hand on her throat. In court, magistrates disregarded her father’s account after he admitted he had a ‘poor memory’.
When Lesley married Bailey at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire in front of more than 300 guests, she held onto the belief — ‘ridiculously’, she concedes — that ‘making his marriage vows may change things’.
‘I didn’t sleep a wink the night before the wedding, thinking that I should cancel it, but I couldn’t do it. You go through this huge range of emotions, from being in a fairy tale to it becoming a horror movie and thinking, “How can I ever tell anybody?”
‘I remember my daughter being so happy. All my family and friends were, too. He gave the most gushing, wonderful speech about how amazing I was and how proud he was of me. We danced to Whitney Houston’s Nobody Loves Me Like You Do. Everybody’s there. You feel like the princess in a beautiful place. It’s as if you don’t want to think about the horrible stuff.’
After the wedding, there was a period of calm for three months until, at the end of 2021, Bailey was made redundant.
‘He became increasingly bad-tempered and was always in a foul mood, slamming doors. He kept asking for money and if I didn’t give it, he’d break things. I was really struggling. I knew I had to get out.’
Friends offered Lesley their house in Majorca in February for a four-day break. She went with a close friend to clear her mind and work out how she could leave.
In court, Bailey insinuated that she had jetted off on a girls’ holiday, leaving him to shoulder the lambing season alone.
‘He was continually ringing and messaging me, saying “I love you”, “I miss you”, “Why aren’t you answering my calls?” When we got back he met me at the airport and totally ignored my friend. He threw my bag in the car and was swearing. I could see what was coming next. I was on eggshells.’
That night he attacked her.
‘He had gone into the lounge and put the TV on. I’d put my dressing gown on and was really nervous, so I wanted a drink. There was only a really big bottle of beer in the fridge, so I opened that. I sat on the sofa a bit away from him and had it in my hand.
‘When he was in a rage he’d go really pale and his eyes would turn black. He looked at me and just lunged at me. He’s a big man — 6ft 6in. I’m 5ft 7in and a size 8 to 10. He literally grabbed me here’ — she reaches for the lapels of her shirt — ‘and lifted me off my feet, then threw me on the floor.
‘He snatched the bottle out of my hand, twisted my dressing gown round to hold me down — that’s where all the bruising came from in the photograph shown to the court — and poured this huge bottle of beer over my nose and my mouth, continually and very slowly. I couldn’t breathe. It was filling my lungs. It was in my nose, in my eyes, my hair.’
Lesley called the police. Bailey was arrested and kept in custody for 23 hours.
This week, he was found guilty of assault but cleared of coercive control. Magistrates concluded: ‘We think a lot of the behaviour we heard of was quite normal in a relationship. For example, asking where someone is going is quite a reasonable thing to do.’
He was sentenced to a 24-month community order, during which he must complete 20 rehabilitation activity hours and 100 hours of unpaid work. A non-contact restraining order was also imposed for two years.
Now, Lesley is divorced from Bailey and lives in a small rented home with her daughter, where she has security cameras both in and outside the property, and a fiercely protective dog.
‘When they sentenced him I made the decision I wanted to face him in court. He was in the holding unit. I thought he’d look at me but he just glared straight ahead at the magistrates as he received his sentence. I think he just took the coward’s way out,’ she says.
Asked for comment, Bailey told the Mail: ‘The allegations being made are malicious, fabricated and completely untrue.
‘I have been acquitted by a court of law of all allegations save a one-off spontaneous offence following a verbal argument. I have been punished for this.
‘I have been involved in raising livestock all my life. The discord in our relationship began when Lesley did not appreciate the effort involved and it impeded her party lifestyle.’
Lesley says: ‘I could never forgive myself if I didn’t speak out and he did what he’s done to me to somebody else.
‘I haven’t hidden away, feeling I have something to be ashamed of. I didn’t do anything wrong and can hold my head high. I will not let him destroy me. I made my sister a promise that I would live my life and be happy. I will.’
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk