With the pews of her village church filled by family and friends, Tina Bauld’s funeral came to a close to the sound of the Abba song Dancing Queen.
For a woman who was the life and soul of every gathering, it was a truly fitting tribute.
Earlier in the service her husband, Tom, had shared his favourite memory of the 55-year-old, recalling how on a holiday to Croatia he had returned to their cruise ship from a solo day trip to find Tina leading the crew around the deck dancing the conga.
Others praised her ‘extraordinary sense of fun’, her ‘infectious laughter’ and a smile that ‘lit up a room’. She was, a niece concluded, ‘sunshine in human form’.
All of which made the shadow cast by the circumstances of her sudden, brutal death earlier this year so much harder to bear.
Gregor Bauld (centre front) killed his mother (right) with a kitchen knife
Tom Bauld told the court that his son was ‘dead to me now’ after the death of his wife
Because the person responsible for cutting her life so tragically short was her one and only child, Gregor.
On the morning of Sunday March 3, as Tina prepared to take their dog out for a walk, the 23-year-old appeared armed with a Sabatier kitchen knife with a foot-long blade.
As she shouted ‘he’s got a knife, he’s got a knife’, Bauld chased her out of the front door of their £1million house, across the driveway and onto the road outside.
Even though his mother was defenceless, he then stabbed her multiple times, delivering the fatal blow through her back as she cowered on the ground.
With Bauld’s father holding Tina in his arms and shouting for neighbours to help, it was only a matter of minutes before the emergency services were at the scene in the village of Burbage, Leicestershire.
There, Bauld was arrested without a struggle, telling police his dead mother was a ‘paedophile’ and claiming: ‘She deserved it.’
The accusations were completely baseless.
So why did this young man, a ‘mummy’s boy’ who had enjoyed such a warm and affluent upbringing, wreak such terrible violence against the person who loved him most?
The question went to the heart of Bauld’s two-week trial at Leicester Crown Court.
Blood tests revealed that in the hours before the killing he had taken a cocktail of drugs, including LSD, ketamine and cannabis.
In fact, he had been abusing drugs since his early teenage years. Shortly before the stabbing, his father had found and removed bags of pills from his son.
The prosecution claimed that it was Bauld’s use of these drugs, together with his rage and anger at his parents for having confiscated them, that had driven him to murder.
Referring to his son as he gave evidence, Tom Bauld told the court: ‘He is dead to me now.’
But Bauld, while admitting he had killed his mum, denied the more serious charge, on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
He claimed to have no memory of what happened and ‘took the view he had gone insane’.
His defence was that he suffered from schizophrenia and he claimed to have no memory of what happened, taking the view ‘he had gone insane’. The prosecution did not dispute the diagnosis, but argued that he was driven by drugs or anger.
Aged 16 he had twice tried to commit suicide and in 2021 his parents had to barricade themselves in the kitchen and call police after he made threats against his mother, saying: ‘She’s an alien, I’m going to kill her.’
Months later he was briefly sectioned having suffered a bout of psychosis.
Yesterday, after three days of deliberations, the jury cleared him of the murder charge.
He will be sentenced for manslaughter next month with Judge Tim Spencer KC telling the court that public protection would be at the ‘heart of his thinking’ as the evidence suggested Bauld was a ‘continuing danger’.
He also formally commended police officers involved in the case, which he said was ‘one of the most upsetting and emotional cases any of us in criminal law have been involved in’.
Police attend the Leicestershire home after the brutal stabbing of Tina Bauld in March 2024
The youngest of four sisters raised in Devon, Tina Bauld had a large family – and an even larger circle of friends.
She and her husband Tom, a wealthy company executive 14 years her senior, had their only child in 2001.
Sharing a love of travel, the family enjoyed skiing trips to Europe and holidays around the globe, as well as owning a motor-cruiser moored in Hamble, Hampshire.
At the same time, Tina was a familiar and much-loved figure in Burbage, where she worked as a pharmacy dispenser.
‘Everybody knew her because she worked in the chemist,’ said a local resident. ‘She was really down-to-earth, and didn’t need to work but did.
‘I’d never seen her without a smile on her face, she was always smiling.’
Her son – a ‘quiet’ boy – attended the local primary before progressing aged 11 to the local secondary school.
However, within a couple of years he had gone off the rails, falling in with a ‘bad crowd’.
This initially involved smoking cannabis, but then progressed to Bauld taking a variety of illegal drugs, as well as the anti-anxiety medication Xanax on prescription. Despite this his parents continued to support him, his mother posting a photograph online of a certificate awarded to Bauld to mark his completion of an apprenticeship in logistics.
‘Gregor 18 today,’ she wrote. ‘Starting to make his way making me a proud mum.’
In reality, Bauld’s life had already begun to spiral badly out of control.
While never diagnosed, the court was told that he showed signs of autism as a child and had struggled to fit in at school.
After he had started taking drugs, friends had taken advantage of him because he was always the one with money.
In 2018, he made two suicide attempts, once throwing himself at a car, banging his head on the windscreen, and once by taking an overdose.
By 2021 he had a job, but then started to hear voices in his head.
After he threatened to kill his mother for being an alien in December that year, his father contacted a GP – with his son telling the medic he felt his ‘mum was controlling everything, and he threatened to kill her then himself’.
Bauld was subsequently sectioned in June 2022 and diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis.
But consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Gareth Garrett, who treated Bauld in a secure psychiatric unit in Leicester following the killing and who reviewed his previous medical notes, said the psychosis was a part of his schizophrenia and not a temporary psychosis caused by him taking drugs.
He said that although drugs were involved, he considered it ‘part of what will now be a lifelong illness for this young man…. as a clinician you look back with the benefit of hindsight and say this is all about schizophrenia’ and that while some psychotic episodes were sparked by drugs, Bauld was just as likely to have episodes without having taken drugs due to his underlying mental illness.
Dr Garrett said: ‘Some of these episodes are triggered by drugs. He has those symptoms whether he takes drugs or not.’
Three days before the killing, on Thursday February 29th, Bauld received some good news, telling his parents that he had got a job at a logistics company in Coventry.
But his parents’ delight at what they saw as his ‘greatest achievement’ would be short lived.
A police officer at the property in Burbage, Leicestershire, following the incident on March 3
In the early hours of the following morning Mr Bauld heard his son ‘howling’ in his bedroom. When he went up to investigate he found him snorting ketamine off a saucer using the plastic casing from a pen.
Bauld was so affected by what he had taken he had to be put to bed. His father then confiscated a bag containing more drugs, hiding them in his own room.
Challenged about his behaviour on Saturday morning, Bauld promised his parents that he would not take any more drugs. It was a promise he would break within hours.
On the same day, Bauld met with two old friends from school. They were planning a holiday together, with Bauld driving, but he told them he was going to pull out.
Bauld insulted his friends, calling them ‘wastemen’ and ‘dossers’.
He later messaged to apologise, telling one of them: ‘Dude, I’m broken. I need help. It’s not fair releasing it on you guys. I’m sorry, man.’
He went on: ‘I’ve had enough. I’m suicidal. I just have an illness from the world.’
Bauld also said he needed a four-month ‘drugs break’ away from his friends.
The second friend told the court that Bauld had been having difficulties with his parents.
He said they were selling their home and that Bauld had to find his own place. He said that he was also unhappy about having his drugs confiscated.
The witness added that Bauld had been fearful that his parents were threatening to send him back to hospital, saying: ‘He seemed frightened.’
Having spent the Saturday night in his bedroom, at 10am the following morning Bauld’s father saw him on the driveway looking for something in his car, raising his suspicions.
When Bauld then went for a shower his father checked the pockets of his tracksuit bottoms, finding two plastic bags containing tablets, which he also confiscated. He told his son that he had flushed away the pills.
‘I told him I’d thrown them away,’ Mr Bauld told the court. ‘He was screaming at me: ‘They’re for my anxiety – you don’t know how it makes me feel. I won’t get through today’. ‘He became more and more aggressive.’
Mr Bauld said that he had offered to take him to the doctors to get him help.
With his son ‘banging around’ upstairs, it was then that Tina decided to take the dog for a walk, getting his lead from the boot room, next to the kitchen.
But seconds later she started shouting, before running out of the house chased by her son, wielding the large kitchen knife.
Mr Bauld said: ‘She ran into the street. A couple of times he stabbed her, then she panicked and cowered on the floor and I think he put the knife in again.’
He said his son did not say a thing throughout the entire attack.
CCTV shown to the jury showed Mr Bauld shouting: ‘Run! Run! Run! Run, Tina. Police. Police. Police. Help!’
But it was too late and despite medics performing emergency surgery at the scene, Tina was pronounced dead soon after.
The court heard that even after the killing, Bauld had continued to hear voices and would continue to be a danger to others, and himself, with or without illicit drug use.
Floral tributes for Christine Bauld left at the family home in Burbage, Leicestershire, in March
Hearings had deemed Bauld fit to stand trial, but consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Garrett said that process – into which he had an input – had found Bauld to be ‘borderline fit to plead’.
In her closing speech, Mary Prior KC, defending, said that during his evidence Bauld’s father said he ‘wished his son was dead’.
She added: ‘He’s the man who had to stand there while his son killed the woman he loved. ‘Can you imagine the trauma, and how that must have felt?
‘He’s dead to me now’, he said. And who can blame him?’
She added: ‘We know how awful this case is. Even for those of us that do this job week in, week out, it will stay. There is no winner here. There is a very great loser, a wonderful woman who is no longer with him.’
