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World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 1 - John Sweeney - Full Episode

August 12, 2021 / 44:59

This episode covers the gruesome murders of Melissa Halstead and Paula Fields by John Sweeney, a violent domestic abuser. It discusses Sweeney's history of violence, his relationship with Halstead, and the eventual discovery of her dismembered body in Rotterdam. The episode also details Sweeney's subsequent attack on Delia Balmer, who survived and later provided crucial information to the police.

Melissa Halstead, an American photographer, was murdered by her British boyfriend, John Sweeney, in 1989. After a tumultuous relationship marked by violence, Sweeney dismembered her body and disposed of it in a canal. The investigation into her murder was complicated by the lack of identifying features.

In 2001, Sweeney killed Paula Fields, whose remains were also found dismembered. The police linked both murders to Sweeney, leading to a joint investigation between British and Dutch authorities.

Delia Balmer, another victim of Sweeney, survived a brutal attack and later revealed Sweeney's confession about Halstead's murder. This information was pivotal in building a case against him.

Ultimately, Sweeney was convicted of murder and received a life sentence, with police believing his artwork may hold clues to additional victims.

TL;DR

John Sweeney murdered Melissa Halstead and Paula Fields, showcasing a history of domestic violence and dismemberment of victims.

Episode

44:59
00:00:06
- NARRATOR: 2nd November, 1989, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
00:00:10
32-year-old Melissa Halstead phones her mother in Ohio.
00:00:15
- MELISSA: I just called to wish you a happy birthday,
00:00:17
have a good time and take care of yourself.
00:00:19
Goodbye, I love you.
00:00:21
- NARRATOR: It was her last call home.
00:00:24
Six months later, her headless torso was found
00:00:27
dumped in a bag in the Westersingel Canal, Rotterdam.
00:00:31
Her hands were also missing.
00:00:34
- STEVE: The fact that he can kill women is one thing.
00:00:37
But then to dismember the bodies and remove body parts
00:00:40
that even to this day have still not been recovered
00:00:43
is just a horrendous and shocking thing to do.
00:00:46
- NARRATOR: Melissa's murderer was her British boyfriend,
00:00:48
33-year-old John Sweeney,
00:00:51
otherwise known as the Scalp Hunter.
00:00:53
After brutally dismembering her, he created macabre pictures
00:00:57
about the killing.
00:00:59
- LOUIS: You look at his artwork
00:01:00
and it speaks for itself
00:01:02
as to the depth of his very grotesque fantasies,
00:01:07
and that tells you what's going on inside of him.
00:01:10
- NARRATOR: In the ten years that followed, back in London,
00:01:13
he brutally dismembered a second woman,
00:01:16
and subjected another to a violent campaign of assault.
00:01:19
- DELIA: I saw my small finger fly through the air,
00:01:22
and then I thought, "That's it, I've had enough, I want to die.
00:01:26
I don't want to live in this pain."
00:01:28
- NARRATOR: Driven by jealousy, he maimed and even held
00:01:31
his so-called lovers prisoner in their own homes.
00:01:34
He hacked two women to death in a moment of rage.
00:01:38
That makes John Sweeney one of the world's most evil killers.
00:01:42
- ♪
00:01:57
♪♪
00:02:03
- NARRATOR: When 33-year-old Melissa Halstead's body
00:02:06
was found in Rotterdam's Westersingel Canal
00:02:09
on May the 3rd, 1990,
00:02:12
police at the time were mystified as to the identity
00:02:15
of this unknown woman.
00:02:17
- No one knew who she was.
00:02:20
Obviously, it was a female, but there's no head,
00:02:23
there's no hands, so there's no dental records
00:02:26
to be found, there are no fingerprint records to be found.
00:02:30
Remember, this is a long time before DNA really became
00:02:35
significant in the identification of a body.
00:02:39
- NARRATOR: Former detective inspector Steve Smith
00:02:42
would later investigate the murder
00:02:44
for London's Metropolitan Police.
00:02:48
- Identification was impossible.
00:02:51
What they could say was that it was the body
00:02:52
of a...a young, white female.
00:02:55
In around late 20's, early 30's.
00:02:58
She was trussed up with rope,
00:03:00
but there was really nothing else to go on.
00:03:02
- NARRATOR: Eighteen years later the police finally identify
00:03:06
the body as Melissa's by DNA during a cold case review.
00:03:11
It was then they linked it to a strikingly similar killing
00:03:14
of 31-year-old Paula Fields in December 2000.
00:03:18
She'd also been found savagely dismembered
00:03:21
and dumped in bags in Regents Canal, London, England.
00:03:26
- ELIZABETH: When you dismember somebody,
00:03:28
you are essentially obliterating them,
00:03:30
you are cutting them into pieces,
00:03:32
and that expresses an anger towards the victim,
00:03:35
that they are something that should be destroyed,
00:03:38
that they're not worthy.
00:03:40
- NARRATOR: The chilling common thread found between them?
00:03:43
They both had a relationship with London-based John Sweeney.
00:03:47
For the first time, British and Dutch polices forces
00:03:51
launched a joint European murder inquiry
00:03:54
into the suspected killer.
00:03:56
- STEVE: This was a violent, controlling individual
00:03:59
who in every relationship with women throughout his life,
00:04:03
he had behaved in the same reprehensible way,
00:04:06
just exploding in fits of rage and violence.
00:04:09
Culminating in murder.
00:04:13
- NARRATOR: Those who knew the happy-go-lucky
00:04:15
bohemian carpenter were horrified to discover a man
00:04:19
with a long history of domestic violence against women.
00:04:23
- Sweeney's attacks on women
00:04:25
that he was in relationships with
00:04:27
put him in the category of domestic abuser,
00:04:29
and domestic abuse is not taken as seriously
00:04:32
as it should be.
00:04:34
This really, really frustrates me
00:04:35
about this kind of case,
00:04:37
because there's a failure to see how dangerous
00:04:39
a serial domestic abuser is.
00:04:43
- NARRATOR: This killer's story begins
00:04:44
on the 13th of October, 1956.
00:04:48
John Patrick Sweeney was born in Kirkdale, Liverpool,
00:04:52
in the northwest of England.
00:04:54
He had a brother and a sister.
00:04:56
After spending his early years in Merseyside,
00:04:59
the family moved 14 miles further north,
00:05:02
to Skelmersdale, in Lancashire.
00:05:04
- STEVE: There was some evidence that we discovered
00:05:06
that his father was violent, and John Sweeney did receive
00:05:11
beatings in his youth, and I think this would have
00:05:14
possibly made him resentful of any sort of authority.
00:05:17
- ELIZABETH: He comes from quite a working-class background
00:05:20
so there's this idea that men should be tough,
00:05:22
they should be stoic, they should be resilient,
00:05:25
so the kind of stuff he's being exposed to
00:05:28
during his childhood is kind of teaching him something
00:05:30
about women; who they are, how they should behave,
00:05:33
and that they are inferior to men.
00:05:37
- NARRATOR: Young Sweeney had a creative mind.
00:05:41
He developed a passion for drawing and painting.
00:05:44
At the age of 15, he considered art school,
00:05:47
but instead trained as a carpenter.
00:05:51
- ELIZABETH: He wanted to be an artist,
00:05:53
but he ended up going into carpentry and joinery,
00:05:56
because I think there was that expectation
00:05:58
that the young men--young working-class men--were not
00:06:01
going to pursue those kind of artistic, creative endeavors,
00:06:04
so I think there's always that frustration in him,
00:06:06
that he has to be a particular type of man.
00:06:10
- NARRATOR: As a teenager, the man's man Sweeney
00:06:13
showed a capacity for extreme violence.
00:06:16
This resulted in a number of run-ins with the authorities.
00:06:20
- STEVE: Sweeney had convictions from his teenage years
00:06:23
because he was always showing violent tendencies.
00:06:27
I certainly remember that one of his earlier convictions
00:06:30
was involved in an affray outside a fish-and-chip shop.
00:06:35
He got involved in an altercation
00:06:36
with some other youths,
00:06:38
and I believe there was certainly an axe
00:06:40
that was brandished.
00:06:41
I think it was by luck, really, that no one got seriously hurt.
00:06:45
So he was on the radar of the police
00:06:46
from a young age.
00:06:49
- NARRATOR: By 1974, the wayward Sweeney
00:06:51
appeared to settle down,
00:06:53
marrying at the tender age of just 18.
00:06:57
He and his young wife, Anne, lived in Skelmersdale.
00:07:01
- GEOFFREY: They had two children, a boy and a girl.
00:07:03
It's a very violent relationship.
00:07:06
He beats her. He hits her regularly.
00:07:09
- ELIZABETH: A lot of his violence focuses around
00:07:11
the domestic setting, he's violent towards
00:07:13
the women in his life, and there are criminal incidents
00:07:16
that are connected to that.
00:07:18
- NARRATOR: Sweeney reportedly threw bricks through the window
00:07:22
and abused the family's pet turtles at home.
00:07:25
But it was his wife who suffered the most.
00:07:28
- Sweeney had a proprietary view of the different women
00:07:31
he was involved in in his life.
00:07:33
In other words, he thought he owned the women,
00:07:35
and as a result he was extremely controlling,
00:07:38
he wanted to know everything they were doing,
00:07:40
he wanted to control all of their movements,
00:07:42
and if something is done that's out of his control
00:07:46
or something that he doesn't want, he explodes,
00:07:49
in a very violent way.
00:07:52
- NARRATOR: After just five years of marriage,
00:07:54
Sweeney's wife decided she'd had enough,
00:07:57
and divorced him in 1979.
00:08:00
But the ever-manipulative Sweeney persuaded her
00:08:03
to make a fresh start with him once again.
00:08:07
- STEVE: Amazingly, they remarried.
00:08:09
It was about 1981, but unfortunately,
00:08:12
after a very short period of time,
00:08:13
the second marriage also went sour, again,
00:08:17
entirely due to Sweeney's
00:08:18
unreasonable and violent behavior.
00:08:21
- NARRATOR: The same old sadistic Sweeney
00:08:23
had reappeared once again.
00:08:26
One evening, though, the regular domestic violence
00:08:29
he inflicted on his wife escalated to new heights.
00:08:34
- STEVE: One occasion, she'd had a major operation,
00:08:38
and Sweeney got drunk one night,
00:08:40
and he was so violent towards her when he attacked her,
00:08:43
that he assaulted her and he had actually burst
00:08:45
her operation scar.
00:08:48
- NARRATOR: Enough was enough for Sweeney's wife,
00:08:51
and once again, she ended their relationship.
00:08:54
John Sweeney finally left the family home.
00:08:57
However, one day, his ex-wife, Anne, was with her neighbor,
00:09:01
when she suddenly heard noises from her own house next door.
00:09:06
- STEVE: She chose to call the police.
00:09:07
When an officer turned up and helped search the house,
00:09:10
in her bedroom, Sweeney jumped out of a wardrobe
00:09:13
with an axe and a knife,
00:09:15
stating that he just wanted to surprise her,
00:09:17
so one can only imagine what sort of surprise
00:09:20
that would have been if the police hadn't been present.
00:09:23
- ELIZABETH: He intended to do serious harm to his wife.
00:09:26
I think he actually intended to kill her,
00:09:28
because she'd slipped out of his control
00:09:31
and he wanted that back.
00:09:34
- NARRATOR: He was arrested but later released
00:09:36
without charge, on agreement that he'd stay away
00:09:39
from his wife.
00:09:40
She divorced him once again
00:09:42
and moved 150 miles south with their two children
00:09:46
to Northampton.
00:09:48
Sweeney also decided it was time for a change,
00:09:52
leaving his hometown of Skelmersdale,
00:09:54
where he was under the watchful eye of the police.
00:09:58
- STEVE: He went off the radar for a while,
00:09:59
he went looking for work abroad
00:10:01
because there was more money, more opportunity,
00:10:04
casual work was easy to come by.
00:10:06
So he certainly traveled to Germany,
00:10:09
and probably France and the Netherlands,
00:10:11
but his actual movements are really quite sketchy.
00:10:15
- NARRATOR: But before long, 26-year-old John Sweeney
00:10:18
would be back to his old ways.
00:10:21
- GEOFFREY: What I believe, and absolutely believe,
00:10:24
is he was, in the end, a predator looking for victims,
00:10:28
looking for a woman who was vulnerable,
00:10:30
looking for someone whom he could entice,
00:10:34
someone he could...draw into the spider's web
00:10:38
of his control.
00:10:40
- NARRATOR: Soon, he'd ensnare another victim on his travels,
00:10:43
another unsuspecting woman he could control and abuse.
00:10:48
This time, though,
00:10:49
he'd return to his passion for drawing,
00:10:51
and his gruesome artwork would reveal more sinister plans.
00:10:57
1986. London, England.
00:11:02
30-year-old wife abuser John Sweeney was divorced
00:11:06
and living more than 60 miles away from his family.
00:11:10
Now, he's set his sights on finding another woman
00:11:13
he could entice into his home.
00:11:17
Whilst working as a carpenter on the set of a photoshoot,
00:11:21
he met Melissa Halstead, an American photographer.
00:11:26
- ELIZABETH: She was a model, she was a really stunning
00:11:28
young woman,
00:11:29
and she meets Sweeney,
00:11:31
and you'd think, "What on earth did she see in this guy?"
00:11:34
But actually, when you look at people like John Sweeney,
00:11:36
they are very quick to suck you in
00:11:38
and make you feel very special,
00:11:40
and Melissa was quite vulnerable
00:11:42
'cause she's in a country that she doesn't know,
00:11:44
she hasn't got that strong support network
00:11:46
of friends and family around her,
00:11:48
and she is, in essence, the ideal victim for Sweeney,
00:11:52
because he's able to isolate her.
00:11:56
- NARRATOR: Shortly after they met,
00:11:58
Melissa agreed to set up home with Sweeney in North London.
00:12:03
- ELIZABETH: The initial relationship between
00:12:05
Melissa and Sweeney,
00:12:06
it would've been full of charm and romance,
00:12:09
he would've swept her off her feet,
00:12:11
because that's how abusers operate.
00:12:13
They come in as this knight in shining armor,
00:12:15
they make themselves indispensable to you.
00:12:19
- NARRATOR: Soon, though, the charm melted away,
00:12:22
and John Sweeney, the domestic abuser,
00:12:25
revealed his true self.
00:12:27
- This relationship was quite quick to turn nasty,
00:12:31
and the following year, he was already assaulting her,
00:12:34
and I think by that point, he chipped away so expertly
00:12:38
at her self-esteem and at her confidence,
00:12:41
that she finds herself in this impossible situation.
00:12:45
- NARRATOR: Melissa's family in Ohio, in the United States,
00:12:48
were becoming concerned about this new relationship
00:12:51
that she'd been drawn into.
00:12:53
Her sister paid a visit to London
00:12:55
and didn't like what she discovered.
00:12:58
- STEVE: She took an instant dislike to Sweeney.
00:13:00
Some drugs were found in Sweeney and Melissa's flat,
00:13:04
and this really added to her view that Sweeney
00:13:07
was not a good individual at all for her sister to be with.
00:13:12
In fact, there was one conversation that Melissa had,
00:13:15
in which she confided in her that if anything ever happened
00:13:17
to her, then it would be Sweeney that had done it.
00:13:20
- NARRATOR: And sure enough, within 12 months
00:13:22
of moving in with Melissa,
00:13:24
serial abuser Sweeney came onto the police radar
00:13:28
once again.
00:13:29
In 1987, he was reprimanded twice by the authorities
00:13:34
for violent assaults on his girlfriend.
00:13:37
- One of the assaults involved Sweeney throwing a chair at her.
00:13:41
Causing injury, I think to her legs,
00:13:43
and then on another occasion,
00:13:45
he punched her, causing severe bruising.
00:13:48
- NARRATOR: On both occasions, Sweeney was slapped on the wrist
00:13:51
with a fine, he never received a custodial sentence.
00:13:57
- ELIZABETH: Domestic abuse doesn't have a particularly
00:13:58
high status as a crime,
00:14:01
nowhere near as high as it should be,
00:14:03
so we will often find that men convicted of domestic abuse,
00:14:07
the sentences they receive are quite lenient,
00:14:09
they will get let off, they'll be free to harm
00:14:11
other people.
00:14:13
- NARRATOR: Tragically for Melissa,
00:14:15
the abusive Sweeney would disappear off the police radar
00:14:18
once again.
00:14:20
When her work visa ran out in the summer of 1988,
00:14:24
the couple decided to move to Vienna, in Austria.
00:14:28
- STEVE: Sweeney and Melissa were in Austria together,
00:14:31
and for a time-being, everything would seem fine.
00:14:33
Work was good, they were making a living,
00:14:35
and they were renting a property in the center of Vienna.
00:14:39
- NARRATOR: But the romance of a new city
00:14:41
would soon wear thin.
00:14:43
One night, after a drunken argument,
00:14:45
Sweeney chased Melissa with a hammer,
00:14:48
and hit her over the head.
00:14:50
- A hammer! I mean, not just the fists,
00:14:54
a--a proper blunt instrument.
00:14:56
He attacks her ruthlessly,
00:14:58
and is indeed taken by the police
00:15:01
and thrown into jail.
00:15:04
- NARRATOR: Melissa was rushed to hospital
00:15:06
with a fractured skull,
00:15:07
and this time, Sweeney was jailed for assault.
00:15:11
In prison, he built up a seething resentment
00:15:14
towards his girlfriend for his predicament.
00:15:17
Here, Sweeney the artist began sketching again,
00:15:20
with terrifying results.
00:15:23
- STEVE: Some of the drawings and the pictures
00:15:25
that Sweeney had done were-- apart from very graphic
00:15:28
and very gruesome-- were confessional.
00:15:31
- We are talking about an incredibly warped individual
00:15:36
with an imagination that is so violent,
00:15:40
that is so depraved,
00:15:42
it's very difficult to actually describe.
00:15:46
- NARRATOR: The most alarming sketch he drew
00:15:48
in his prison cell was one he sarcastically dubbed
00:15:52
"A romantic weekend for two in Austria."
00:15:55
It was anything but romantic.
00:15:58
- LOUIS: One of the things psychologists use
00:16:00
when they evaluate somebody is ask them to draw pictures,
00:16:03
because the individual in his drawings,
00:16:06
are projecting what's going on internally into his artwork,
00:16:11
and I think the same could be said with Sweeney.
00:16:13
If you look at what he drew, it's an x-ray of his mind,
00:16:17
it's exactly what he was thinking about.
00:16:19
You see that he was thinking about killing and violence.
00:16:24
- NARRATOR: Melissa, meanwhile, was on the road to recovery,
00:16:27
blissfully unaware of Sweeney's dark drawings.
00:16:30
She took pity on her abuser, and in February 1989,
00:16:34
made an unexpected move.
00:16:37
- Due to the legal system in place in Austria at the time,
00:16:40
it was possible for a victim to petition the judge
00:16:43
and effectively ask for clemency,
00:16:46
which is what Melissa did.
00:16:48
And the judge, on hearing her pleas for mercy,
00:16:50
released him.
00:16:52
- NARRATOR: Sweeney was ordered to leave Vienna,
00:16:54
so the couple hit the road once again,
00:16:57
traveling 700 miles northwest
00:16:59
to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.
00:17:02
- They rented a flat in the center of Amsterdam,
00:17:05
very close to the central railway station,
00:17:08
where they stayed for the whole of 1989.
00:17:12
- NARRATOR: In November 1989,
00:17:14
Melissa phoned her family in Ohio.
00:17:17
No one was in, and she left a message.
00:17:21
- MELISSA: Hi, Mom, it's Melissa,
00:17:22
I just called to wish you happy birthday.
00:17:24
Have a good time, and take care of yourself.
00:17:27
Goodbye, I love you.
00:17:30
- NARRATOR: It was her last call home.
00:17:35
Six months later, at the end of April 1990,
00:17:38
Sweeney exploded into a rage from which there was no return.
00:17:44
- GEOFFREY: One of his fantasies is dismembering female bodies.
00:17:49
It's horrifying to think of.
00:17:51
In this case, he kills Melissa.
00:17:54
We don't know for sure exactly how.
00:17:57
I suspect with violence of tremendous kind,
00:18:01
but we don't know because he removed her head
00:18:04
and her hands.
00:18:06
He broke her spine in half,
00:18:09
collapsing the body,
00:18:12
and put it into a, effectively, big, black bag.
00:18:16
- NARRATOR: Sweeney then made a sharp exit
00:18:18
from Amsterdam to avoid the finger of suspicion.
00:18:22
He took Melissa's dismembered body with him
00:18:26
nearly 50 miles south, to the Dutch city of Rotterdam.
00:18:30
- STEVE: What we still don't know is how did he transport
00:18:32
Melissa from Amsterdam to Rotterdam,
00:18:36
which is a fair distance.
00:18:38
He was a big lad, Sweeney, I mean, he was strong,
00:18:41
and he could've got a train or a coach.
00:18:43
If he keeps the bag with him, it's possible to do,
00:18:46
so we figured that's probably what he did.
00:18:48
- NARRATOR: Once in Rotterdam, Sweeney made his way
00:18:51
to the Westersingel Canal,
00:18:53
which runs through the heart of the city.
00:18:56
- STEVE: Obviously, when it was quiet, maybe
00:18:57
under the cover of darkness-- he chose his moment just...
00:19:00
slipped his bag into the canal, quite easy to do.
00:19:04
- GEOFFREY: She's simply dropped into a canal
00:19:07
and left.
00:19:09
I think it is a despicable crime.
00:19:12
Not just the matter of the murder,
00:19:15
nor indeed just the matter of the dismemberment,
00:19:18
but it's the denial of itself, the denial of the individual,
00:19:22
the desecration of life
00:19:25
that makes it so poisonous and so evil.
00:19:30
- NARRATOR: Soon, though, the depths
00:19:32
of the Westersingel Canal gave up its dark secret.
00:19:35
On May the 3rd, the bag containing Melissa's torso
00:19:39
was spotted by a passerby and reported to the police.
00:19:43
They opened it, making the gruesome discovery.
00:19:48
The authorities were perplexed. Who was this young woman?
00:19:52
- She was missing the key body parts that you need
00:19:55
for identification, so--there was no head,
00:19:58
so dental records couldn't be used,
00:20:01
her hands were missing so fingerprints couldn't be taken.
00:20:05
- STEVE: There was a formal police investigation,
00:20:08
and extensive inquiries were obviously made
00:20:10
into the possible identification of the victim,
00:20:12
but unfortunately, all came to nothing.
00:20:15
- NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Melissa's family were concerned
00:20:18
as the phone calls home had stopped.
00:20:20
They hadn't spoken to her for more than a year.
00:20:23
It was completely out of character.
00:20:27
- STEVE: They did make inquiries with the Amsterdam police,
00:20:31
but they really couldn't provide much information.
00:20:34
They didn't know where Melissa had been staying,
00:20:36
they certainly didn't know where Sweeney was.
00:20:39
So really, from the Halstead family's perspective,
00:20:43
it was a very worrying but a very frustrating time for them.
00:20:48
- NARRATOR: Melissa's family reported her missing
00:20:50
in Amsterdam,
00:20:52
but Rotterdam came under a different police district.
00:20:55
This meant that the authorities didn't link her disappearance
00:20:59
with the inquiry into the headless torso.
00:21:02
- After a fairly short space of time,
00:21:04
the investigation was closed
00:21:07
and the body was interred in a public cemetery
00:21:10
in Rotterdam, and that's where it remained.
00:21:14
- NARRATOR: Before long, the dangerously free spirit,
00:21:17
Sweeney, was on the road once again.
00:21:20
He'd got away with murder,
00:21:22
and soon the killer and domestic abuser
00:21:24
was looking for his next victim.
00:21:29
Camden, northwest London, 1991.
00:21:34
34-year-old John Sweeney met 40-year-old nurse
00:21:38
Delia Balmer in their local pub.
00:21:44
- DELIA: He asked me if I'd like a beer,
00:21:46
and he told me he'd traveled back and forth to Germany
00:21:49
to find work and because I love traveling and...
00:21:52
I thought, "Oh, he's a traveler,
00:21:53
he's the kind of guy I would like."
00:21:57
- NARRATOR: After their first encounter, weeks later,
00:22:00
Delia bumped into Sweeney once again, on the street.
00:22:04
- DELIA: He asked me out, and I says, "Oh, no, I'm too busy,"
00:22:07
and then I felt terrible, because I'm silly and stupid,
00:22:10
and...I thought, "Oh, he might think I'm awful and thing,"
00:22:13
and I wrote him a letter in the end, I gave it to him
00:22:15
and started something I should not have started.
00:22:18
- NARRATOR: Before she knew it, the killer Sweeney
00:22:21
had swept Delia off her feet and they were dating.
00:22:25
He laid on the charm, fixing her broken window.
00:22:28
- I had nobody to help me with anything ever,
00:22:30
and I thought, "Oh, he's doing this for me,"
00:22:33
and, uh, then he started bringing flowers and chocolates
00:22:38
and then in the end, he ended up moving in with me.
00:22:43
- NARRATOR: Sweeney put his carpentry skills to good use,
00:22:46
making stools, tables, shelving, and even a bed
00:22:50
that Delia couldn't afford to buy herself.
00:22:54
- ELIZABETH: You've got the classic pattern of behavior
00:22:56
with a coercively controlling abuser here.
00:22:59
He's this knight in shining armor character,
00:23:02
he makes himself indispensable to her,
00:23:05
and it doesn't take long, though, for that veneer to crack
00:23:08
and for the real Sweeney to shine through.
00:23:11
- DELIA: He made new kitchen cupboards,
00:23:14
and the next day he came along
00:23:15
and deliberately scratched the top,
00:23:17
I says, "What did you do that for?"
00:23:20
I said, "They were nice, and look, why do you do that?"
00:23:22
"Oh, it's nothing."
00:23:24
So, little things, they mounted up, mounted up,
00:23:27
and then it got worse, and, uh...
00:23:31
I wanted to get rid of him, but I was afraid to ask.
00:23:35
And I thought, "What am I gonna do?
00:23:36
I want him out of here."
00:23:39
- NARRATOR: After more than two years of threatening behavior,
00:23:42
in December 1993,
00:23:44
Delia finally built up the confidence to ask Sweeney
00:23:47
to leave.
00:23:49
He agreed but kept on putting it off.
00:23:51
In the meantime, his controlling behavior continued.
00:23:55
- I couldn't go anywhere, he'd always go with me.
00:23:58
We'd go to the pub together, we did everything together.
00:24:01
I knew I was in trouble,
00:24:03
and I didn't know how to get out of it.
00:24:06
- It gives you s good insight
00:24:07
into Sweeney's behavior with women.
00:24:10
Once you got into his orbit,
00:24:13
he was totally controlling of you,
00:24:15
he just wanted to dominate every aspect of you
00:24:19
and terrorize you, and this gave
00:24:22
a great deal of erotic gratification to Sweeney,
00:24:26
this was arousing to him, to terrify somebody
00:24:30
and to have them totally under your control and dominance.
00:24:34
- NARRATOR: In early May, 1994,
00:24:37
Delia managed to escape his clutches
00:24:39
and went out with a friend for the day.
00:24:42
When she returned, though,
00:24:44
Sweeney flew into a jealous rage,
00:24:47
tying Delia to their bed and threatening her
00:24:49
with a gun and a knife.
00:24:52
- DELIA: "If you scream, I'll cut your tongue out,"
00:24:53
I think he said.
00:24:55
I was lying there, tied up, and he said,
00:24:57
"And I suppose you wonder what happened
00:24:59
to my American girlfriend, Melissa?"
00:25:01
And I thought, "Well, why does he ask me this now?"
00:25:05
And he said, "We had a room in Amsterdam, I went in,
00:25:09
"there was two Germans there with her, I killed them all.
00:25:13
"I didn't know what to do with the bodies,
00:25:14
"I sat with them for three days,
00:25:16
"on the third day I cut them up, and I put them in bags
00:25:19
and I threw them in the canal."
00:25:22
- NARRATOR: Delia now knew the terrifying truth.
00:25:25
She'd been living with a killer.
00:25:27
And now he had her as his hostage.
00:25:31
- I knew there was no way of trying to get away.
00:25:36
I knew--it was as if he could read my mind.
00:25:40
I didn't dare think of doing anything,
00:25:42
and I knew better not to,
00:25:44
because he was very quick and if I tried anything,
00:25:50
I'd probably have ended up cut up or whatever.
00:25:53
- LOUIS: I think it's terrorizing.
00:25:55
He's basically saying, "If you don't listen
00:25:56
"to absolutely everything I say, I'm gonna kill you
00:25:59
like I killed the other person," and it's just terrifying.
00:26:03
What Sweeney did with the women is,
00:26:05
he wanted to break their mind,
00:26:08
so that he could control absolutely everything,
00:26:11
their emotion, their behavior, everything.
00:26:14
- NARRATOR: After a week being held hostage,
00:26:16
Delia was finally released to go back to work.
00:26:20
- STEVE: Throughout the summer of 1994, Delia and Sweeney
00:26:23
did stay together in the same flat, her flat.
00:26:27
But Sweeney was playing games.
00:26:29
He continually told her that he was going to leave,
00:26:31
and then he would leave, he'd come back,
00:26:33
and this went on for months.
00:26:35
- NARRATOR: In July, Delia sought help
00:26:37
from a woman's refuge.
00:26:39
The police escorted her home to her flat
00:26:42
while Sweeney was out.
00:26:44
She told them about his macabre drawings
00:26:47
and his confession to Melissa's murder.
00:26:50
- DELIA: I said, "Look, he was in Amsterdam
00:26:52
"with his girlfriend and he cut up his girlfriend
00:26:55
and the two Germans."
00:26:57
They said, "Oh, come on, now, he's just trying to scare you."
00:27:00
And I thought, "Oh, yeah, sure,
00:27:02
just what I thought you would say."
00:27:03
Well, they didn't take that,
00:27:05
and then they didn't look at the drawings.
00:27:08
- NARRATOR: Sweeney finally moved out
00:27:09
at the beginning of November,
00:27:12
so Delia seized her chance and changed her locks.
00:27:15
Sweeney was enraged when he discovered this.
00:27:19
On Friday, the 11th of November, he broke in and launched
00:27:22
a surprise attack by ramming his fingers down her throat.
00:27:27
- DELIA: The pain was excruciating.
00:27:29
Then, he took his fingers out, he held his fingers up,
00:27:31
he says, "You bit me!"
00:27:34
His fingers were covered in blood.
00:27:36
And I opened my mouth and large clots of blood,
00:27:40
about the size of a tablespoon,
00:27:42
spilled out of my mouth onto the floor.
00:27:45
I said, "It's not your blood, you've damaged me inside."
00:27:51
And then he dragged me up and took me to the front room.
00:27:54
- NARRATOR: The next day, Delia managed to escape
00:27:57
to a police station, but when she was escorted home,
00:28:00
Sweeney was nowhere to be seen.
00:28:03
The following day, the determined abuser
00:28:05
attacked her as she left home,
00:28:08
and forced her back into her flat.
00:28:10
When Delia missed an appointment to meet a friend,
00:28:13
the police were alerted and officers called
00:28:16
at Delia's door.
00:28:18
- DELIA: I went to the door, he followed behind,
00:28:20
and just out of my mouth, there was the policeman there,
00:28:24
the police female there, I said, "Help me!"
00:28:28
and I rushed out of the door and down the street.
00:28:32
- ELIZABETH: What we see in the second attack
00:28:34
is an escalation in the level of violence that Sweeney
00:28:37
is prepared to use to take back control.
00:28:40
Um, Delia nearly had her tongue ripped out,
00:28:42
and I think he possibly would have killed her
00:28:45
in this second attack,
00:28:46
had her friend not called the police
00:28:48
and they turned up at the property.
00:28:52
- NARRATOR: When police search Delia's flat,
00:28:54
behind her bath panel, they found a mysterious bag.
00:28:58
In it were tools showing Sweeney's murderous intentions.
00:29:02
- Inside the holdall was a tarpaulin, masking tape,
00:29:07
uh, surgical gloves, and masks,
00:29:10
and also lengths of rope.
00:29:12
And I would describe the holdall and its contents
00:29:15
as a killer's kit bag.
00:29:17
But unfortunately, they didn't realize
00:29:19
the significance of what these items could really be.
00:29:23
- NARRATOR: Sweeney was arrested and held on remand
00:29:25
in Pentonville Prison for a week.
00:29:28
He was released on condition that he'd return
00:29:30
to his parents' home in Skelmersdale,
00:29:33
in the north of England, 200 miles away from Delia.
00:29:37
But on the 22nd of December,
00:29:39
he broke his bail conditions when he once again
00:29:43
started staking out her London home.
00:29:46
- This one night, there was no one on the street,
00:29:50
it was the darkest day of the year...
00:29:53
- NARRATOR: As usual, Delia propped open her front door
00:29:56
with a brick, then went back down her steps
00:29:59
to pick up her bike.
00:30:01
- I was halfway up the stairs with the bicycle.
00:30:03
I kept looking from side to side,
00:30:06
wondering if he was hiding.
00:30:08
Then I looked right, and there his face was.
00:30:13
I quickly kicked the brick and let the door shut.
00:30:18
I thought, "I've got to face him out here,
00:30:20
"if he gets inside there with me,
00:30:22
he's gonna cut me to bits."
00:30:24
- NARRATOR: Sweeney pulled out and axe and swung it
00:30:27
at Delia's arms.
00:30:28
The killer then reached for a knife.
00:30:32
- DELIA: He cut his palm,
00:30:33
and he says, "You fucking bitch!"
00:30:36
Then he stabbed me through the breast into the lung.
00:30:39
Then he stabbed me in the thigh.
00:30:42
Then he swung the axe, and he took my finger
00:30:44
and he...got the knuckles of the other two,
00:30:48
and I saw my finger fly through the air, to next door.
00:30:52
- NARRATOR: Delia threw her bike on top of herself
00:30:55
to protect her from the blows.
00:30:57
The noise of the axe crashing down on the bike
00:30:59
brought a neighbor outside.
00:31:01
He beats Sweeney with a baseball bat
00:31:03
and the killer fled into the night.
00:31:06
- She has the forethought to kick the brick away
00:31:11
so that the door to her flat slams shut.
00:31:15
Had she not done that, she would almost certainly
00:31:18
have lost her life.
00:31:20
- NARRATOR: Delia was rushed to hospital,
00:31:22
she had two broken arms, two stab wounds
00:31:25
in the thigh and chest, a severed little finger,
00:31:28
and a punctured lung.
00:31:30
She was given 19 units of blood as surgeons fought
00:31:33
to save her life.
00:31:35
Psychologically, though, Delia felt defeated.
00:31:39
- DELIA: I wasn't fighting for my life,
00:31:41
I didn't want to live,
00:31:43
the medical lot were fighting for my life, I wanted to die.
00:31:47
I didn't care anymore, I wanted to be dead.
00:31:53
- NARRATOR: Before the police could find him,
00:31:55
Sweeney went on the run.
00:31:58
Fleeing 65 miles north, to Northampton,
00:32:02
then on to his hometown of Skelmersdale, then he vanished.
00:32:07
- STEVE: After the attack on Delia,
00:32:08
he really goes off the radar.
00:32:10
He manages somehow to get out of the UK and he goes on the run
00:32:15
effectively for six years.
00:32:19
- NARRATOR: Sweeney had the gall to write to police
00:32:21
whilst on the run, sarcastically claiming
00:32:24
Delia's attack was an "axeident."
00:32:27
Soon, he'd return to his disturbing drawings,
00:32:30
portraying revenge on the women who'd scorned him.
00:32:35
London, England, the year 2000.
00:32:40
After six years on the run, 44-year-old John Sweeney
00:32:45
slid back into the UK capital under a new identity.
00:32:53
- ELIZABETH: Sweeney has quite a lot of aliases,
00:32:55
names that he's known by, he's not just John Sweeney,
00:32:58
he's Joe Scouse--Scouse Joe, and, you know,
00:33:01
a whole list of, uh, other names.
00:33:04
- GEOFFREY: Michael this, Joe Johnson,
00:33:07
that was one of Sweeney's other great tricks.
00:33:10
He could hide in plain sight.
00:33:12
He was so--was quite adept at looking rather different.
00:33:16
If you look at photographs of Sweeney,
00:33:18
he can adopt different guises,
00:33:21
he is quite skillful at disguise.
00:33:25
- ELIZABETH: So I think this adds
00:33:26
to his comedian-like quality,
00:33:29
and it allows him to present different versions of himself
00:33:32
to different people.
00:33:35
- NARRATOR: Sweeney roamed building site to building site,
00:33:38
finding easy work as a carpenter in a booming capital.
00:33:43
Here, he met fellow Liverpudlian,
00:33:45
31-year-old Paula Fields.
00:33:48
She'd led a happy life in the northwest,
00:33:50
until she was drawn into London's darker side
00:33:54
of drugs and prostitution.
00:33:56
- ELIZABETH: So Paula was quite a vulnerable individual,
00:33:59
she'd moved from Liverpool to London,
00:34:01
she had some drug dependency issues,
00:34:04
and Sweeney, being the predator that he is,
00:34:07
would've honed in on that very, very quickly.
00:34:10
He would've identified the fact they both came from Liverpool,
00:34:13
so there was that affinity there.
00:34:15
- LOUIS: Unlike Delia, Paula was, uh,
00:34:17
involved in prostitution and she was somewhat
00:34:19
of a street person, so you would think somebody like Paula
00:34:22
would have some street smarts where she would be able
00:34:25
to detect somebody like Sweeney trying to get over on her.
00:34:29
It tells you how crafty and how cunning
00:34:32
and how manipulative Sweeney was.
00:34:36
- NARRATOR: Like other women in his life,
00:34:38
Sweeney, also known as Scouse Joe,
00:34:41
built up a seething resentment towards her.
00:34:44
- She would buy drugs from a local dealer,
00:34:47
and without having the funds,
00:34:48
she would tell the dealer that Joe Scouse would pay,
00:34:51
so the next thing that would happen would be the dealer
00:34:53
would be banging on Joe Scouse's window
00:34:55
asking for payment.
00:34:57
And this would've upset him greatly, I suspect.
00:35:00
- NARRATOR: Sweeney also accused Paula of stealing
00:35:02
his mobile phone.
00:35:04
His resentment continued to build,
00:35:07
and one day in December, it flew out of control.
00:35:11
He violently attacked Paula and ended up killing her.
00:35:16
- GEOFFREY: Yet again, those same fantasies
00:35:18
come to the surface,
00:35:20
those fantasies of dismemberment,
00:35:22
and this time he, again, cuts Paula's head off.
00:35:27
He also takes off her hands, and this time, also her feet.
00:35:32
The remains of her...is cut up into separate parts
00:35:37
and placed in holdalls.
00:35:40
- NARRATOR: Once again, Sweeney disposed of his victim
00:35:43
in a waterway, the region's canal
00:35:45
in North West London.
00:35:47
Two months later, on the 19th of February, 2001,
00:35:52
a bag containing Paula's body parts was found
00:35:55
by boys who were fishing.
00:35:58
The police were called, and five more gruesome holdalls
00:36:02
were recovered.
00:36:03
Then, a full-blown murder inquiry began.
00:36:07
- Within a very short period of time,
00:36:08
they--they got a match with the DNA from...
00:36:11
a woman called Paula Fields from Liverpool.
00:36:13
They very quickly established that she'd had a relationship
00:36:17
with this tall Liverpudlian man who they called Joe Scouse
00:36:22
or Scouse Joe.
00:36:24
- NARRATOR: Before long, police inquiries link
00:36:27
Scouse Joe to John Patrick Sweeney,
00:36:30
and he soon became Britain's most wanted man.
00:36:33
Just a month later, police surveillance
00:36:36
found Sweeney working at a building site off Fleet Street.
00:36:40
The net was finally closing in.
00:36:43
- STEVE: So they then get an armed surveillance team
00:36:46
from Central London to tail Sweeney,
00:36:48
and of course, they jump on him,
00:36:50
just as he's entering the building site,
00:36:52
and that's how he gets nicked.
00:36:55
- GEOFFREY: When the police finally confront Sweeney,
00:36:58
he is armed, he has a gun,
00:37:01
and he has a knife in his waistband,
00:37:04
but finally, finally,
00:37:07
this evil man is brought to justice.
00:37:11
- NARRATOR: After his arrest, police seized over 300 pieces
00:37:15
of his sinister artwork and poems at his property.
00:37:19
- STEVE: In his room, they find drawings and sketches,
00:37:22
a lot of them showing very macabre subjects
00:37:25
like dismembered bodies,
00:37:26
and pictures of him with an axe in his belt, etc.
00:37:30
Also is found two loaded shotguns,
00:37:32
and there's also a garrote.
00:37:35
- NARRATOR: One drawing police found was
00:37:37
menacingly entitled, "The Scalp Hunter."
00:37:41
- GEOFFREY: It's clear what it's supposed to portray,
00:37:43
it's actually him, uh, with an axe in his waistband,
00:37:47
and hanging from his waistband is a blonde scalp,
00:37:50
which is clearly meant to be Delia.
00:37:53
And of course, on the picture is a credit
00:37:56
to Delia, if I can call it that, by Sweeney,
00:37:58
where he says to her, "May you die in pain."
00:38:01
And I think that, to me, sums up the contempt
00:38:04
he had for Delia.
00:38:06
- NARRATOR: After six years of hunting for Delia's attacker,
00:38:10
the police charge 44-year-old John Sweeney
00:38:13
with her attempted murder, false imprisonment,
00:38:16
and firearms offenses.
00:38:19
On March the 5th, 2002, at the Old Bailey,
00:38:22
he received four life sentences.
00:38:25
Despite his punishment, the reality was
00:38:28
that Sweeney could be out on parole
00:38:30
in as little as nine years.
00:38:33
Police needed to prove he was responsible
00:38:35
for Paula Fields' murder to prevent him from getting out.
00:38:39
- STEVE: The investigation into the death of Paula
00:38:41
carried on for some considerable time,
00:38:43
but unfortunately, due... effectively to a lack
00:38:46
of evidence, the inquiry really fizzled out
00:38:49
and no one was ever charged at that stage for Paula's killing.
00:38:53
- NARRATOR: Investigators had hit a brick wall,
00:38:55
but six years later, in 2008,
00:38:58
detective inspector Steve Smith had a call out of the blue
00:39:02
from a Dutch policeman about an unidentified body
00:39:06
they'd found in Rotterdam's Westersingel Canal in 1990.
00:39:11
- STEVE: What he had to tell me was quite amazing.
00:39:14
They'd managed to recover a phial of blood
00:39:16
that was taken from the post mortem examination
00:39:18
of the dismembered female,
00:39:20
but with the advancement in DNA,
00:39:22
they had managed to obtain a full profile of the victim.
00:39:26
The DNA match was that of Melissa Halstead.
00:39:30
- NARRATOR: With this new breakthrough and Sweeney's
00:39:32
earlier confession to Delia about Melissa's killing,
00:39:36
Steve Smith and his Metropolitan Police team formed
00:39:39
the first ever joint European murder inquiry,
00:39:42
sanctioned by Europol.
00:39:45
Sweeney was their prime suspect.
00:39:48
- STEVE: Here we had Sweeney that was involved
00:39:50
in relationships with both Melissa and Paula.
00:39:53
And both women had ended up as dismembered,
00:39:57
body parts had been removed, and both put into canals.
00:40:00
I mean, that for us was way beyond any coincidence,
00:40:04
so he had to be the man responsible.
00:40:07
- NARRATOR: As Melissa's murder had taken place
00:40:09
nearly 20 years earlier, detectives would struggle
00:40:12
for any forensic evidence linking Sweeney to her killing,
00:40:17
but scientific analysis of one of his sketches
00:40:20
would help prove his guilt.
00:40:22
- STEVE: One particular drawing, "One Man Band,"
00:40:25
what was of particular interest to us was
00:40:27
some correction fluid in the middle of the picture,
00:40:30
which, when the scientists looked beneath the fluid
00:40:32
using particular light techniques,
00:40:35
you could see that it was an RIP message
00:40:37
to Melissa Halstead.
00:40:39
How would he have known that she was dead?
00:40:41
Only the killer would know, so to write "RIP" was, to us,
00:40:45
quite telling.
00:40:47
- ELIZABETH: He's so arrogant that he thinks that just
00:40:49
correcting over it, it is going to destroy
00:40:53
any evidence linking it to Melissa's death,
00:40:55
but he's not going to let go of this piece of artwork,
00:40:59
because it gives him power and that sense of control
00:41:01
that he so wants.
00:41:03
- NARRATOR: As police delve deeper into Sweeney's sketches,
00:41:06
they found two drawings they also believed
00:41:09
were clearly confessional.
00:41:11
- STEVE: One is of a female body where the head
00:41:13
and hands are removed, in the fetal position,
00:41:16
which of course resembled how Melissa was found
00:41:18
within the bag.
00:41:20
And then the other one was of interest to us,
00:41:22
was a dismembered female form cut into sections,
00:41:25
which is exactly, really, how Paula was found
00:41:27
in the different bags.
00:41:30
- NARRATOR: But a poem he'd scrawled on the back
00:41:32
of a lottery card was the golden nugget that sealed the deal.
00:41:37
- STEVE: The poem read, "Poor old Melissa,
00:41:39
"chopped her up in bits, food to feed the fish,
00:41:41
Amsterdam was the pits."
00:41:43
Now, that to me, tells you everything you need to know
00:41:45
about what he'd done to Melissa,
00:41:48
and again, that's really confessional.
00:41:52
- NARRATOR: Senior investigating officer Steve Smith
00:41:55
was confident they'd now built their case against Sweeney.
00:42:00
- STEVE: We did struggle, really, with a complete lack
00:42:02
of hard forensic evidence.
00:42:05
We had what we described as similar fact evidence.
00:42:07
So you had the relationships with both women,
00:42:10
and these series of drawings that were confessional,
00:42:13
and a real nugget that we had that Sweeney was really
00:42:17
gonna struggle with, was his confession to Delia
00:42:19
in 1994 about killing Melissa.
00:42:23
- NARRATOR: Nearly 21 years after Melissa's death
00:42:26
and more than ten years after Paula's,
00:42:28
the case was finally heard against John Sweeney
00:42:31
at the Old Bailey in London.
00:42:34
On April the 4th, 2011, the 54-year-old killer
00:42:39
was found guilty on two counts of murder
00:42:41
and perverting the course of justice.
00:42:44
- It's incredibly significant for me that Sweeney received
00:42:46
a whole life order.
00:42:48
He will never be released from prison.
00:42:51
This is reserved for the crimes that cause the most harm,
00:42:54
for the offenders least likely to be rehabilitated.
00:42:59
- GEOFFREY: The most famous photograph of Sweeney,
00:43:02
the one that's used almost everywhere,
00:43:05
there was just the faintest hint of a smirk.
00:43:10
That smirk conceals the serial killer's delight
00:43:14
in knowing something that nobody else does,
00:43:16
and the delight in not allowing the family of the victims
00:43:21
complete closure.
00:43:23
It is utterly, utterly depraved.
00:43:26
- NARRATOR: Although he's never been charged
00:43:28
for any other murders,
00:43:30
police believe Sweeney's sinister artworks
00:43:33
could contain clues to even more killings.
00:43:37
- STEVE Contained within Sweeney's artwork
00:43:39
were some pictures of other women,
00:43:42
in particular two women which we've never actually
00:43:43
managed to trace.
00:43:45
It's quite possible that there may be other victims.
00:43:49
- ♪
00:43:53
- NARRATOR: He was possessive and controlling,
00:43:55
a serial domestic abuser who thought nothing
00:43:59
of torturing his partners and holding them hostage.
00:44:03
The women who escaped did so through a sheer determination
00:44:07
to survive.
00:44:09
He brutally murdered two lovers,
00:44:11
and removed their heads and hands in the hope
00:44:14
they would never be identified.
00:44:17
That makes John Sweeney one of the world's most evil killers.
00:44:22
- ♪
00:44:35
♪♪
00:44:46
- [swish]

Badges

This episode stands out for the following:

  • 90
    Most shocking
  • 90
    Biggest twist
  • 85
    Most heartbreaking
  • 85
    Most unpredictable

Episode Highlights

  • Melissa's Last Call
    Melissa Halstead calls her mother for her birthday, unaware it would be her last.
    “Goodbye, I love you.”
    @ 00m 19s
    August 12, 2021
  • The Chilling Discovery
    Melissa's dismembered torso is found in Rotterdam's canal, leading to a police investigation.
    @ 00m 24s
    August 12, 2021
  • Sweeney's Dark Artwork
    In prison, Sweeney creates disturbing drawings that reveal his violent fantasies.
    “It's an x-ray of his mind.”
    @ 16m 13s
    August 12, 2021
  • Delia's Awakening
    After two years of abuse, Delia finally musters the courage to ask Sweeney to leave.
    @ 23m 42s
    August 12, 2021
  • A Terrifying Confession
    Sweeney reveals his past murders to Delia, confirming her worst fears.
    @ 24m 59s
    August 12, 2021
  • The Brutal Attack
    Sweeney violently assaults Delia, leaving her with life-threatening injuries.
    @ 30m 39s
    August 12, 2021
  • Sweeney's Capture
    After years on the run, Sweeney is finally arrested while armed.
    @ 36m 50s
    August 12, 2021
  • A Life Sentence
    Sweeney receives a whole life order, ensuring he will never be released.
    @ 42m 46s
    August 12, 2021
  • John Sweeney: A Portrait of Evil
    A serial domestic abuser who brutally murdered two lovers, aiming to evade identification.
    “That makes John Sweeney one of the world's most evil killers.”
    @ 44m 17s
    August 12, 2021

Episode Quotes

  • That’s it, I’ve had enough, I want to die.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 1 - John Sweeney - Full Episode
  • He intended to do serious harm to his wife.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 1 - John Sweeney - Full Episode
  • I wanted to get rid of him, but I was afraid to ask.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 1 - John Sweeney - Full Episode
  • If you don’t listen to absolutely everything I say, I’m gonna kill you.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 1 - John Sweeney - Full Episode
  • I wasn’t fighting for my life, I didn’t want to live.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 1 - John Sweeney - Full Episode
  • The women who escaped did so through sheer determination to survive.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 1 - John Sweeney - Full Episode

Key Moments

  • Last Call00:19
  • Domestic Abuse01:22
  • Predatory Behavior10:24
  • Dark Artwork16:13
  • Delia's Fear23:31
  • Brutal Assault30:39
  • Life Sentence42:46
  • Survival44:03

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown

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