A carpenter who was yesterday convicted of trying
A carpenter who was yesterday convicted of trying to murder his ex-girlfriend is a suspected serial killer who may have chopped up the bodies of at least two other women.
John Sweeney, 45, warned he now faces life by an Old Bailey judge, may have murdered two other girlfriends – prostitute Paula Fields, 31, and former model Melissa Halsted.
He was yesterday found guilty of a horrific double attack on nurse Delia Balmer, then 43, back in December 1994 which has left her psychologically traumatised.
During the second attack, on the steps of her home in Kentish Town, north London, she suffered scalp, chest and arm wounds, punctured lungs and had one of her fingers chopped off with a felling axe.
Sweeney, originally from Skelmsdale, Merseyside, remained at large for six years during which it is thought he slaughtered Miss Fields whose dismembered remains were found bagged and dumped in a canal.
It was revealed yesterday that Sweeney, born in Kirkdale, has a string of convictions on former girlfriends dating back to 1982.
Sweeney was before the courts on at least four occasions for attacks on Miss Halsted.
In Vienna in 1989 he was sentenced to 12 months jail for battering Miss Halsted with a hammer and keeping her prisoner.
He hit her on the back of the head and fractured her skull in that attack.
Detective Chief Inspector Norman McKinlay, the investigating officer in the attacks on Miss Balmer said: ‘He is a truly evil man.
All the evidence points to him being responsible for the disappearance of Melissa Halsted and Paula Fields.
‘He could have carried out many murders.
We don’t know who his girlfriends have been in the last few years – but we will be making inquiries to find out.
He seems to hate women.
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Six travel bags containing Miss Field’s remains were recovered from a canal in Camden, north London last February – it is thought she was murdered two months earlier.
Her body had been chopped into a dozen pieces.
Sweeney was not charged through lack of evidence.
Meanwhile, detectives in Holland are re-examining the death of a woman whose hacked-up remains were also pulled from a canal in Amsterdam in 1992.
As with Miss Fields the head, hands and feet have never been recovered.
Sweeney was in Amsterdam when Miss Halsted, aged in her early 30s, disappeared.
The keen artist was convicted after three of his chilling sketches were shown to jurors as crucial evidence during his weeklong trial at the Old Bailey.
In one of the grisly crayon drawings, talented he drew his victim Miss Balmer as a cockroach about to be crushed under his boot.
Another depicted himself as the devil in the aftermath of an axe attack on the woman in a haunting premonition of what was to happen.
When arrested police found hundreds of Sweeney’s drawings at his hideout including violent images and glimpses of the murderous attack on his partner dated shortly it happened.
He will return to the court next month when he will be sentenced for the attack.
He was warned by The Recorder of London, Michael Hyam, that he faces life imprisonment.
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