MAN KILLED 3 PARTNERS
He pushed his wife to her death, strangled lover 11 years later... then was released to slaughter ex-girlfriend with claw hammer
A MAN who killed two partners went on to murder a third after he was freed from a secure unit just two years into his sentence.
Serial killer Theodore Johnson, 64, strangled and battered ex-girlfriend Angela Best, 51, to death in December 2016 after she found out about his dark past and ended their relationship.
Johnson was first convicted of manslaughter and jailed for three years in 1981 after throwing his wife off a ninthfloor balcony in Wolverhampton.
In 1992 he strangled his girlfriend at their home in London and pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility because of depression and a personality disorder.
He was detained in a psychiatric hospital for just two years and met Miss Best shortly after he was released.
Johnson was due to stand trial at the Old Bailey for the murder of Miss Best, a grandmother and mother of four, but changed his plea to guilty at the last moment.
He was taken into court in a wheelchair after a failed suicide bid left him disabled.
He faces a life sentence when he returns to court on Friday. Prosecutor Mark Heywood said: ‘This is a man who is controlling and violent to the women in his life and who, when crossed, will kill.’
Johnson was first convicted of manslaughter on the basis of provocation in November 1981 after he hit his wife Yvonne with a vase and pushed her off the balcony of their ninth-floor flat in May that year.
In 1993 he was convicted of manslaughter at the Old Bailey after strangling Yvonne Bennett with a belt during a row at her flat in Finsbury Park, north London, in September 1992, after she ended their relationship and started seeing another man.
Johnson then tried to hang himself from a tree but the string snapped. Doctors concluded he was depressed and had a personality disorder and he was sentenced to a hospital order.
He was discharged two years later, but remained under the care of psychiatrists.
Johnson, who was born in Jamaica and moved to the UK in 1980, started a relationship with Miss Best when he was released in 1995. She was initially unaware of his previous convictions but later found letters revealing that he had killed a partner and he admitted it was true.
Johnson was described by Miss Best’s children as abusive and controlling and he once punched her after she found out he had cheated on her.
Their relationship finally ended in the autumn of 2016 and she started seeing another man.
Johnson tried to get her back and began stalking her near her home in Tottenham, before throttling her with a dressing gown belt and battering her with a hammer.
Hours after killing her, he threw himself in front of a train at Cheshunt railway station in Hertfordshire but survived despite suffering horrific injuries.
Johnson had attacked Miss Best after she went to accompany him to an appointment at the Jamaican embassy.
Mr Heywood said: ‘She did nothing whatsoever to bring any violence in her direction: she had gone to his home to help him with an appointment he had that day. Instead of accepting her help, the defendant set on her with brutal, merciless violence.
‘He did it for a simple reason: after all that time she was no longer prepared to remain with him and his controlling ways.
‘She had recently met another and began a new chapter in her life, seeing that other man.
‘The defendant is someone who would rather that she did not live if that life was to be with anyone but him. And so, quite simply, he killed her.’
‘Controlling and violent’