Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I lived with serial killer for 3 years ...I knew I’d be his next victim when I found his murder kit under the bed NIGHTMARE
eney’s brutal attacks. He was sted and sent to Pentonville Prison orth London but released on bail. was then that Delia had a premoniof her own murder. “I thought, ‘He do something. He will cut me to bits. like he had Melissa’. The moment I overed he was out, I was on edge. I w he would be coming for me.” elia was attracted to Sweeney, origiy from Skelmersdale, near Liverpool, when they met in a Camden pub in 1991. He told her he worked on building sites in Germany and seemed well-travelled and exotic. Delia, who is originally from Australia and lived in Israel and America before settling in London, was excited by their shared passion for travel.
But it did not take long for the cracks to show and he began to manipulate Delia. It began with constant phone calls and increasingly controlling behaviour, before graduating to throttling, death threats and rape.
Before he launched his last savage attack, Delia found a bag filled with masking tape, Marigold gloves, surgical gloves, a large plastic ground sheet, rope and a saw.
Delia says it was “a body disposal kit meant for me”. Police also made a terrifying discovery during their later
wonder what happened to my American girlfriend, Melissa?”
Melissa had been furthest from my mind. Why, suddenly, should I find myself tied to the bed; and he feels it’s time to tell me about Melissa?
“We were in our room in Amsterdam,” he continued. He was ranting and raving as he spoke. “Melissa was there, and two German probe. A hoard of more than 300 violent and pornographic paintings and poems were found at the filthy squat where Sweeney lived – one entitled the “Scalp Hunter”. The pictures showed female victims being mutilated with axes.
“When I look back on my relationship with John, it’s the sort of thing you read about in a novel or watch in a movie, it doesn’t happen for real,” she says.
“But it did, it happened to me. He was
guys.” What he had to say next astounded me. “I killed them all, I sat with the bodies for three days. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t want the police to find me.”
He waved the knife in the air, slicing through it, the blade swishing left and right. “On the third day,” he confessed, “I cut up their bodies and put them in bags, and threw them in the canal.”