PART II:Amateur Artist's Girlfriend Disappears Mysteriously, Bloody Paintings Hide Murder Clues
This is the second part, if you haven't seen the first part, you can click to view it
3 2001, United Kingdom
After six full years, although he was wanted by the whole country for attacking Delia, John Sweeney seemed to have disappeared from the world, and the police did not find any clues.
Police speculate that John Sweeney has been touring construction sites across the UK and Europe, where he could easily find work because he was a carpenter.
Such jobs are often paid in cash, employers are not very careful about checking the identities of workers (many illegal immigrants), John Sweeney is careful to use different pseudonyms, avoid real-name mobile phones and social media, and avoid any cameras. In this way, he was able to get away with impunity for six years.
Yet a narcissistic, brutal, and misogynistic criminal like John Sweeney can't stop hurting women.
On February 19, 2001, two young boys fishing on London's Regent's Canal caught a blood-soaked travel bag containing several bricks and a corpse wrapped in a plastic tarp.
The London police immediately went to the Regent's Canal for salvage. In the end, they found 6 similar travel bags, which contained 10 shredded corpses. Like the unclaimed female corpse in Rotterdam 10 years ago, there was no head or no head.
However, unlike 10 years ago, the police quickly determined the identity of the woman's body through DNA testing: the deceased was 31-year-old Paula Fields, who had lost contact with her family since December 2000.
Paula Fields, a single mother of three, was born in a small town near Liverpool. She was the youngest of 11 children, and her mother died when she was nine.
When Paula had a child of her own, she thought she would have a better life in London and moved to London with the child. However, bad things happen frequently in the world, and Paula's life doesn't seem to improve much. In May 2000, Paula became addicted to drugs. In order to buy drugs, she began to pick up customers on the street.
Because of drug addiction, Paula began to become estranged from her family. When she was lonely and vulnerable, Paula met a fellow Liverpool fellow named Joe Carroll, and the two soon began to date. After Paula disappeared in December 2000, Joe Carroll disappeared.
However, the police could not find any information about Joe Carroll in the database, which was a fake identity that could not be found. The police compared the DNA and found that Joe Carroll and another man named Anton Sweeney were brothers. Joe Carroll was John Sweeney, who had been wanted by the police for six years.
Different from previous cases, Paula had not tried to leave John Sweeney when she disappeared. John Sweeney had just dated Paula for a while, and had not "enjoyed" the process of torturing Paula. What is the reason? Let him start early?
One theory is that Paula discovered John Sweeney's true identity. One of Paula's neighbors testified that on the evening of December 13, 2000, he heard a man screaming in the wee hours of the morning: "No! No! No!" Two days later, Paula disappeared.
Another theory is that when Paula was addicted to drugs, he often stole John Sweeney's belongings and sold them for money, and sometimes asked drug dealers to come to John Sweeney to pay for his drugs. These actions greatly angered John Sweeney, making him "tired" ahead of time and wanting to get rid of Paula "quickly".
According to the information provided by the informant, the police quickly found the apartment where John Sweeney lived, and he still lived in London and had no plans to escape.
In his apartment, police found a machete (without Paula's blood on it), a large bundle of rope, a loaded pistol, two shotguns and ammunition. In addition to this, there are more than 300 paintings and poems.
Violence, gore, and pornography fill these "artworks" with obsession and hatred for women—if Satan can paint, these are probably his worst works.
So far, Paula's murder and Delia's attempted murder have been combined, and Scotland Yard (Metropolitan Police) investigators believe that, given John Sweeney's brutal character and actions in Delia's case. So, it is almost certain that he is Paula's murderer.
However, the police did not have any crucial evidence to directly prove that John Sweeney killed. Chief Inspector Howard Groves, who presided over the investigation, recalled that after John Sweeney was arrested, he denied all charges with a smug look on his face, as if to say, "There is You can prove it!"
If the police risk prosecution, once John Sweeney is acquitted in Paula's case, then John Sweeney will go unpunished under the autrefois acquit.
So the police decided to first prosecute John Sweeney with the well-documented Delia case, and continue to sort out the clues in Paula's case while he was serving his sentence, so as to try to murder Paula Fields before he was released from prison.
In 2001, John Sweeney was sentenced to 'life imprisonment' for the attempted murder of Delia, but in the UK legal system he was only a 'first offender' if he behaved well in prison (offenders like him usually will be), and it is very likely that after 12 or 3 years, he will be released on parole because of "rehabilitation".
Howard Groves knew very well that people like John Sweeney would never return to society, and he would definitely kill again, but the police investigation at this time was at a bottleneck. For the next six years, the investigation team also No critical breakthrough was achieved. Paula's case was temporarily put on hold.
But at this moment, an international call suddenly turned the whole case that seemed to be in a dead end.