NARRATOR: Human remains have been discovered
in London's Regent's Canal.
Dismemberment of any human being is brutal.
It never ceases to amaze me
what people are capable of doing to each other.
This is someone who's clearly got psychopathic tendencies.
A violent killer is on the loose.
The view I took having seen the artwork...
...was that this was a depraved individual.
Forensics face unprecedented challenges to track them down.
The fact that a body of a female's been found
missing head, hands and feet,
I would suggest that the offender in this case
might well be very forensically aware.
We were very concerned
that he again would form a relationship with another woman
who could end up in the same way.
A call comes in that human remains had been found in a bag
by two boys on the Grand Union Canal.
Senior crime scene manager john Cockram
from the Met Serious Crimes Unit races to the scene.
Soon as I get down here, I try to define what my crime scene is.
The bag is actually on the side of the canal.
There's four bricks that have been taken out of the bag,
and a black bin liner containing flesh
had been taken out of the rucksack that was there.
The scene was somewhat chaotic
because if you're aware of the Regent's Canal, it's a thoroughfare.
So there was lots of people on foot or on bicycles
heading either way along the canal,
so they had to obviously cordon off the area.
They had to try and make it as sterile as possible
so that when the forensic team came in,
no forensic opportunities were lost.
Forensic experts gather on site.
I need a pathologist, potentially an anthropologist.
I need a photographer, most definitely,
to photograph as things are revealed.
The scene tents were put on the north side of the canal.
This is where we based ourselves,
where we did examination of the remains.
One of the first things we're trying to do
is establish if this is human or nonhuman.
A forensic anthropologist
is relying on their skills of human anatomy
and often animal anatomy, so we're able very quickly
to distinguish between human and nonhuman material.
It's based on the physical features,
the colouration and the shapes that we're seeing.
It's obvious to a trained forensic anthropologist that this is human.
I could see flesh, I could see it was female,
and I could see there was a pelvic part of the torso.
Once we are able to say that they were human remains,
at that point, it became a murder investigation.
The pathologist took a tissue sample that was dispatched
to our Metropolitan Police Forensic Laboratory in quick time
so that DNA analysis can be undertaken.
Forensics scientists begin their harvest of the outside of the bag.
At a very early stage, the CSI would come and take photographs...
...and then they would swab the zips.
Sarah Thirkell is a leading forensic trainer.
Because the bag's been in a canal,
there may well be very, very little forensic evidence
that could be obtained from the outside.
The wet bag presents a challenge.
It still wouldn't mean
that it wouldn't be swabbed for DNA on the zipper part of the zip,
but fibre evidence, fingerprint evidence
would be negligible on this bag.
As a CSI finding only parts of a human within a crime scene,
you're thinking, "Well, where's the rest of the body?"
Finding this first bag is the beginning of a puzzle...
...because where is everything else?
Is it hidden? Is it still with the killer?
Is it locally in the canal?
Usually, there would be more body parts.
The decision was made at an early stage
that they were gonna bring divers in.
just because a bag that's been weighted down
has been dropped in one location,
it doesn't mean to say that the rest of the body
is in bags in the same location.
They could have been dumped further downstream.
The canal is undergoing maintenance work,
which helps police divers.
On this particular occasion,
it struck me that the water was very clear.
Because at Camden Lock, which is the next lock down,
they were replacing the lock gates,
and so there was no boat movement through the canal.
All the mud had settled down.
Divers begin their search.
Got to think, "What other items have been thrown into that canal?"
There may be old bikes, bottles...
...mobile phones that might have been dropped off boats.
There's so much other debris that might be within a canal.
It can take quite a long time to try and locate any items.
CSls search for further leads.
It's really important to think about access points.
If someone's dumped a body in the bag,
how have they got the body there?
In my mind, I'd be thinking,
"Well, they're not gonna be carrying loads of bags with heavy body parts
"down the street, so where's the vehicle access?
"What's the closest point you can get a vehicle to that scene?"
Ancl I would be looking there for tyre-track marks,
for footprints etc.
A crime scene is a very precious commodity
because you've only got one chance of getting it right.
On site, CSls examine the ballast.
The bags were weighed down with bricks and so on.
There's soil on the bricks that may link back to a location.
That would be another avenue
that would be considered as a type of forensic evidence.
Sometimes, you have to expand your arsenal of forensic types
and look for the more unusual types.
Forensics ecology samples -
so, soil, pollen, that kind of thing.
A day on, and the search of the canal is nearing completion.
Police divers have discovered more holdalls of similar design.
There were five other bags that were in the canal.
CSls confirm the bags contain more human remains.
The torso had been cut into two.
Both arms had been cut into two,
and there were the legs, so there were ten parts in total.
I've not just got the one part.
I've got the multiple parts here,
and then, obviously, that escalates the whole thing.
On site, we make the assumption
that all of these bags are from the same individual,
especially if there are no identical parts.
So, we don't find two right legs or something like that.
It's easier to go with the simplest explanation.
What was missing was the head, hands and feet.
Those are forensically important parts of a human
that are easily identifiable.
That tends to indicate
that the offender realised that facial recognition,
recognition by fingerprints might occur,
so I would suggest that the offender in this case
might well be very forensically aware.
In my opinion, whoever did this,
disposing of the head, hands and feet elsewhere
suggests to me they didn't want this person identified.
The body was actually dismembered quite neatly, in a tidy fashion.
Could be someone who knows their way around a saw,
perhaps even a butcher... or a carpenter.
Someone's clearly mentally unstable to be able to cut a human body up.
NARRATOR: The remains of a woman
have been discovered in London's Regent's Canal.
The most unsettling thing about this particular case
really is the way that the individual was actually dismembered
and thrown away as if they were garbage.
At postmortem, the pathologist looks for cause of death.
The body would be laid out as close to anatomical order as we could.
Of course, in this case, we are missing the hands and the head,
so those cannot be examined.
The only physical injuries we could find
were some light bruising,
fingertip-type bruising to the upper right arm,
and they would have happened whilst the victim was alive.
Other than that, we were unable to ascertain any other injuries.
With the body being dismembered in the way that it was,
and the absence in particular of the head,
it's proved impossible to hypothesise any cause of death.
To ascertain the time of death,
the team need to work out when the body was deposited in the canal.
Once we looked at temperature data and the quality of the material,
we would be able to tell with some reasonable accuracy
how long they had been in the water.
They estimate the remains had been submerged for around nine weeks.
At this stage of the inquiry, the most important thing
is identifying the remains, plain and simple.
If women are gonna get murdered, 90-odd percent of the time,
it's gonna be somebody they know
and there's gonna be domestic violence in that history.
With the case ongoing,
police are called to investigate a missing woman.
Her name is Paula Fields.
The family became really concerned.
A couple of the sisters went into the local police station
and filed a missing persons report.
Paula hadn't been seen for the best part of three weeks.
She was the sort of person who was always out and about.
The family are especially worried
because Paula has been the victim of domestic violence.
In nearly every homicide case I've looked at,
and I've looked at hundreds, in a domestic homicide,
coercive control is the single biggest predictor of that homicide.
Police were very keen
to know as much information about Paula, her lifestyle,
effectively any leads, really,
that could lead them to try and find Paula...
...and hope that she was OK and everything was fine.
Some of the things I talk about are the five Ws -
the when, the where, the what, the why and the who.
Paula was from Liverpool.
Came from quite a large family, seven or eight sisters.
She was by all accounts very friendly, outgoing...
quite a bubbly personality.
She was also a mother. She had three little boys.
Paula moved down to North London three years earlier.
Unfortunately for Paula,
she fell in, I suppose, with the wrong people.
She developed a drug habit.
Think things have spiral led from that point onward.
The family's physical description of Paula
bears a resemblance to the human remains in the mortuary.
We can build a picture
on what the visual observations of the postmortem are.
We can estimate stature, the ethnicity and hair colour.
We discovered a caesarean scar, and that's an identifying feature.
The information
that the forensic scientists were able to give to the SIO
broadly fitted with what the family told us about Paula.
They need more forensic assurance
that the remains held at the mortuary belong to Paula.
The team took DNA from Paula's sister.
Your DNA won't be an exact match to your sibling,
but it will be very similar.
They compare the DNA from the remains
with the sample from Paula's sister.
That positively proved that it was Paula Fields.
Police inform Paula's family.
It's a difficult conversation to have...
...explaining to a bereaved family
the circumstances around the demise or the death of a family member.
For a loved one to be murdered in any circumstance
is extremely harrowing.
Most families, I would imagine, never, ever recover.
But to actually be informed
that not only has your sister, daughter, been murdered
but then the body has been dismembered
is particularly horrific.
I wouldn't even imagine how they would ever come to terms with it.
Police are concerned this brutal killer could strike again.
This is a highly dangerous person.
Dismemberment is something
that most people would find absolutely impossible.
Ancl they are taking off a head.
Now, that's not an easy thing to do, it's a messy thing to do,
and it would be something that most of us
would feel completely repelled with.
Somebody like that's not really gonna suffer with guilt or shame.
The family informed the officers
that Paula was having a relationship with somebody called Joe Scouse.
On one occasion, they actually metjoe,
and he explained to them that he was a carpenter
and was also from Liverpool.
They were effectively kindred spirits, really.
That was one of the things
that sort of attracted her to him and him to her.
But the relationship was tempestuous.
Paula thinks she's in a safe relationship
with this really nice guy,
and really quickly, things completely changed,
and he became violent and abusive.
Police were very, very keen to identify who this individual was...
...where he was, and exactly what his relationship was with Paula.
Joe Scouse lived at a particular address in Finsbury Park -
North Four.
The police investigation focused on the address
Paula had been frequenting quite regularly.
She would knock on his window.
He would invite her in.
It was a multi-occupancy address with about nine or ten bedsits.
He's nowhere to be seen.
Police question all other residents.
They were all of the view
that the relationship between Paula and Joe was somewhat tense.
There was one particular individual
who police felt was quite evasive when questioned,
and they felt that he actually knew more than he was letting on.
They discover he's a close acquaintance ofjoe Scouse.
Police focus their attention on him.
During questioning, he lets slip a secret.
Joe Scouse was in fact...
"John Sweeney.
That was his real identity.
Why would you have an alias
if you weren't intent on avoiding arrest
and you hadn't clone anything wrong?
We do a criminal record check on him,
and we realise that he's got a long criminal history,
criminal history of violence, serious violence.
john Sweeney was actually wanted
for the attempted murder of another girlfriend back in 1994.
He was basically on the run...
...hence the reason why he was using the alias.
Once as an SIO you identify
that someone's on the run tor an attempted murder,
your primary aim is to arrest him as soon as possible.
What you don't want is for him to be on the run
and he attacks or kills somebody else.
With a warrant to search his bedsit,
police return to Sweeney's address in Finsbury Park.
Once inside, they're confronted with a chilling scene.
There's some artwork which is very unusual and quite morbid.
Images of people with feet missing.
Very sadistic, weird images.
There were some quite skilfully made items of furniture, as well,
of a sexual nature.
He was a very talented carpenter.
Officers who were looking at this artwork
were of the view that this was
not really a normal individual they were dealing with.
The weird art that was on the walls and the furniture is important,
but at that stage, it just tends to show his character.
Would it form any direct link with the murder of Paula Fields?
Well... I wasn't sure.
Within the property,
there was a pillowcase that appeared to have some blood staining on it.
So the pillowcase was sent away for further testing
to see if they could ascertain whose blood that was.
CSls recover soil samples from the back garden.
We were trying to prove
that the bricks that were weighing down the bags
may have come from that particular premises.
We employed a forensic sedimentologist
to sample the bricks
and take various forensic samples from the garden
to try to prove a link between the two.
The DNA results of the bloodstained pillowcase are in.
The blood turned out to be the blood from Paula Fields.
Yes, that is exciting because it is a firm forensic link
between an address that he lived at
at the time we found the parts in the canal.
But it isn't enough to charge Sweeney.
Unfortunately, because she was a regular frequenter to the address,
and the blood could have got there quite innocently,
not necessarily an indication that she'd come to harm there.
The killer could say, "We were in a relationship.
"The blood you found is not relevant.
"|t's from something innocuous."
It gives doubt.
Ancl it may allow the killer to put some distance
between his normal relationship activities
and the death of the individual.
Police hope the soil samples will provide conclusive evidence.
The sedimentologist was able to prove a link
between the debris and the bricks found at the canal side
with Sweeney's address.
But the multi-occupancy address gives Sweeney a get-out again.
He can say someone else took the bricks.
From the S|O's perspective, finding that that soil
was from an address that Sweeney was living at
was important but not necessarily significant.
It was supportive evidence.
You feel initially frustrated, but personally, it spurs you on.
You've just got to find the evidence
that's actually going to convict him.
Police need a new lead.
With Sweeney on the run, the team track down an ex-girlfriend,
Delia Balmer, whom he'd attempted to murder.
Sweeney had met Delia in the Camden Town area.
He'd moved in with her some time after the relationship began.
What tends to happen is there's this stage where you first meet
where everything happens really, really quickly.
We call it love bombing.
So, they might be really romantic, you know,
"|'m your Prince Charming, look, I've arrived."
They will listen to you talking because they will want to find out
what your are weaknesses are, and your vulnerabilities.
Sweeney was somebody who was controlling,
and he obviously preyed on women who were vulnerable.
It very quickly deteriorated
into bouts of violence from him towards Delia,
and to such an extent that Delia wanted him out of her life.
He attacked Delia numerous times.
He tied her up.
He was abusing her, threatening her, he had weapons.
Delia became more and more determined to get rid of Sweeney,
but unfortunately, he wouldn't leave.
Ancl the times that she thought he had gone,
in fact, he kept coming back.
One clay, she got him out, and she went and changed the locks.
Now, that's pretty final.
A month later, Delia rides her bike home from work.
It's six o'clock, and it's dark.
She goes up the steps to unlock her door.
Sweeney was lurking down below the steps in the dark,
in the shadows, she hadn't seen him.
Sweeney was absolutely furious.
He wasn't going there to cry or to beg.
He was going there to kill her.
He jumped out armed with a knife
and what I can only really describe as a two-foot felling axe.
He, in public, attacked her brutally.
She managed to grab her cycle and put it over herself,
which stopped some of the blows, but she was still severely injured.
He managed to inflict terrible life-threatening wounds.
She had a stab wound to the chest, punctured lung.
It was either one or both of her arms were snapped,
her bones and her tendons.
I mean, the injuries were horrific.
A next-door neighbour comes to the rescue.
He hit Sweeney right across the back with a baseball bat,
which caused him to sort of wheel round and stop attacking Delia,
which I think undoubtedly saved her life.
Sweeney ran off into the night.
She was very, very lucky.
If he'd got her into the house,
there's not a doubt in my mind that she would be dead.
Delia spends five weeks in intensive care.
She had an extremely long rehabilitation,
and now Sweeney was on the run.
He was a man capable of extreme violence.
It was felt that if he wasn't arrested quickly,
then someone else could be attacked or even die as a result.
NARRATOR: Police need to find john Sweeney,
their prime suspect in the murder of Paula Fields.
He is also wanted for the attempted murder of an ex-girlfriend.
There was an outstanding warrant for his arrest.
He'd been on the run for a long time.
He had travelled extensively throughout Europe.
Sweeney was quite resourceful.
He's not what I call a clever man, but he's sly, and he's devious.
And he hated police. He'd never go near anyone in authority.
But seven years on from the attempted murder,
police discover he's back in London.
They act quickly.
just before he got into his place of work,
which was a building site in Shoe Lane,
which, ironically, is very close to the Old Bailey...
...he was arrested in the street.
He'd obviously been clever enough to evade capture,
so I'd imagine he did get the shock of his life
when he was sort of wrestled to the ground.
Sweeney struggled, but he was restrained,
and a knife was retrieved from his waistband.
The team arrest Sweeney for the attempted murder of Delia Balmer
back in 1994.
He is also arrested for the suspicious death of Paula Fields.
His tool chest was searched.
There was a loaded Luger pistol found.
Anybody that could have a loaded firearm at work
is not, in my opinion, of sound mind.
Sweeney is taken to Kentish Town Police Station for questioning.
Sweeney was rather truculent during his interviews.
He was dismissive of them,
and on most of the questions that he was asked, he made no comment.
He admitted knowing Paula Fields and had had a relationship with her.
But that is about as far as it went.
He denied anything to do with her murder
or the disposal of her body parts.
Police have witnesses to the attempted murder
of Delia Balmer,
but need more evidence that Sweeney killed Paula.
They have just 24 hours before the custody clock is up.
A warrant is secured to search his new address.
We found a loaded sawn-off shotgun...
...numerous cartridges and numerous pieces of ammunition
of various calibres, and these were prohibited items.
A bag was found in Sweeney's flat that contained tools.
He's a carpenter, so tools would be quite legitimate for him to have,
but within the bag, there were rubber sheets, duct tape
and an item that could be used as a garrotte.
It's not normal for someone to have those items in a bag.
It almost looked like a killer's kit.
Sweeney is charged and convicted of firearms of fences
and the attempted murder of Delia Balmer.
But the Crown Prosecution Service decides there's not enough evidence
to convict him of killing Paula.
I'd rather that, I'd rather the CPS say,
"No, you haven't got sufficient evidence,"
and forcing us to go and find it,
than proceeding with insufficient evidence
and him being found not guilty at court,
cos that would be devastating, particularly for the families.
Sweeney was given a minimum term of ten years in prison.
He is due for release in 2011,
but police are determined to keep him behind bars
and convict him of the murder of Paula Fields.
Then Delia Balmer comes forward with new information.
During his relationship with Delia Balmer,
he actually confessed to her on more than one occasion
that he'd actually killed a girlfriend by the name of Melissa,
who was from the US.
He came across her while they were staying in Amsterdam
with two German men, and that he'd shot them all.
There are some rules that seem to be in every controlling relationship,
and the one that I'm thinking of specifically is,
"You must not make me jealous."
He had said he had stayed with the bodies for a few clays
and then dismembered them and then disposed of them in a canal.
When you hear the circumstances fitted exactly
something similar to Paula Fields,
that's, like, a eureka moment.
Police need to prove that Melissa's story is true
and if Sweeney is telling a version of Paula's murder
or has killed before.
Sweeney went for women who were quite isolated,
who were living far away from home,
so there was nobody there looking out for them.
Sweeney has told Delia he was living with Melissa in Amsterdam
when he killed her.
Police actually send a telex message to the Amsterdam police -
could they please check their records
and look for any dismembered bodies that may have turned up in Amsterdam
during a particular time period?
But police in Amsterdam have no record
of a dismembered body being found.
Because the case was in the Netherlands,
it was not easy for us to progress some of the inquiries
that we would've liked to have clone to try and trace her.
However hard, they won't give up on getting justice for Paula Fields
and any other of Sweeney's victims.
Eight years into Sweeney's sentence, the police get a call.
On the other end was a Dutch policeman
who introduced himself as a member
of the quite newly formed cold-case investigation team
from Rotterdam Police.
They'd been tasked with looking at unsolved cases from Rotterdam.
The first case he'd looked at
was of an unidentified and dismembered female...
...found in the Westersingel Canal in May 1990.
Rotterdam and Amsterdam are separate police jurisdictions.
The way that the body had been deposited
was very similar to that of Paula.
She was trussed up in a large holdall
and thrown into a waterway.
Head and hands were missing.
It's a very similar MO, or modus operandi,
to how Paula Fields was found.
So, a similar MO means that potentially,
it's the same offender that's committed the two crimes.
Her body was actually folded in half.
36, 48 hours after death,
the body will become very soft, very malleable, easy to move around.
And at that point, the killer could have folded her body in half.
I thought to myself, "What are the chances of two women
"both ending up murdered, dismembered,
"placed in bags in a canal?"
it just wasn't gonna happen.
The case now becomes the first joint murder investigation
between the Netherlands and the UK.
Our clock's ticking.
John Sweeney could be released in 2011.
We were concerned that were he ever to be released,
he again would form a relationship with another woman
who could end up in the same way.
The team need to identify the body found in the Westersingel Canal.
On a cold-case review, they would review all old samples
and find out if there's further work that can be clone.
The blood sample was taken from the body
when she was initially found in 1990.
The blood sample has been stored
in the Netherlands Forensic Institute in The Hague.
With the advances in technology,
some of the DNA techniques that we used 20 years ago
have actually been superseded quite a lot.
The Forensic Institute were able to now create a full DNA profile.
This profile was loaded
onto the newly amalgamated Missing Persons DNA Database,
which was also cross matched
with the crime scene database in Rotterdam.
Ancl lo and behold, this DNA profile belonged to Melissa Halstead.
Melissa was from Ohio in the US.
She was a model for about two to three years,
and then she decided to come to Europe to start a new profession
being a photographer within the modelling industry.
The police database reveals that Melissa has been reported missing
by her family.
Normally, she would ring her mother and wish her birthday greetings
or Christmas, and they hadn't seen her for some time.
VOICEMAIL RECORDING:
This was the last they ever heard from Melissa.
Though the vial of blood is a match, because of its age,
CSls need additional forensic confirmation of Melissa's identity.
Blood doesn't keep very well over time.
Police make a difficult decision
to exhume her body and recover more DNA.
When a body is exhumed, it's normally clone
really early in the morning, at first light.
This is to maximise the daylight hours,
to provide respect for the victim,
and also to reduce the likelihood of any media attention.
When the body was exhumed,
she would likely be completely skeletonised.
Forensics recover DNA from the bones.
DNA is taken from the femur
because the femur is quite a large, robust bone
that preserves very well,
so it's likely that there will still be DNA intact within it.
This is especially true because there's no skull.
If there was a skull, we may have preferentially taken from the teeth.
The DNA taken from the femur is developed
and compared to the DNA from the original blood sample.
Again, it's a hit.
They were able to match the DNA sample to the victim, Melissa.
But the team still need to find a link
between Sweeney and Melissa Halstead.
It then meant that the previous investigation into Paula Fields
could be resurrected and us try to see whether or not
we could prove that john Sweeney
was not only the person who killed Paula Fields,
but more than likely the person who killed Melissa Halstead.
The team quickly established
that Melissa and Sweeney were in a relationship.
Melissa met Sweeney at a shoot.
They were in what could have been described as a loving relationship,
but very quickly, that turned violent.
Ancl there were significant episodes of assault on Melissa
over a two-and-a-half-year period.
She was subject to attacks, ABHs,
she was hit over the head with a hammer.
This bore distinct similarities
to the turbulence relationship he'd had with Delia.
Serial killers are quite often motivated...
They've got a sexual motivation.
There'd have been escalation points in their life,
they'd have built up to the first murder
and probably really enjoyed it...
and wanted to do it again.
And it can become almost a compulsion with them.
They can become very obsessive about it.
The team can now argue Sweeney has a violent MO.
The common denominator with all three victims
was that they were in a relationship with John Sweeney.
Things were rapidly moving.
At that stage, we hadn't explored all the potential forensic avenues.
There was more to be found.
NARRATOR: Police suspect john Sweeney is the killer
of Paula Fields and Melissa Halstead,
but they need more forensic evidence to charge him with both murders.
I had to make certain decisions
around how we were going to progress the investigation.
Sweeney's ten-year sentence for attempted murder is nearly up.
The clock is ticking.
We were acutely aware that we didn't want him
ever to face the prospect of release before we were able to charge him,
really because of the potential danger to any women
with whom he formed a relationship with.
They urgently need a new lead.
The team directs forensic resources
to look at Sweeney's macabre artwork in more detail.
One of the priorities for us was to recover the artwork.
They discover that it's being stored by his mother.
Some of us went to Liverpool with a warrant
and searched his mother's address.
And in the attic, we recovered all the artwork.
There were numerous pieces of artwork,
I think somewhere in excess of 200 or thereabouts.
Some of them were particularly damning.
They showed pictures of dismemberment, attacking women,
women tied up in holdalls.
Not exactly what you'd describe
as sort of everyday, innocent doodlings.
The artwork is taken to the lab
for examination by a documents expert.
Several pieces of the artwork
contained little bits of correction fluid.
So the officers were very keen to establish
what was below the correction fluid.
It is feasible to use different light sources
to be able to look through Tipp-Ex,
to be able to identify what is written underneath.
The specialist uses UV light to look at any concealed images or writing.
The name "Melissa" appeared.
There was a tombstone,
written the words "Melissa born" on her birth date and "died",
but the "died" was left blank.
Why would you write "died" unless you knew they'd died?
A painting called The Scalphunter,
depicting a blonde scalp hanging off a man's belt with an axe,
is found dedicated to Delia.
Some of it was autobiographical
in terms of Sweeney outlining his views
at a particular time in his life
and relationships that he was having.
Other items are found.
Part of the material was a mini-cab card.
Ancl on the back of the card was, like, a pre-printed calendar,
and one of the dates on the calendar was ringed in pen
with the words "nine and a half P".
So we were thinking, "Well, is it significant?"
The date was about nine and a half weeks
since Paula had last been seen, in December,
so we were thinking, "Could the P be for Paula?"
I think that his almost obsessive interest in sex
would mean that women have this power over him
that they don't know is there.
You know, they're not doing this on purpose.
And I think there's a lot of resentment in him
that comes out in his art
and comes out in the sexual abuse
of the women he's in relationships with.
Once we'd recovered what I deemed at the time
to be significant pieces of evidence in relation to the artwork,
in relation to the cab card,
I was confident that we would be able to go to the CPS and say,
"We have built what we think is a strong case
"to show that he had killed not only Paula Fields,
"but also Melissa Halstead."
The Crown Prosecution Service agrees Sweeney can now be charged
with double murder.
Sweeney was tried for three of fences,
which was the murder of Melissa Halstead,
the murder of Paula Fields,
and for perverting the course of justice -
in the case of Paula, for dismembering her body.
It was because the two killings were so inextricably linked to him,
coupled, of course, with the confession evidence
and also the messages contained within the artwork
that we were able to eventually convict him.
Sweeney had earplugs in his ears, yellow ones.
Ancl for the majority of the case, he sat with the earplugs in,
which I'd never seen before.
Ancl I think even the jury members sat on there sort of aghast
that he's not listening to,
or he's trying not to listen to what's being said.
Ancl I've never come across anybody with earplugs in their ears
when someone is accusing them of murder times two.
Ultimately, when Sweeney was convicted of both murders,
he declined to leave his cell and come up for sentencing.
He wanted to stay in his cell.
Finally, his victims were having the last say,
and I don't think he could handle that at all.
just weeks away from his release, Sweeney is locked up forever.
Sweeney was given a life sentence,
and his life sentence means that he will never come out of prison.
He will die there.
The killer in this case thought he got away with murder
by dumping the body parts in a canal.
What he didn't realise is with the advances of forensic science,
we were able to catch him.
I'm proud that forensics played a big part in this,
particularly that this case was the first case, as I understand it,
that cooperated with our partners in Europe.
It was a great effort between the Dutch police and us
to get the result that we did.
I feel really sad for the families
to have to undergo such a tragic death of a loved one,
especially when not all of the body has been found.
My suspicions are that Sweeney has killed more than two victims.
I believe that there are others out there,
but only time will tell.