John Sweeney was a carpenter from Liverpool who drifted between London and building sites in mainland Europe for much of the 1980s and 1990s, often under other names. In April 2011 an Old Bailey jury convicted him of murdering two women he had been in relationships with. Melissa Halstead, an American former model, died in the Netherlands in 1990; her remains were pulled from a canal in Rotterdam that May but were not identified until 2008. Paula Fields, a mother of three from north London, died about ten years later; her remains were found in the Regent's Canal in Camden in February 2001. The heads and hands of both women were never found.
By the time of the murder trial, Sweeney was already serving life for an axe attack on another former girlfriend in Kentish Town in 1994, after which he had spent years on the run. Much of the case against him rested on more than 300 paintings, drawings and poems recovered from his homes, including one painting in which he called himself "the Scalp Hunter." The judge gave him a whole life order. Police said they feared there were other victims and appealed for help in tracing several former girlfriends; no further charges were brought. Sweeney died in HMP Whitemoor in August 2026, aged 69, without saying where the missing remains were.
Sweeney was born and grew up in Kirkdale, in north Liverpool, the Scottish Daily Express reported in 2024. It said he worked as a bricklayer and carpenter, married and had two children, and that the marriage ended in the early 1980s, after which he moved to London hoping to make a name for himself by selling his paintings. The Islington Tribune, reporting his conviction in 2011, described him as a divorced carpenter with two children who lived in Kentish Town.
The Camden New Journal, which covered the case for more than a decade, described him in 2011 as a handsome and charming man who led a transient, bohemian life and spoke with a stutter. He was known around the Holloway Road area of north London and used the names Joe Johnson, Joe Carroll and "Scouse Joe." He visited and worked across Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, and he later worked on construction sites on the continent under assumed names, which the Dayton Daily News said helped him evade the authorities for years.
Melissa Halstead grew up in Oakwood, a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. The Springfield News-Sun, drawing on interviews with her family before the trial, reported that she went to Harman Elementary, left Stebbins High School before graduating and worked as a waitress at a steakhouse. As a teenager she modeled locally and appeared on the Mike Douglas show. At 19 she was discovered in New York by Eileen Ford, and the Dayton Daily News reported that she left home to join Ford Models. Her career took her to Paris, Italy and Milan, and then from New York to London.
Her father, Dr. Jack Halstead, had a dental practice in Dayton; he and her mother, Francis, divorced, and he died about two years before his daughter was identified. Her older brother, also named Jack, served in the Army in Berlin and later worked as a carpenter in a Dayton suburb, where, the Springfield News-Sun reported, he keeps her ashes. He told the paper that the loss of contact with his sister had haunted him his whole adult life. Her sister, Chance O'Hara, lived in California.
When modeling work in London dried up, Halstead turned to photography, and that work brought her into contact with Sweeney. The Springfield News-Sun put their meeting in 1988; her sister told the Old Bailey that she had visited Halstead in London in the summer of 1987, when Halstead was working as a photographer and makeup artist, and had seen Sweeney then.
Chance O'Hara gave evidence by video link from San Francisco at the 2011 trial. She described Sweeney as possessive, angry and demeaning toward her sister. During her 1987 visit, she said, he flew into a rage during a photo shoot at a flat in Belgravia, beat Halstead and smashed mirrors and vases; O'Hara said she later suffered flashbacks.
O'Hara also told the jury that her sister had once said that if she ever went missing, Sweeney would have killed her and made sure her body was never found. Under cross-examination by Sweeney's counsel, Michael Wood QC, she could not remember whether she had told the family about this in the 18 years between her sister's death and the identification, and Wood suggested she had only recently begun to speak of it. She insisted on what she had seen and heard.
The jury also heard that Sweeney had been jailed in mainland Europe for attacking Halstead with a claw hammer. The Springfield News-Sun said the conviction was in Austria and that he served six months. O'Hara said her sister had wanted him released after he cried, begged and promised to leave her alone.
In 1989 Halstead was deported from Britain, the Islington Tribune reported, and Sweeney followed her to the continent. She settled in Amsterdam; the Springfield News-Sun gave her address as Kromme Waal, a canal-side street in the city center. The IDFA documentary festival's description of a later film about the case says the two had lived together in Amsterdam when she was killed.
Halstead's former landlord in Amsterdam told the Old Bailey that when he came back from a holiday in April 1990 she had vanished from her basement flat without paying her rent. On May 3, 1990, Rotterdam police recovered a woman's body from the Westersingel, a canal in the city center. It had been placed in bags; the head and hands, and, according to the Islington Tribune, the legs, were missing. With no face, no fingerprints and no missing person report to match, the woman could not be identified, and the case went cold.
Her family became worried when she did not call her mother on her birthday, November 2. The Islington Tribune's account of the trial gives the year as 1989, and the Dayton Daily News gives it as 1990; the sources do not settle the point. Sweeney returned to London.
In London Sweeney began a relationship with a nurse, who is not named here. In 1994 she tried to end it and changed her locks. The Springfield News-Sun reported that he had told her before the attack that he had killed a former girlfriend named Melissa. At that point the Rotterdam body had no name, and no suspect had been connected to it.
He then attacked her with an axe and a knife at the flat they had shared in Leighton Grove, Kentish Town. A neighbor arrived and intervened, and she survived. Sweeney escaped and went on the run.
The woman later wrote about her experience, and her account was adapted for television in 2024. She was too distressed to give evidence at the 2011 murder trial, the Islington Tribune reported. The prosecution nonetheless put before the jury a painting Sweeney had made of a woman having her throat cut, dedicated to her and inscribed "May you die in pain," which he had later tried to cover with correction fluid.
The sources do not trace Sweeney's movements in detail between 1994 and his arrest in 2001. The Camden New Journal reported that he worked as a carpenter in north London and on construction sites across Europe under his aliases. Police later said that two women they wanted to trace, both known to him, had been in north London in 1996 to 1998, while he was a fugitive, and that he drew one of them in about 1997.
Paula Fields was a mother of three from Highbury, in the borough of Islington. The Camden New Journal described her in 2026 as having worked in a launderette. She met Sweeney while he was on the run, and after their relationship she began working as a prostitute, the Islington Tribune reported. Her sister, Irene Allahgreen, later told the court that the family never had the chance to say goodbye.
Sources give her age as 31 (PA, the Associated Press and the Dayton Daily News), 29 (Islington Tribune, 2011) and 33 (Narrowboat World, 2010); 31 is the figure most of them give. Where she was in the months before her death has not been described.
In February 2001 boys fishing in the Regent's Canal in Camden Town saw bags floating in the water. Inside six weighted holdalls were the dismembered remains of a woman. Her head, hands and feet were missing. Narrowboat World, reporting in 2010, said police had concluded the remains had been in the water for some months and that a post-mortem examination could not establish a cause of death. The remains were identified as those of Paula Fields.
Detectives suspected Sweeney, but the case could not be proven. The Camden New Journal later wrote that the murder remained unsolved for ten years, through repeated police appeals, before it was linked to the body in Rotterdam.
Sweeney was arrested in 2001 as he left a London building site, the Daily Mail reported in 2011 (as quoted by IrishCentral). According to the Press Association in 2010, he was ordered to serve four life sentences in 2001 for the axe attack and for keeping a stockpile of loaded guns. The Courier and the Springfield News-Sun date the attempted murder sentence to 2002. The IDFA festival description says he had been in prison since 2001.
Police searching his properties found hundreds of artworks and writings. These were the materials that would later become central to the murder case.
In 2008 a Rotterdam cold case team using newer DNA techniques matched the Westersingel remains to members of the Halstead family. Eighteen years after she disappeared, the woman in the canal had a name. The identification connected the Dutch case to Sweeney, and through him to the Camden canal case.
Dutch and British police set up a joint investigation. The Islington Tribune named Detective Chief Inspector Howard Groves of the Metropolitan Police as the officer who led it with a Dutch cold case unit, and IrishCentral, citing the Daily Mail, said the operation was funded by the European Commission.
On March 30, 2010, the Associated Press reported from The Hague that the two forces were working together on the two cases and now believed one person had killed both women. Jeichien de Graaff, a spokeswoman for the Dutch prosecution service, said investigators believed the same person was responsible. That evening the cases featured on the BBC's Crimewatch and on a similar Dutch program. The Press Association reported the same day that detectives wanted the public's help to keep a suspected double murderer in prison, because he could be freed within months.
In late April 2010 a 53-year-old man was arrested in London over both killings, Narrowboat World reported, and the two cases were formally linked. The Islington Tribune reported that Sweeney was arrested at Gartree Prison, where he was serving his life sentence, and that officers found in his cell a drawing of a headless body cut into pieces. He was charged with both murders.
The trial at the Central Criminal Court lasted about five weeks in March and early April 2011. Sweeney, then 54, denied both murders. The prosecutor, Brian Altman QC, told the jury that Sweeney had a preoccupation with dismemberment and a hatred of women, and that he had used saws to cut up the bodies. Witnesses described possessive and controlling relationships; the Dayton Daily News reported testimony that he hated women and became violent when rejected.
There was no forensic evidence tying him to either body, and no confession in the ordinary sense. The prosecution relied on the pattern of his relationships, the similarity of the two disposals, the witnesses, and his own writing and art. The Islington Tribune reported that prosecutors treated a note he had written on the back of a lottery scratchcard as a confession; it referred to Halstead's body being cut up and disposed of in water. More than 300 paintings, drawings and poems were seized from his properties, many of them autobiographical, according to the Tribune, and many showing dismembered bodies resembling Halstead and the woman he attacked in 1994. In one, showing a bloody axe, he called himself "the Scalp Hunter," PA reported.
Sweeney's defense argued that the overlap between the women in his life was a coincidence. It suggested to the jury that two other men could be responsible: Anthony Hardy, the so-called Camden Ripper, who killed three women in 2002, and the German killer Frank Gust. Sweeney said he had been framed by the police and had no motive to harm either woman. The Camden New Journal later noted that Hardy has no connection to the case.
On April 4, 2011, after deliberating for less than ten hours, the jury unanimously found Sweeney guilty of murdering Melissa Halstead and Paula Fields. It also convicted him of perverting the course of justice by dismembering Paula Fields's body.
He was sentenced the next day, April 5, 2011, by Mr Justice Saunders. Sweeney refused to leave his cell and was not in court. The judge imposed a whole life order, meaning he would never be released. He described the crimes as terrible and wicked, and, according to the Dayton Daily News, as exceptional in their brutality; he said the disposal of the bodies showed substantial planning and that Sweeney had sought to control the women in his life. The Islington Tribune reported that the judge said he could not be certain why the killings happened, and that he treated the mutilation as a serious aggravating factor because of the lasting distress it caused the families. Because the heads were never found, the cause of death of neither woman could be established.
In a victim impact statement, Irene Allahgreen said the person responsible should be required by law to explain where her sister's body parts were, and that not knowing where or why was a daily torture. She asked that Sweeney be made to reveal where Paula's head, hands and feet were. The Halstead family's statement, read by Detective Chief Inspector Paul Webb, described Melissa as an intelligent and very attractive young woman and said the family hoped Sweeney would never be free to commit such crimes again. Her brother had told the Springfield News-Sun that he intended to travel to the sentencing.
DCI Groves thanked the families for their patience and said Sweeney had wrongly believed he would never be caught.
No appeal against the murder convictions or the whole life order has been reported, and none of the accounts of his death in 2026 mentions one.
These are suspicions and appeals by police, not findings of any court. Sweeney was never charged with any other killing.
After the verdicts, DCI Groves said the investigation would continue to identify and trace other possible victims in the UK, the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. Detectives said they did not know what had happened to several women and needed to learn more about them and their relationships with Sweeney. The Islington Tribune reported that detectives feared five former girlfriends, three of them from Islington, might have been victims since the 1970s.
In May 2011 the Metropolitan Police released photographs of Sweeney from the 1980s and 1990s and drawings from his collection. The Camden New Journal listed the women they wanted to find:
Irani, a Brazilian woman believed to be in her mid-40s in 1996 to 1997, known in pubs and restaurants around Highbury and Holloway Road, who may have worked as a kitchen cleaner. Sweeney's drawing of her was believed to date from 1997.
Maria, a Colombian woman believed to be in her late 30s in 1997 to 1998, known around Finsbury Park and Holloway Road.
An English woman, then in her late 20s or early 30s, a churchgoer from Derbyshire who was training to be a nurse, was known around Holloway Road and Seven Sisters Road in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and may have moved to Switzerland. The Islington Tribune gave her name as Sue.
An unidentified woman in a drawing marked "London 1985," found among his possessions.
In February 2013 Metropolitan Police officers working on Operation Sherston traveled to Fife, in Scotland, to look for a woman, possibly called Fiona, believed to have been Sweeney's girlfriend in the mid-1980s and to have shared a house with him on Hornsey Park Road, north London, in 1985, The Courier reported. In May 2013 the paper reported that she had been found safe and well in England, and that detectives had concluded he had not harmed her. A police source said she was traced after local media carried the appeal.
The Islington Tribune also reported in 2011 that Dutch police would examine a claim that Sweeney had shot two German men he found with Halstead. The Springfield News-Sun reported that Dutch authorities also suspected him in a 1992 Amsterdam canal case involving an unidentified woman, and quoted the prosecution spokeswoman Jeichien de Graaff as saying they could not exclude that he was responsible for other murders. No charges followed from any of these lines of inquiry.
Sweeney died at HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire, on August 14, 2026, aged 69, the Press Association reported on August 26, 2026. PA cited The Times as reporting that he died of cancer. A Prison Service spokesperson said the crimes had been terrible and that its thoughts remained with the victims and their families. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman opened an investigation, which IBTimes UK described as standard procedure. The Camden New Journal reported on September 4, 2026, that the Prison Service declined to comment further.
He never told detectives where the heads and hands of either woman were. Melissa Halstead's family recovered her remains; her brother keeps her ashes in Ohio. Paula Fields's head, hands and feet have never been found.
The Dutch director Jaap van Hoewijk followed the Rotterdam and British detectives for his feature documentary Kill Your Darling, which premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2012 and screened at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2013. According to the festival descriptions, he interviewed relatives of Halstead and of Sweeney, attended the trial, and used a long letter Sweeney wrote to him as the basis of a voice-over; when Sweeney later telephoned him from prison, van Hoewijk questioned him directly.
In 2019 the Dutch legal publisher Boom published The Creative Carpenter: Biased Presentation of Evidence in a Jury Trial, written by students and staff of Project Reasonable Doubt under Peter van Koppen, emeritus professor of legal psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Maastricht University. The publisher's description says the authors examined the police investigation and the trial, argued that the conviction rested on his drawings and poems rather than on physical evidence, and raised questions about both.
The woman Sweeney attacked in 1994 published an account of her life with him, and in 2024 ITV broadcast a drama based on it.
The safety of the verdicts: the Project Reasonable Doubt book (2019) questions whether the evidence, especially the artwork, should have carried the weight it did. No court has reviewed the convictions, and no appeal was found.
Cause of death: because the heads were never found, neither the Dutch nor the British authorities could establish how either woman died. Some press accounts describe the method in specific terms, but in the court record the cause remains unknown.
Further victims: the women named in police appeals, the claim about two German men and the 1992 Amsterdam case are police suspicions only. One woman sought in 2013 was found alive.
Sweeney's reported statement to the woman he attacked in 1994 that he had killed "Melissa" comes from press accounts of her story; the reports do not say whether police acted on it at the time, when the Rotterdam remains still had no name.
Dates: sources differ on when he met Halstead (1987 or 1988), the year of her missed birthday call (1989 or 1990), and whether his attempted murder sentence came in 2001 or 2002.
1980s: Sweeney, a Liverpool carpenter, moves to London; he works in north London and across Europe.
1987 or 1988: meets Melissa Halstead, an American former model working as a photographer in London; her sister sees him attack her during a photo shoot in Belgravia in 1987.
Before 1990: jailed for six months in Austria for a hammer attack on Halstead (Springfield News-Sun).
1989: Halstead is deported from Britain; Sweeney follows her to the continent.
April 1990: Halstead is found to have vanished from her flat in Amsterdam.
May 3, 1990: a woman's remains are recovered from the Westersingel canal, Rotterdam; she cannot be identified.
1994: after she ends the relationship, he is arrested and bailed, then attacks her with an axe and a knife in Kentish Town; a neighbor intervenes, and he flees.
1994 to 2001: a fugitive, working in north London and Europe under aliases.
About 2000: meets Paula Fields, a mother of three from Highbury.
February 2001: Paula Fields's remains are found in six holdalls in the Regent's Canal, Camden Town.
2001: Sweeney is arrested leaving a London building site; given four life sentences (dated 2001 by PA, 2002 by other sources) for attempted murder and firearms offenses.
2008: Rotterdam cold case detectives identify the Westersingel remains as Melissa Halstead by DNA.
March 30, 2010: Dutch and British police appeal on television for information.
Late April 2010: Sweeney is arrested at Gartree Prison and charged with both murders.
March 2011: trial opens at the Old Bailey.
April 4, 2011: unanimous guilty verdicts on two murders and perverting the course of justice.
April 5, 2011: Mr Justice Saunders imposes a whole life order in Sweeney's absence.
May 2011: police release photographs and drawings to trace other former girlfriends.
2012: Kill Your Darling, a documentary on the Halstead case, premieres at IDFA.
February to May 2013: police search for a woman from Scotland linked to Sweeney in 1985; she is found safe and well.
2019: The Creative Carpenter, a critique of the case, is published in the Netherlands.
2024: ITV broadcasts a drama based on the 1994 survivor's account.
August 14, 2026: Sweeney dies at HMP Whitemoor, Cambridgeshire, aged 69.
August 26, 2026: PA reports the death; the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman is investigating.