Latest / True Nightmare Stories / The Carpenter Who Dismembered: Her Torso in a Dutch Canal
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: A woman's torso was found sealed inside a bag and
- 0:06Speaker 1: a Dutch canal in May of nineteen ninety. No head,
- 0:10Speaker 1: no hands, no identity. For eleven years she lay buried
- 0:14Speaker 1: under a name that wasn't hers, in a country she
- 0:16Speaker 1: hadn't chosen, while the man who put her there went
- 0:19Speaker 1: on living, working, moving, meeting new women. What found him
- 0:23Speaker 1: in the end wasn't a witness or confession. It was
- 0:26Speaker 1: a drawing. There is something about this case that has
- 0:29Speaker 1: stayed with me in a way I can't entirely account for.
- 0:32Speaker 1: The violence is part of it, but what truly unsettled
- 0:35Speaker 1: me was how long the world looked straight at this
- 0:38Speaker 1: man and saw nothing wrong. Her name was Melissa Halstead
- 0:41Speaker 1: and she was thirty two years old when she was killed.
- 0:44Speaker 1: She had grown up in Ohio, trained as a photographer,
- 0:47Speaker 1: and arrived in London in the mid nineteen eighties with
- 0:50Speaker 1: a camera and the particular kind of restless curiosity that
- 0:53Speaker 1: takes a person across an ocean alone. She met John
- 0:56Speaker 1: Patrick Sweeney in London in nineteen eighty six. Within months
- 1:00Speaker 1: she had moved in with him. Sweeney was a carpenter
- 1:02Speaker 1: from Kirkdale, Liverpool, large, physically powerful, and by every account
- 1:07Speaker 1: from people who knew him, capable of an extraordinary warmth.
- 1:10Speaker 1: When he chose to project it. He used several names,
- 1:14Speaker 1: Joe Scouse, Scouse, Joe Michael, Joe Johnson. The name switching
- 1:19Speaker 1: was not quirky, it was operational. He had teenage convictions
- 1:23Speaker 1: for violence, including an incident involving an axe, and two
- 1:27Speaker 1: failed marriages marked by documented brutality, one involving a wardrobe,
- 1:32Speaker 1: an axe and a knife, and a wife who fled
- 1:35Speaker 1: before he could use them. Melissa did not know any
- 1:37Speaker 1: of that when she met him, or perhaps she learned
- 1:40Speaker 1: it slowly, the way people do when they are already
- 1:43Speaker 1: inside something they cannot yet name. By nineteen eighty seven,
- 1:47Speaker 1: she and Sweeney were living in London and the violence
- 1:49Speaker 1: was already visible to authorities. Police records from that year
- 1:52Speaker 1: so he was fined for two assaults on her, a chair, throne,
- 1:56Speaker 1: punches landed. The paper trail existed. It did not stop anything.
- 2:00Speaker 1: They moved to Vienna. There, Sweeney attacked Melissa with a
- 2:04Speaker 1: hammer and fractured her skull. He was arrested, jailed, and
- 2:08Speaker 1: miles sitting in a cell in Austria, he began to
- 2:11Speaker 1: draw the sketches he produced during that imprisonment would later
- 2:14Speaker 1: become evidence in a murder trial. At the time, they
- 2:17Speaker 1: were dismissed as the hobby of a man waiting at
- 2:19Speaker 1: a sentence. Melissa, from her hospital bed, petitioned the Austrian
- 2:23Speaker 1: judge for clemency on his behalf. He was released and
- 2:26Speaker 1: expelled from Austria. She left with him. They moved to Amsterdam.
- 2:31Speaker 1: On November twod nineteen eighty nine, Melissa called her mother
- 2:35Speaker 1: in Ohio and left a voicemail. The message was brief
- 2:38Speaker 1: and warm. She said, Hi, Mom, it's Melissa. Take care
- 2:42Speaker 1: of yourself, good Bye. I love you. It was the
- 2:46Speaker 1: last time her mother heard her voice. By the end
- 2:48Speaker 1: of April nineteen ninety, Melissa was dead. On May third,
- 2:52Speaker 1: nineteen ninety, a passer by near the Vestisential Canal and
- 2:55Speaker 1: Rotterdam noticed a bag partly submerged at the water's edge.
- 2:59Speaker 1: Inside was a woman's torso, bound and wrapped. The head
- 3:03Speaker 1: was not there, neither were the hands. Rotterdam police opened
- 3:07Speaker 1: an investigation into an unidentified woman, and, finding no leads,
- 3:11Speaker 1: eventually closed it. The torso was interred in Rotterdam under
- 3:15Speaker 1: a name that was not hers. Here is the detail
- 3:17Speaker 1: that matters, and that no one connected. For over a decade,
- 3:21Speaker 1: Melissa's family had reported her missing to police in Amsterdam.
- 3:24Speaker 1: Amsterdam and Rotterdam, though separated by roughly seventy kilometers, operated
- 3:29Speaker 1: under entirely different police districts. The missing woman in Amsterdam
- 3:33Speaker 1: and the unidentified Torso and Rotterdam were never linked. They
- 3:37Speaker 1: were two separate files in two separate cities, and the
- 3:40Speaker 1: man responsible had already left the Netherlands. He returned to
- 3:43Speaker 1: London and found another woman to live with. Her name
- 3:47Speaker 1: was Delia Balma Delia Bauma met John Sweeney in Camden
- 3:50Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one. She was a nurse forty years old,
- 3:54Speaker 1: practical by training and by nature. She noticed he was large,
- 3:58Speaker 1: physically powerful, and unusually charming. She did not notice, not
- 4:03Speaker 1: at first, the way he watched doors. For three years,
- 4:06Speaker 1: the relationship held a shape that felt almost ordinary. Then
- 4:10Speaker 1: sometime in the spring of nineteen ninety four, that shape
- 4:13Speaker 1: collapsed entirely. Sweeney tied her to a bed, He held
- 4:17Speaker 1: a gun, he held a knife, and then, in the
- 4:20Speaker 1: particular silence of a room where someone is completely controlled
- 4:24Speaker 1: by someone else, he started talking. He told her he
- 4:27Speaker 1: had killed Melissa Houstead. He told her he had killed
- 4:30Speaker 1: two German women in Amsterdam as well. He said he
- 4:33Speaker 1: had sat with the bodies for three days before dismembering them.
- 4:36Speaker 1: He described where the pieces went. He was not confessing
- 4:39Speaker 1: out of guilt. He was demonstrating what he was capable of.
- 4:42Speaker 1: Delias survived that night. She carried what he told her
- 4:46Speaker 1: out of that room and into a police station. The
- 4:48Speaker 1: rational explanation stopped working here. Officers listened to her account.
- 4:53Speaker 1: They looked at her. They told her Sweeney had probably
- 4:56Speaker 1: just been trying to frighten her. They did not act
- 4:58Speaker 1: on the confession, she reported. They did not investigate the
- 5:01Speaker 1: name Melissa Halstad. Somewhere in Rotterdam, a torso and a
- 5:05Speaker 1: bag had been buried four years earlier under a nameless headstone.
- 5:10Speaker 1: The two cases sat in separate countries, in separate filing systems,
- 5:14Speaker 1: and no one connected them. There was something else behind
- 5:17Speaker 1: the bath panel in Delia's flat. Police found a bag
- 5:21Speaker 1: inside tarpauling, masking tape, gloves, masks, rope. Detective Inspector Steve Smith,
- 5:28Speaker 1: who would later lead the cold case inquiry, described it
- 5:31Speaker 1: as a killer's kit bag. It had been placed there
- 5:34Speaker 1: before the attack. Sweeney had not brought it that night
- 5:37Speaker 1: in a rush. He had prepared it in advance and
- 5:40Speaker 1: hidden it inside her home in the wall behind where
- 5:43Speaker 1: she bathed. Officers logged it, they did not pursue what
- 5:46Speaker 1: it meant. On December twenty second, nineteen ninety four, Sweeney
- 5:50Speaker 1: found Dahlia outside her flat. He had an axe, He
- 5:53Speaker 1: had a knife. He severed her left little finger. He
- 5:56Speaker 1: stabbed her twice, once through the breast and into the lung,
- 6:01Speaker 1: once through the thigh. He broke both her arms. He
- 6:04Speaker 1: punctured her lung. A neighbor intervened. Dearly required nineteen units
- 6:09Speaker 1: of blood to survive. Sweeney fled the country. He was
- 6:13Speaker 1: gone for approximately six years. He re entered the United
- 6:17Speaker 1: Kingdom under aliases Joe Scouse, Scouse, Joe Michael, Joe Johnson
- 6:22Speaker 1: and worked on building sites across London. He was large,
- 6:26Speaker 1: strong and skilled at the skies. He moved through the
- 6:29Speaker 1: city's construction workforce as if he had never left. The
- 6:32Speaker 1: people working beside him did not know his name, not
- 6:35Speaker 1: his real one. Somewhere in that period he met Paula Fields.
- 6:39Speaker 1: Paula was thirty one from Liverpool and living in circumstances
- 6:43Speaker 1: that made her easy to isolate. She was drug dependent.
- 6:46Speaker 1: She worked as a prostitute in London. She had met
- 6:49Speaker 1: Sweeney some time around the year two thousand. In December
- 6:52Speaker 1: of that year, she was killed. On February nineteenth, two
- 6:55Speaker 1: thousand one, two boys near Regent's Canal in London spotted
- 6:59Speaker 1: a bag in the wall. Police recovered it. Then they
- 7:02Speaker 1: recovered five more hold alls from the same canal. Paula
- 7:05Speaker 1: Field's remains had been distributed across all six Her head,
- 7:09Speaker 1: hands and feet had been removed. DNA confirmed her identity.
- 7:14Speaker 1: The pattern was not coincidental, it was methodical. Sweeney was
- 7:18Speaker 1: arrested in two thousand one on a building site on
- 7:21Speaker 1: Fleet Street. An armed team took him. He was carrying
- 7:24Speaker 1: a gun and a knife. The two thousand two trial
- 7:27Speaker 1: at the Old Bailey addressed the attack on dili Obama.
- 7:30Speaker 1: He was convicted on four counts attempted murder, false imprisonment
- 7:34Speaker 1: and firearms offenses. He received four life sentences. He was
- 7:38Speaker 1: in prison and that is when the drawing surfaced. During
- 7:42Speaker 1: the investigation, police seized more than three hundred artworks and
- 7:46Speaker 1: poems from Sweeney's property. The volume alone was unusual, but
- 7:50Speaker 1: it was what the works depicted and what had been
- 7:52Speaker 1: done to them that changed everything. One sketch showed a
- 7:56Speaker 1: woman's body in a fetal position, headless, handless, inside a bag.
- 8:01Speaker 1: The posture and the containment matched exactly how Melissa Halstead's
- 8:04Speaker 1: torso had been found in the Vestasingle Canal in May
- 8:08Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety. Sweeney had been in Vienna when that
- 8:11Speaker 1: torso was discovered. He had been in a cell. He
- 8:14Speaker 1: had drawn this from memory. A second sketch showed a
- 8:17Speaker 1: female figure dismembered into sections, each section separated, each placed
- 8:22Speaker 1: in a distinct container. The distribution matched the pattern of
- 8:25Speaker 1: paula Field's remains across six holdles in Regent's Canal. There
- 8:29Speaker 1: was a third piece, a drawing labeled the Scalp Hunter
- 8:33Speaker 1: a man an axe, a blonde scalp hanging from his belt,
- 8:37Speaker 1: written beneath an inscription, may you die in pain. The
- 8:42Speaker 1: name attributed to that wish was Delia's. And then the
- 8:45Speaker 1: laboratory received one specific sketch for analysis. Under ordinary light,
- 8:50Speaker 1: it appeared to be a woman playing a one man band.
- 8:53Speaker 1: Under scientific lighting, with a correction, fluid chemically lifted a
- 8:57Speaker 1: hidden inscription appeared in the white space, ripped Melissa Halstead.
- 9:01Speaker 1: He had written her name and covered it. He had
- 9:04Speaker 1: carried that image, with her name buried underneath it, through
- 9:07Speaker 1: prison and through years of movement across Europe. It was
- 9:11Speaker 1: not grief, It was not guilt. It was something closer
- 9:14Speaker 1: to possession, the act of keeping a secret inside a secret,
- 9:18Speaker 1: in plain sight for years. There is no version of
- 9:21Speaker 1: this story where everything makes sense. There was also a
- 9:24Speaker 1: poem written on a lottery card. The handwriting was his.
- 9:28Speaker 1: The words read, poor old Melissa chopped her up in bits,
- 9:32Speaker 1: food to feed the fish. Amsterdam was the pits. He
- 9:34Speaker 1: had ridden a rhyme about her. He had kept it.
- 9:37Speaker 1: D I. Steve Smith, working the cold case, built the
- 9:41Speaker 1: first joint British Dutch Europel murder inquiry. The Rotterdam torso,
- 9:45Speaker 1: unidentified for over a decade, was matched through DNA. Melissa Halstead,
- 9:50Speaker 1: the American photographer from Ohio, who had left a voicemail
- 9:53Speaker 1: for her mother on November Tewod nineteen eighty nine and
- 9:57Speaker 1: then disappeared, was finally named. Her body had been in
- 10:01Speaker 1: Rotterdam the whole time, interred under no name, while her
- 10:04Speaker 1: family in the United States had been searching. The Amsterdam
- 10:08Speaker 1: Missing Persons Report and the Rotterdam Torso inquiry had never
- 10:12Speaker 1: been linked. They belonged to different police districts in different cities,
- 10:16Speaker 1: and no one had bridged them. Sweeney had counted on
- 10:20Speaker 1: exactly that. The prosecution at the twenty eleven Old Bailey
- 10:23Speaker 1: trial built its case on what lawyers call similar fact evidence.
- 10:27Speaker 1: There was no direct forensic connection placing Sweeney at the
- 10:30Speaker 1: moment of Melissa's death. The exact cause of her death
- 10:33Speaker 1: remains unknown. How her body traveled from Amsterdam to Rotterdam,
- 10:38Speaker 1: whether by train, by coach by some other means, has
- 10:41Speaker 1: never been confirmed. What the prosecution had was pattern. What
- 10:45Speaker 1: they had was art. The sketches depicting Nlissa's disposal and
- 10:49Speaker 1: Paula's dismemberment were entered as evidence. The hidden inscription under
- 10:53Speaker 1: correction fluid was entered as evidence, The lottery card poem
- 10:57Speaker 1: was entered as evidence, Deely as testimony, the hostage confession,
- 11:01Speaker 1: the kit bag the December attack was entered as evidence,
- 11:05Speaker 1: and three hundred pieces of artwork collected across years formed
- 11:09Speaker 1: a body of documentation that Sweeney had created himself, apparently
- 11:13Speaker 1: unable to stop recording what he had done. On April fourth,
- 11:16Speaker 1: two thousand and eleven, John Patrick Sweeney, aged fifty four,
- 11:21Speaker 1: was convicted at the Old Bailey on two counts of
- 11:23Speaker 1: murder and one count of perverting the course of justice.
- 11:26Speaker 1: He received a whole life order. He will never be released,
- 11:30Speaker 1: but the conviction resolved only two names. Sweeney confessed to Delia,
- 11:35Speaker 1: while holding her at gunpoint, that he had killed two
- 11:38Speaker 1: German women in Amsterdam in addition to Melissa. Those women
- 11:41Speaker 1: have never been identified. Two unidentified women appear in his artwork.
- 11:46Speaker 1: Investigators believe the images may reference additional victims. The women
- 11:50Speaker 1: have never been traced. The total number of people John
- 11:53Speaker 1: Sweeney killed is not known. What is known is that
- 11:55Speaker 1: he documented them over three hundred pieces, poems, sketches, hidden inscriptions,
- 12:02Speaker 1: a private archive of what he had done, kept close, revised, concealed,
- 12:07Speaker 1: carried across borders. It is not clear whether the archive
- 12:10Speaker 1: was a compulsion or a precaution, or something else entirely,
- 12:14Speaker 1: something that does not have a clinical name for the
- 12:17Speaker 1: relationship between a man and the record of the people
- 12:20Speaker 1: he destroyed. The drawing called the Scalp Hunter was not abstract.
- 12:24Speaker 1: The man in it holds an axe, the scalp on
- 12:27Speaker 1: his belt is blonde. Sweeney titled it himself. He chose
- 12:31Speaker 1: that image for himself, and he kept it. And when
- 12:34Speaker 1: police found it among the three hundred, it was sitting
- 12:37Speaker 1: with the others, like any piece of work a man
- 12:39Speaker 1: might leave behind. Some questions the evidence cannot answer. Why
- 12:43Speaker 1: did he keep everything? Why did he write her name
- 12:46Speaker 1: and then cover it instead of never writing it at all.
- 12:49Speaker 1: What is the relationship between a man who dismembers the
- 12:52Speaker 1: people he kills and then draws them, names them, poems them,
- 12:56Speaker 1: hides them in white space under correction fluid? What is
- 12:59Speaker 1: the relationship between that compulsion and what we mean when
- 13:02Speaker 1: we say someone committed a crime? The Leah Balma survived.
- 13:06Speaker 1: She testified the case was built in significant part on
- 13:10Speaker 1: what she carried out of that room in nineteen ninety four,
- 13:13Speaker 1: what the police dismissed as a man trying to frighten her,
- 13:17Speaker 1: what it actually was. Melissa Halstead's head and hands have
- 13:20Speaker 1: never been recovered. The verdict came on April fourth, twenty eleven.
- 13:25Speaker 1: John Patrick Sweeney, fifty four years old, stood at the
- 13:28Speaker 1: Old Bailey and heard the word twice guilty of murdering
- 13:31Speaker 1: Melissa Halstead guilty of murdering Paula Field's The judge handed
- 13:35Speaker 1: down a whole life order, meaning Sweeney would die in prison,
- 13:39Speaker 1: never eligible for release, never walking free under any condition.
- 13:44Speaker 1: It was the harshest sentence English law allows. But a
- 13:47Speaker 1: whole life order does not recover ahead. It does not
- 13:50Speaker 1: recover two hands. Melissa Halstead's remains were buried in Rotterdam
- 13:54Speaker 1: years before anyone knew her name, a torso in a bag,
- 13:58Speaker 1: interred as an unknown woman while her mother in Ohio
- 14:01Speaker 1: waited for a phone call. It would never come. After
- 14:03Speaker 1: the DNA ad dedimanation, her family finally knew where she was.
- 14:08Speaker 1: They also knew that part of her the part that
- 14:10Speaker 1: would have confirmed her face, that would have given her
- 14:13Speaker 1: finger prints, had never been found. As of the trial date,
- 14:16Speaker 1: it still had not been. The canal had kept what
- 14:19Speaker 1: it was given. There is something specific about that absence
- 14:22Speaker 1: that resists closure in a way that a verdict cannot touch.
- 14:25Speaker 1: Paula Fields's family learned the same arithmetic. Her head, her hands,
- 14:30Speaker 1: her feet removed with the same methodical precision Sweeney had
- 14:34Speaker 1: practiced years earlier in Amsterdam. The holdels recovered from Regent's
- 14:38Speaker 1: canal gave them enough for identification, enough for a grave,
- 14:42Speaker 1: but not enough for wholeness. Two women, two sets of
- 14:45Speaker 1: unrecovered remains, the same signature applied across a decade. Then
- 14:51Speaker 1: there is the question that the whole life order leaves
- 14:53Speaker 1: entirely unanswered. Sweeney told Delia Boma, while she was tied
- 14:57Speaker 1: to his bed, that he had killed Melissa and two
- 15:00Speaker 1: German women in Amsterdam. He described sitting with the bodies
- 15:03Speaker 1: for three days. He described the dismemberment, He described the canal.
- 15:08Speaker 1: When detectives eventually examined the more than three hundred artworks
- 15:11Speaker 1: seized from his property, they found two women they could
- 15:14Speaker 1: not place, faces drawn with the same strange intimacy as
- 15:18Speaker 1: the sketches of Melissa and Paula, women who appeared in
- 15:21Speaker 1: his private world, but matched no missing persons report that
- 15:25Speaker 1: investigators could confirm those two women have never been identified.
- 15:29Speaker 1: No charges were ever brought beyond Melissa and Paula, not
- 15:33Speaker 1: because detectives dismissed the possibility of other victims. They did not,
- 15:37Speaker 1: but because a confession given while holding a woman at
- 15:40Speaker 1: gunpoint and artwork that functions as a private lexicon do
- 15:44Speaker 1: not by themselves constitute the evidence a court requires the
- 15:47Speaker 1: standard of proof does not bend for what seems obvious.
- 15:50Speaker 1: Sweeney was never asked in court to account for those
- 15:53Speaker 1: two faces. Something I find genuinely difficult to move past
- 15:57Speaker 1: after spending time with this case is that the artworking
- 15:59Speaker 1: goes exists, over three hundred pieces, poems, drawings, a man
- 16:04Speaker 1: with an axe and a blonde scalp on his belt,
- 16:06Speaker 1: the confession hidden under correction fluid. He kept all of it.
- 16:10Speaker 1: He carried it with him across aliases, across cities, across years.
- 16:15Speaker 1: Whatever that represents compulsion, pride, something that has no clean name.
- 16:20Speaker 1: It means that somewhere in that archive the answer to
- 16:23Speaker 1: who those two women were may already exist. It is
- 16:26Speaker 1: just that no one has been able to read it yet.
- 16:29Speaker 1: Diviabalma survived. That fact deserves its own sentence. She survived
- 16:34Speaker 1: the axe and the knife, and the two broken arms,
- 16:37Speaker 1: and the punctured long and nineteen units of blood transfused
- 16:40Speaker 1: into her body on a December night in nineteen ninety four.
- 16:43Speaker 1: She survived the years Sweeney spent free. She survived giving
- 16:47Speaker 1: testimony about what he whispered to her while she was restrained.
- 16:51Speaker 1: The confessions she had carried alone for years before anyone
- 16:54Speaker 1: believed they mattered. The conviction in twenty eleven was also hers.
- 16:59Speaker 1: The kit bag that all officers failed to recognize. In
- 17:01Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four, the tarpaulin, the masking tape, the rope
- 17:05Speaker 1: hidden behind her bath panel was eventually understood for what
- 17:09Speaker 1: it was. A preparation, not a precaution, not a precaution.
- 17:13Speaker 1: D I. Steve Smith, who spent years rebuilding this case
- 17:16Speaker 1: from a Rotterdam torso in a nae no one had matched,
- 17:19Speaker 1: called it a killer's kit bag. He was right, but
- 17:22Speaker 1: that recognition came seventeen years after the bag was first found,
- 17:26Speaker 1: and seventeen years after a neighbor intervened on a street
- 17:29Speaker 1: instead of a detective. Melissa's last voicemail to her mother
- 17:33Speaker 1: ended with the words take care of yourself, goodbye, I
- 17:37Speaker 1: love you. She left that message on November two, nineteen
- 17:41Speaker 1: eighty nine. She was dead before the spring ended. Her
- 17:44Speaker 1: mother heard that message and did not know it was
- 17:47Speaker 1: the last one. She could not have known. That is
- 17:50Speaker 1: the particular weight of it, not that the goodbye was withheld,
- 17:53Speaker 1: but that it was given in a voice that still
- 17:55Speaker 1: expected another call to follow. The message arrived. It always
- 17:59Speaker 1: arrived until the one that didn't. Sweeney sits in a
- 18:03Speaker 1: cell somewhere in England with a whole life order attached
- 18:06Speaker 1: to his name. The two women in his drawings remain untraced.
- 18:09Speaker 1: The canals have not given everything back. And somewhere in
- 18:13Speaker 1: three hundred pieces of artwork in a private language, built
- 18:16Speaker 1: from correction fluid and the lottery cards and pencil lines,
- 18:20Speaker 1: there may be names that no one has learned to read.
- 18:23Speaker 1: Yet that archive is not closed, It is waiting. This
- 18:27Speaker 1: show is made by Obamedia