He was hardly what you’d call a catch, an itinerant carpenter with wispy, ginger hair, who spoke in a high-pitched whine and often stuttered when agitated. And yet women were drawn to John Sweeney like moths to a flame. And, like moths, many of those women had their wings burned. Some even ended up dead.
John Patrick Sweeney was born in Kirkdale, Liverpool, in 1956. He was raised by a single mother in nearby Skelmersdale, where he lived an apparently unremarkable childhood, eventually leaving school and taking up an apprenticeship as a carpenter. After qualifying at that trade he took advantage of the many work opportunities in Europe, spending several years on the continent before returning to Liverpool in 1976. Shortly after, he married a woman named Ann Bramley.
It is here that we first become aware of the true nature of John Sweeney. His new wife soon learned to her cost that Sweeney was jealous, possessive, and controlling. He demanded complete subservience and was not opposed to using his fists, or even a weapon, to enforce his rules. The long-suffering Ann endured for three tough years before filing for divorce in 1979. Two years later, she was apparently won over by Sweeney’s stories of how he was a changed man. She remarried him in 1981, and would eventually bear him two children. But by then, Ann had already discovered the truth of the old adage, “a leopard doesn’t change its spots.” In 1982, she filed charges of assault against him. A year later, the marriage had irrevocably broken down.
Sweeney next appears on our radar in 1986, in North London, where he began a relationship with US-born Melissa Halstead. On the face of it, it was an unlikely pairing. Melissa was a beautiful and intelligent ex-model, who had signed her first contract with the famous Ford modeling agency at 15. Now, aged 33, she found herself on the other side of the lens and was a talented photographer. Still, she appeared infatuated with Sweeney, indulging his extreme possessiveness and forgiving the various beatings he inflicted upon her. Three times the police were called to intervene in incidents of domestic violence. On one of those occasions, a neighbor reported that she’d heard Sweeney screaming at Melissa: “Who do you think you are? I’m the one who says what you can and can’t do.”
Melissa had by now grown terrified of Sweeney, so scared in fact that she told her sister that if she ever went missing, it probably meant that Sweeney had killed her. But she was also afraid to leave him, afraid of what he might do.
Then, in 1988, came a disappointment which, in retrospect, might just have turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Melissa was deported from the UK for having overstayed her work visa. She left immediately for Vienna, Austria, probably thinking that she’d escaped John Sweeney for good.
Sweeney, however, was not so easily discouraged. He arrived in Vienna soon after, tracked down Melissa, and forced his way into her apartment. Melissa was not home at the time so Sweeney tied up her roommate, then held the terrified woman captive while he ransacked the place looking for evidence of a new lover. When Melissa arrived, he accused her of cheating on him. Despite her denials, he attacked her, fracturing her skull with a claw hammer. For that vicious assault, he received a sentence of just six months in jail.
Melissa might have used the period of Sweeney’s incarceration to drop out of sight, perhaps to return to the States and leave her abusive lover behind forever. But she didn’t. In fact, when Sweeney showed up on her doorstep in March 1989, crying and begging to be forgiven, she took him back. Psychopaths can be very persuasive. Later that year, the two of them traveled to Stuttgart, Germany and then to Amsterdam, where they got an apartment together. Then in April 1990, Sweeney suddenly returned to Britain. A few days later, on May 3, 1990, the Dutch police pulled an army kit bag from the Westersingel canal in Rotterdam. It was found to contain the dismembered corpse of a woman, cut into ten pieces with a hacksaw, the head and hands missing. Melissa Halstead would remain unidentified until a familial DNA match nearly two decades later.
By 1994, Sweeney was back in London and living with a new lover. And like Ann Bramley and Melissa Halstead before her, Delia Balmer would quickly get to know his possessive nature and extreme cruelty. By November 1994, the Australian nurse had finally had enough and asked Sweeney to leave, a brave but foolhardy move. He pulled a gun, held it to Delia’s head and threatened to blow her brains out. He also threatened to decapitate her with an ax.
Sweeney was arrested that same day, after Delia filed charges. But he was released on bail within 24 hours. Seething with rage, he headed straight for his former lover’s apartment.
Delia had just returned home from her job at a nearby hospital when he pounced on her, attacking her on her doorstep. He trapped her under her bicycle and began slashing at her with an axe, severing a finger and inflicting horrendous head injuries. She would almost certainly have been killed had a neighbor not heard her screams and come to her rescue. The man struck Sweeney several times with a baseball bat before he eventually broke off the attack and fled. Delia would be rushed to a hospital where she’d eventually recover from her injuries, although she’d carry the mental and physical scars for the rest of her life.
With an attempted murder warrant now out for him, Sweeney again fled the UK. Over the next six years, he traveled around Europe, working on building sites in several countries, under various aliases. In 2000, he returned to London where he began a relationship with 31-year-old prostitute and crack addict, Paula Fields. A familiar pattern now followed, one involving jealous outbursts, threats of violence, and actual physical harm. Paula’s family reported her missing in February 2001, three months after she’d allowed Sweeney to move in with her. Her remains were found floating in the Regent’s Canal a short while later, cut into ten pieces and stashed in six canvas bags. As in the case of Melissa Halstead, the hands and head were missing.
Sweeney was not immediately a suspect in that murder, but the clock was rapidly running down on him for another of his many crimes. In March 2001, officers of the Metropolitan police acted on a tip-off and arrested Sweeney on a London building site, where he had been working under an assumed name. Taken into custody he was charged with the attempted murder of Delia Balmer. However, as the police were about to discover, that was not the full extent of Sweeney’s deadly career.
At Sweeney’s home, officers discovered a large weapons cache that included a couple of sawn-off shotguns, a Luger pistol, a machete, and a garrote. There was also a ‘murder kit’ consisting of a saw, a bow knife, Stanley knife, ax, rubber gloves, and rolls of duct tape, all neatly stashed in a canvas bag. And then there was Sweeney’s bizarre collection of ‘poetry’ and ‘art.’ This included over 300 violent and lurid paintings, showing female victims being killed and mutilated. The poems followed a similar theme, with one that read: “Poor old Melissa, chopped her up in bits, food to feed the fish, Amsterdam was the pits.” On the back of a wood carving Sweeney had engraved: “Inspired by and dedicated especially to Delia. May you die in pain.”
Sweeney’s macabre keepsakes seemed to point to a much broader investigation than the police had originally anticipated. But with no forensics or witnesses, and with Sweeney refusing to cooperate, the prospects for a successful conviction did not look good. Still, they had him on the attempted murder charge and it was for that offense that he was brought before the Old Bailey in 2001. Ironically, the site where he’d been arrested was just a few blocks away from the famous old court. Tried and found guilty of attempted murder, as well as various ancillary offenses, he was sentenced to four life terms.
Sweeney was sent down to serve his sentences, with very little prospect that he would ever be released. But the law was not done with him yet. Over the next decade, a joint Anglo-Dutch police investigation amassed enough evidence to eventually bring charges for the murders of Melissa Halstead and Paula Fields. Tried on those charges in 2011, Sweeney was handed a whole life tariff, the equivalent of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.
But were these two murders, horrendous though they were, the full extent of John Sweeney’s killing spree? Given S
weeney’s propensity for violence and his boasts that he’d had relationships with 30 to 40 women across Europe, it seems unlikely. The police certainly believe that there are more victims of the ‘Canal Killer’ yet to be discovered and the investigation is ongoing.
Three women, long since missing, are of particular interest to them. The first is a Brazilian national named Irani, who dated Sweeney sometime between 1996 and 1997 and disappeared during that time. The second is a Colombian by the name of Maria who, like Irani, was often seen at pubs in the Highbury and Holloway areas, usually in the company of a man matching Sweeney’s description. She disappeared in 1998. Irani and Maria are believed to be among the women depicted in Sweeney’s paintings.
A third missing woman, known as Sue, has also been linked to Sweeney. She had moved to London from Derbyshire in early 1980s and become involved in a relationship with Sweeney. However, she’d soon discovered his true nature and had taken a nursing job in Switzerland, just to get away from him. As he’d done with Melissa, Sweeney had followed. Sue had disappeared soon after.
Since John Sweeney refuses to discuss any of the crimes that are attributed to him, we shall probably never know the true magnitude of his murderous activities. It is entirely likely that he is one of Britain’s, and Europe’s, most prolific killers.
The Stepmother from Hell
Zahra Clare Baker was born on November 16, 1999, in Wagga Wagga, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants in New South Wales, Australia. Her parents, Emily Dietrich and Adam Baker, were unmarried at the time of Zahra’s birth and the relationship broke down soon after, in part due to Emily’s severe postpartum depression. Unable to cope with the strain of raising a newborn, Emily gave up custody of the baby to Adam who shortly thereafter relocated to Giru, Queensland.
Young Zahra had endured a traumatic start to her short life but it was to get even worse in 2005, when she was diagnosed with bone cancer, leading to the amputation of a lower leg. She was later found to have cancer of the lungs as well and the chemotherapy treatments she had to endure resulted in partial hearing loss.
Life had handed Zahra a very rough hand indeed. Not even six years old, she was an amputee and had to rely on a hearing aid. And it must have been tough on her father too. Seeking companionship, he began browsing various online dating sites and it was through one of those sites that he met Elisa Fairchild.
Elisa was an American, originally from North Carolina, who had arrived in Australia just months before. She and Adam hit it off immediately and it wasn’t long before she’d traveled to Queensland to visit him. After a whirlwind few weeks, he proposed and she said yes. The couple was soon married and settled down to domestic life. Zahra had a new and loving stepmother. It seemed the little girl had caught a break at last.
But there were a few things that Adam Baker did not know about his new bride. He did not know, for example, that she had been married seven times before and had never bothered divorcing three of her former husbands. He did not know that she had left in her wake a trail of petty crimes and unpaid bills, that she’d had no fewer than 42 different addresses over the previous seven years. He did not know either that she had three children from prior relationships, and that part of the reason she’d moved to Australia was to escape charges of child abuse.
None of these nasty facts would surface until later. For now, Elisa seemed the perfect wife to Adam and the perfect stepmother to Zahra. And there was even better news in 2008 when Zahra's cancer went into remission. That same year, Elisa suggested that the family should move to the US and Adam agreed. It was shortly after that move that a different side of Elisa emerged, a brooding, malevolent individual who seemed to take pleasure in taunting and hurting her disabled stepdaughter.
The family lived for a time with Elisa’s father but he evicted them when he could no longer stand Elisa’s abuse of Zahra. She frequently beat the little girl and locked her in her room unattended for hours. And that abuse got progressively worse as the Bakers moved to a succession of low-cost homes in Caldwell and Catawba Counties. Neighbors spoke of physical and mental abuse, of neglect.
Finally, with the Bakers staying in a trailer park in Hickory, North Carolina, Child Protective Services got involved. Zahra had arrived at school sporting a black eye, and a teacher had informed the authorities. Elisa claimed that the injury was the result of a fall and the matter went no further. Thereafter, she withdrew the fourth-grader from school. She claimed that she intended home schooling Zahra, and if home schooling could be taken as a euphemism for cruelty and mistreatment, she did just that.
At around 5:30 a.m., on the morning of October 9, 2010, Elisa Baker called the local 911 line and reported a fire at her residence. Firefighters responded and found a small blaze in Adam Baker’s Chevy Tahoe, which was quickly extinguished. Spilled gasoline around the vehicle suggested that the fire might have been deliberately set but since there was minimal damage, and no injuries, the matter went no further. Then, at around 2 p.m. that same day, a second 911 call was placed, this time by Adam Baker himself. He reported that his daughter was missing and that he’d found a note in his truck demanding a $1 million ransom. The note was not addressed to Adam, but to his boss, Mark Coffey, and so it was initially assumed that the kidnapper had mistaken Zahra for Coffey's daughter. Adam further theorized that whoever had started the fire in the truck had done so in order to create a diversion so that they could snatch Zahra.
From the outset, investigators were skeptical of the story told by the Bakers. And those doubts were reinforced when police sniffer dogs gave positive alerts to the scent of human remains in both Adam’s truck and Elisa’s sedan. Elisa was then asked to submit to a lie detector test. She agreed… and failed. Under intense interrogation, she eventually admitted to writing the ransom note, although she denied harming Zahra or knowing what had happened to her. The polygraph, however, said different.
With an admission on record that she had deliberately sought to mislead the police, Elisa Baker was placed under arrest on October 10, 2010, charged with obstruction of justice. Other charges soon followed including indictments for communicating threats, writing bad checks, larceny, and driving with a revoked license. On the issue of her daughter's whereabouts, however, Baker continued to protest her innocence. And since an extensive search had failed to turn up the missing girl, there was nothing that the police could do about it.
Elisa Baker might well have escaped justice for the murder of her stepdaughter had she managed to keep her mouth shut. But time behind bars soon softened her up. On October 23, her lawyer, Lisa Dubs, contacted the district attorney’s office with the offer of a deal. Her client would unravel the mystery of Zahra Baker’s disappearance in exchange for a charge of second-degree murder. With seemingly no prospect of ever finding Zahra’s remains, the prosecutor’s office reluctantly agreed. Whether this actually resulted in the truth being told about the little girl’s tragic death is debatable.
According to Elisa’s story, Zahra had become ill some time in September and had died of natural causes on September 24. Adam had then dismembered the tiny corpse and the two of them had then driven to various locations to disperse the remains. They’d then colluded to cover the death by concocting the kidnapping story.
This account seems highly fanciful, particularly given Elisa’s history of child abuse and documented proof of the mistreatment she had meted out to her stepdaughter. Moreover, Adam’s involvement in the disposal of the corpse was easily disproven. Cell phone towers placed Elisa in the areas where Zahra's remains were later found. They did not place Adam at those locations.
So, what involvement (if any) did Adam Baker have in his daughter’s death? We shall never know for certain. However, he is not completely absolved of responsibility. If Zahra died on September 24, why did he only report her missing on October 10? One can only conclude that he was, at least, an accessory after the fact.
During November 2010, Elisa Baker led police officers to various locations in Catawba County and Caldwe
ll County where they retrieved numerous bones and body parts, although they failed to recover the little girl’s head. Other evidence was also found at the scenes, a bloody mattress and bed sheets, and a pair of bloodstained rubber gloves. One particularly poignant discovery was Zahra’s prosthetic leg, casually tossed into a dumpster behind the Fox Ridge Apartments in Hickory.
Elisa Baker was officially charged with second-degree murder in February 2011, the indictment asserting that Baker had “a history and pattern of physical, verbal and psychological abuse of the victim” and had “desecrated the victim’s body to hinder detection.”
She pleaded guilty to the charge and in September 2011 was sentenced to 18 years in prison. No charges were ever brought against Adam Baker. Elisa was later indicted on federal drugs charges. If found guilty, she faces up to 140 years in prison.
A Pocketful of Death
Miss Christina Catherine Bradfield was the epitome of a respectable, middle-class matron. At the age of 40, she had neither a man in her life nor any prospects of marriage. She preferred it that way. Those who knew Miss Bradfield described her as a charitable person who found no greater joy than in helping others. On Sundays, she taught Bible classes. During the week, she was to be found managing her brother’s tarpaulin shop in Liverpool, England. John Copeland Bradfield based himself at the company’s factory, leaving Christina to manage the office and retail outlet at 86 Old Hall Street. It was a responsibility that she greatly cherished.
Murder Most Vile Volume 12: 18 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Murder Books) Page 3