A man has been found guilty at Manchester crown court of murdering his friend and cutting his body into dozens of pieces that were discovered in parks and nature reserves across Greater Manchester.
Marcin Majerkiewicz, 42, killed Stuart Everett, 67, known as Benny, in a “brutal attack” at the house they shared in Eccles on 27 or 28 March last year, the court heard.
After dismembering Everett, who was described by friends as “jolly” and “someone who everyone got on with”, Majerkiewicz used his phone to communicate with relatives, even sending birthday cards in an attempt to cover up his crime.
He was traced by police after a part of Everett’s body was found at Kersal Dale nature reserve by a member of the public on 4 April 2024.
A police investigation was launched in which detectives spent thousands of hours trawling through CCTV footage to identify a person they referred to as “heavy bag man”, who was seen struggling to carry a large shopping bag near where the first body part was found.
They traced the man to a housing estate in Eccles and while going door-to-door for information an officer spotted Majerkiewicz, who matched the description of “heavy bag man”, getting on a bus. When they searched him, they found Everett’s phone and bank cards, which allowed them to identify the victim.
During the trial, which lasted two and a half weeks, the jury heard how Everett had referred to Majerkiewicz as his “partner” in emails with a friend, and others had observed the pair seemed “close”.
Everett, who was born to Polish parents and originally from Derby, had known his killer for more than a decade. They had their own bedrooms in the house, which Polish-born Majerkiewicz moved into after splitting with his ex-partner.
It is not known what led Majerkiewicz to kill Everett and he did not put forward a defence in court.
A Home Office pathologist told the court it was possible to piece together the remains of Everett’s head, which showed evidence he was hit with a hammer-like weapon and is believed to have been cut up with hand tools.
After the Kersal Dale discovery, further body parts were found in other green spaces, with one of the packages containing remains discovered by a member of the public.
Majerkiewicz assumed the identity of his victim, using Everett’s phone to text his family, friends and the landlord – and even sending two handwritten birthday cards to family members. He used Everett’s bank accounts “as if they were his own”, the prosecution said.
“By that time, he was, we say, already dead, and his body, including his face had been cut up by the defendant,” Jason Pitter KC, for the prosecution, told the court.
On 3 April, Majerkiewicz researched the address of Everett’s brother in Derby, and sent him a birthday card pretending to be Everett. The card had the defendant’s fingerprints on, the prosecution said, and read: “To Rich, happy birthday and all the best my old man :) Benny xxxx.”
The victim’s brother Richard Ziemacki gave a witness statement saying he had initially “not noticed anything unusual”, going by his messages and the card he received.
However, on reflection, he told police: “I do not recognise the handwriting as belonging to my brother,” adding that his brother would not have used the phrase “my old man”.
The senior investigating officer, Det Ch Supt Lewis Hughes, said: “This is a case of rarely seen complexity and scale, with detectives initially responding to partial human remains found deep within a secluded wood.
“But we said from the start that we wouldn’t give up and the victim and their family remained at the forefront of our minds and actions throughout. We have been focused on both ensuring justice in this case, but also ensuring the victim could be returned to his family and laid to rest.
“We knew from the beginning that we had a family somewhere that would one day learn the most distressing news that a family could ever hear, and ultimately from that moment onwards our duty was to recover and identify the victim in a respectful and dignified manner and this was just as important as solving the case and catching the killer.”
Majerkiewicz will be sentenced at a later date.
