In the early 2000s, John Sweeney’s face was a familiar sight on the front page of the UK’s newspapers.
And for good reason. Dubbed the “scalp hunter” by the media, Sweeney was arrested in 2001 and his now serving life in prison for attacking and killing multiple women over the course of the 1990s.
That includes Delia Balmer, who struck up, and managed to survive, a relationship with him. Now a new ITV drama is bringing her story to a wider audience for the first time. Based on Balmer’s book, Living With A Serial Killer, the show stars Anna Maxwell Martin and Shaun Evans as Sweeney.
The Sweeney in the show is certainly terrifying – especially as the mask slips and his horrendous crimes start to come to light. But what was the real Sweeney like? Here’s what we know.
Early years
The young Sweeney was born in Kirkdale, Liverpool in 1956, and he grew up with his mother in nearby Skelmersdale. He trained as a carpenter and joiner, and in 1976 he married a woman named Anne Bramley.
The pair started their life together in Skelmersdale, and had two children, but their marriage was by all accounts troubled. They divorced in 1979, but two years later they remarried.
It might have been an attempt to make the marriage work, but barely a year later Anne went to the police, saying he had threatened her. The pair got divorced again, and by the mid 1980s Sweeney had moved to London.
It was there that he met his first known victim: an American model named Melissa Halstead, who had moved to the UK in 1986. They moved in together, but Halstead was faced with deportation, and Sweeney was violent: she ran away.
He followed her to Vienna, and in 1988 was arrested for attacking her with a hammer. Despite that, Halstead bailed him out of prison, before fleeing to Amsterdam. Again, Sweeney followed her there, and the pair seem to have started their relationship again, moving in together again in 1990.
Shortly after, she vanished entirely. Her family alerted the police, but the case soon ground to a halt. And though a dismembered body was pulled out of a canal in Rotterdam, the lack of identifying marks meant they never found out who it was – until DNA testing in 2008 confirmed it was Halstead. Sweeney had killed her, and soon fled back to the UK.
Delia Balmer
Balmer met Sweeney by chance at the Hawley Arms pub in Camden in 1991.
The pair bonded over their love of travel, and Sweeney told her he often worked on construction sites in Germany. While this was true, this hid a darker past. Not that Balmer knew that: the relationship took off. They moved in together, and soon Sweeney became violent. He emotionally manipulated her, called her at all hours to check on her and made her friends and family extremely worried.
Balmer herself recalled how she took him to meet her family in Texas. “He did not fit in,” she explained in the ITV documentary Until I Kill You: The Real Story, and her brother Stewart added that “I just figured my sister knew better.”
Stewart described an occasion where he’d asked Sweeney if he’d ever killed anyone – to which Sweeney refused to give a straight answer.
There were also other worrying signs. Early on, Balmer found a green bag among his possessions, containing masking tape, Marigold gloves, rope, a saw and a plastic sheet. It was a wake-up call, she later said, a “body disposal kit meant for me.”
In 1994, she left him, changed her locks and asked the police to investigate what she’d found in the bag. Shortly after, however, Sweeney managed to force his way into her home. He tied her to her bed, held her at gun and knifepoint and held her hostage for four days.
He also seemingly confessed to killing Halstead and two other men in Amsterdam. When he left the flat, Balmer managed to escape and went straight to the police. They arrested Sweeney for holding her hostage, but eventually released him on bail - and Sweeney swiftly took his revenge.
On December 22, 1994, Balmer was heading home after finishing her last shift of the year. Sweeney attacked her with an axe, cutting off one of Balmer’s fingers and stabbing her repeatedly, leaving her with life-changing injuries.
She was saved by a neighbour, who hit him over the head with a baseball bat. Balmer spent months in hospital recovering from her injuries, while Sweeney went on the run.
The end
Sweeney spent seven years on the run, living under assumed names, before ultimately being caught in 2001. Shortly before he was caught, he ran into 31-year-old single mother Paula Fields.
She was a Liverpudlian who had moved to London and was making ends meet as a sex worker. Fields was addicted to crack cocaine and in a vulnerable position, and seems to have struck up a relationship with Sweeney.
She went missing in December 2000, and in February 2001, her body was found in London’s Regent’s Canal by two boys. It had been dismembered and put into six holdalls, then dumped.
Sweeney was arrested four weeks later. He was given four life sentences for attempting to murder Balmer (she gave evidence against him in court), and then in 2010 was charged with the murders of Halstead and Fields.
Later, the police would raid Sweeney’s squat and find more than 300 violent, pornographic paintings and poems – including one on the back of a scratch card that read: "poor old Melissa, chopped her up in bits, food to feed the fish, Amsterdam was the pits."
There were drawings of women tied up and knives dripping with blood. Another drawing was of a gravestone, with the words: "RIP Melissa Halstead." One of those paintings was named ‘The Scalphunter’, which possibly contributed to his nickname.
There was another chilling detail: neither Fields’ nor Halsteads’ heads were ever found, and Sweeney has refused to reveal what he did with them.
“It's another form of control,” Balmer later said. “Only John knows where the missing body parts are. When we were in Germany in 1993 he told me that he had stuck a terrarium with his dead pet tarantula inside a brick wall at the building site where he had been working.
"He could easily have done something similar with the missing body parts of his victims. Perhaps somewhere across Europe, concealed in the walls of a building constructed in the 1990s, are Melissa's head or hands, unknown to anyone but John. That is what I believe he did with them."
He was convicted in 2011, and refused to leave his cell for the verdict, leaving the judge to sentence him in his absence. Before his conviction, Detective Chief Inspector Norman McKinlay visited Sweeney in prison to ask him about the murders.
"He said nothing at all,” he later told BBC News. “He just looked at me, staring and smirking. His eyes always got me. He had piercing eyes."
Sweeney is now serving life in prison, with no possibility of release.
"These were terrible, wicked crimes,” said Judge Mr Justice Saunders when Sweeney was convicted for the second time. “The heads of the victims having been removed, it is impossible to be certain how they were killed. The mutilation of the bodies is a serious aggravating feature of the murders.
"Not only does it reveal the cold-blooded nature of the killer, but it has added greatly to the distress of the families to know that parts of their loved ones have never been recovered.”
Until I Kill You is streaming now on ITV
