A sexual predator who murdered law graduate Zara Aleena as she walked home alone after stalking the streets in search of a female victim has been jailed for life.
Jordan McSweeney, 29, trailed Ms Aleena as she headed home from a night out with a friend, before launching a ferocious attack and leaving her to die on the driveway of a home in Ilford, northeast London.
McSweeney, a heavily-convicted criminal with a history of violence towards women, stamped on and strangled Ms Aleena in the early hours of June 26, just nine days after he had been set free from prison on licence.
He had been recalled to prison after missing probation meetings, but had not yet been located by police to be taken into custody when he carried out the murder.
The “savage and brutal attack” on Ms Aleena, 35, was caught on chilling CCTV, while McSweeney had been seen following a series of other women earlier in the evening before selecting Ms Aleena as his victim.
Prosecutor Oliver Glasgow KC told the court McSweeney - drunk and high on drugs - launched an attack that was “with a savagery that is almost impossible to believe”, and was seen laughing and joking with friends on the day after the murder.
“On the night of 25 June 2022, he had left a pub in Ilford and roamed the streets looking for a woman to attack and to sexually assault”, said Mr Glasgow.
“He followed a number of different women and, given what happened to Zara, there can be no doubt that they were lucky to have escaped unharmed. Tragically for Zara Aleena, she was not as fortunate as the others.
“The defendant saw, decided to follow her and was determined to assault her. He approached her from behind, grabbed her around the neck and dragged her into a driveway.
“Despite being only yards from a public street and from onlooking houses, the defendant attacked Zara Aleena with a savagery that is almost impossible to believe.
“He repeatedly kicked and stamped on her head and body; he tore some of her clothes from her body in order that he could sexually assault her; and then he attacked her again, kicking and stamping on her face and neck, and returning several times to continue the brutal violence.
“Finally, once satisfied that she would no longer be able to report him for what he had done, he walked away, taking her mobile telephone with him which he threw over a garden wall, thus ensuring that neither she nor anyone else who might find her could use the phone to call for help.”
At the Old Bailey on Wednesday, McSweeney refused to come into court to be sentenced by Mrs Justice Cheema Grubb, with his lawyer saying the killer did not want to see the CCTV which captured the attack and his movements during the evening.
The judge sentenced him to life in prison with a minimum term of 38 years, concluding McSweeney‘s decision to cower in his court cell shows “the man who took Zara Aleena’s life has no spine at all”.
She said Ms Aleena “was better than him - talented, spirited, intelligent, and kind”.
“Spending the evening with her friend, she had done nothing wrong, taken no misstep, no lack of sense. She was simply a happy, healthy woman who was living her life in what most Londoners think of as the best city in the world.”
The judge said McSweeney, a former bare-knuckle boxer, had shown “no care, no remorse, and no contrition” while laughing and joking the day after the murder, and in murdering Ms Aleena aafter “satisfying his lust”, he had “destroyed the woman he had just degraded with sickening deliberation”.
“He is a pugnacious and deeply violent man, with a propensity for violence”, she added. “It was a sudden escalation of violence which had simmered in his life for many years.”
Following McSweeney’ guilty pleas to murder and sexual assault, Ms Aleena’s aunt Farah Naz said her niece had been conscious of the dangers for women after the murders of Bibaa Henry, Nicole Smallman, Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa. But she “walked everywhere” and had felt “safe in the community where she was well known.”
In a powerful impact statement in court, Ms Naz said the family have dedicated themselves to campaigning for an end to violence against women as they cope with their grief.
“We are compelled to work with others to change society, to act, so other peoples´ daughters can be safe and protected in a way that Zara was not”, she said.
“When a human is murdered, a family is murdered, when a human is murdered, humanity is murdered.
“ Zara lost the right to live her life. Zara lost the right to die a natural death and her right to die surrounded by her loved ones.
“Zara lost the future she worked so hard for, Zara lost her dreams to have a family, to have children, to play with her children, the right to grow old. Zara lost her chance to enjoy the fruits of her hard work, she lost the chance to live her dream of buying her own house.
“She lost the dream of enjoying her successes. Her right to be safe, her right to be protected by a state that she worked for, was brutally taken.
Zara was faced with horror, hatred, pain, mercilessly stamped on, to her death. She suffered physically, emotionally, mentally in her last hours.
“Everything she was, everything she worked so hard for, every dream she had yet to live was destroyed by someone she didn’t even know, someone else´s sense of entitlement.”
The University of Westminster law graduate had begun working at the Royal Courts of Justice just five weeks before her death, and was “the happiest she had ever been”, her family said.
The murder happened at around 2.45am, when Ms Aleena was walking home alone from a night out with a friend.
McSweeney, wearing a prison-issue vest, had been drinking heavily and taking illegal drugs at the Great Spoon of Ilford Wetherspoons pub with a friend on June 25, before being ejected at just after 11pm for harassing a female member of the bar staff.
“Despite her making it clear that she was not interested, he kept returning to the and bar and kept pestering her”, said Mr Glasgow.
“Jordan McSweeney was interested in pursuing any possible romantic liaison that he could, irrespective of whether or not the recipient of his attention was similarly inclined.”
He was then captured on CCTV cameras following a woman who took refuge in a local minimarket to avoid his attentions.
He stalked around outside and then went into the shop to find her, the court heard, before hiding behind the vegetable display until she left again.
McSweeney then resumed following the woman, until - terrified - she ran down a side street to get away from him, ending a pursuit that last more than 20 minutes.
“That young woman had a very lucky escape since, had she been caught, by Jordan McSweeney, she would have been attacked and killed”, said Mr Glasgow.
McSweeney then turned his attention to another woman in the Samiz Chicken Shop in Romford Road, putting his hand down his trousers and staring at her before following her out of the takeaway.
That pursuit was ended when he was distracted by another woman, and McSweeney then spent the next 50 minutes walking up and down Cranbrook Road - the road where Zara was ultimately killed.
Just before 2am, McSweeney is seen following another woman along the road but two passing men had spotted the alarming scene unfolding. They stopped and stared at McSweeney - likely saving the woman from his clutches, and she was then able to enter a property to get away from him.
Ms Aleena had spent the evening with a friend, including some time in the same Wetherspoons pub as McSweeney.
When they parted, her friend took a taxi home and Ms Aleena started her journey on foot. The friend sent a text message asking if she had got home OK, but received no response.
Ms Aleena had been grabbed around the neck by McSweeney at around 2.15am before being dragged backwards on to a driveway.
Cameras from two different properties captured the moment she was grabbed around the neck and subjected her to an attack lasting nine minutes.
“She was dragged backwards into the paved driveway and taken to the ground in the corner of the drive”, said Mr Glasgow.
“She did all she could to fight him off, but she had no idea he was behind her and she must have been terrified as the bigger and stronger Jordan McSweeney dragged her into the darkness and out of sight from any potential rescuer.”
Ms Aleena’s legs can be seen kicking out as she struggled, but McSweeney at one stage knocked her out before starting to remove her clothes. He stamped on her repeatedly during the attack, and after going to leave he returned to her motionless body one last time to deliver more stamps.
“If it were not for the CCTV footage, it would be hard to believe that anyone could treat another human being in such a violent and shocking manner”, said the prosecutor.
After the attack, police found Ms Aleena’s keys and underwear discarded in a nearby bush, her purse thrown into another bush, and her leggings hanging over a tree branch.
Her mobile phone had been taken by McSweeney and thrown into another driveway, and was only discovered the following morning.
Mr Glasgow said McSweeney, who was living in a caravan on a fairground in Valentine’s Park, was quickly identified as the predator responsibile for the murder, and was arrested.
“He walked back the caravan where he was living and the following morning, having hidden the bloodstained clothes and shoes he had been wearing during the attack, was seen laughing and joking with his friends - seemingly without any concern for what he had done or for the fate he had forced upon Zara Aleena”, he said.
“His predatory pursuit of women, and his violent sexual assault and vicious murder of Zara Aleena were caught on various CCTV cameras. Thus, the police were quickly able to identify him and arrest him.
“His attitude upon arrest and in interview reveals that his behaviour on the night was not an aberration. He was violent towards the officers who had dealings with him, he threatened to assault the officers who worked in the custody suite, and he told the officers who interviewed him that they were boring him.”
McSweeney’s fingerprints was also found in blood at the scene of the attack. The killer, from Dagenham, refused to speak in his police interview and repeatedly refused to leave his prison cell as court proceedings progressed.
The court heard he made threats to police officers after his arrest and claims to suffer from ADHD and a split personality disorder. He also suggested he had been bitten by a dog on the day of the murder.
McSweeney has 28 convictions for 69 offences, including for assaults on police officers and members of the public.
He was released from prison on June 17, 2022, after serving his latest sentence for burglary and theft of a motor vehicle, and the Probation Service commenced recall proceedings on June 22 after he missed two appointments. The force said it was informed on June 24 - two days before the murder - and attended an address linked to McSweeney the following day to arrest him but he was not there. He was subsequently arrested on June 27.
A spokesperson for the Met said: “The actions of officers following McSweeney’s recall to prison were reviewed by officers from the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards who found there was no indication of misconduct.”
The court heard McSweeney has a criminal record stretching back to when he was 13-years-old, and had been twice reported to police over domestic violence allegations.
One ex-partner said McSweeney pushed her down the stairs, pulled her hair, and strangled her, while another said he subjected her to an “abusive relationship” in which she was punched, slapped, beaten up, and kicked. However McSweeney did not face criminal prosecution in either cases.
McSweeney also had a catalogue of incidents in prison, including threats to kill a female prison officer and a suggestion he would have another guard murdered.
George Carter-Stephenson KC, representing McSweeney, said his mother was a drug addict and his father was largely absent from his childhood.
He went into care as a teenager due to parental neglect, and says he was sexually abused as a young child by his uncle.
“His first memory of his father was when his father attempted to drown his mother in the bath”, he said. “Domestic violence was something he grew up with as the norm.”
McSweeney was expelled from school for drug dealing to fellow pupils, and he became a bare knuckle boxer as a teenager.
Mr Carter-Stephenson added that McSweeney says he does not remember anything that happened after leaving the Wetherspoons pub, and he accepted during psychological assessments that he is a “horrible person”.
Speaking outside the Old Bailey after sentencing, London Mayor Sadiq Khan promised action to ensure the safety of women and girls on the streets of London.
“Today, yet another violent man has been sentenced for the horrific murder of yet another innocent woman.
“Zara Aleena’s future was stolen by someone with no regard of her life or the rules of our land.
“We don’t know what motivated the terrible and senseless act of violence but we know the cost – a young bright woman’s hopes will never be realised.
“Her family and friends’ lives are forever altered, and more and more women feel less safe as they go about their daily lives.
“I am acutely aware of the question being asked across our city. After Bibaa and Nicole, after Sarah, after Sabina, and after Zara, and after many other women whose lives have been brutally cut short at the hands of men, when is this going to end?
“There is an epidemic of violence against women and girls. In the UK, a man kills a woman every three days.
“As Mayor, I am determined to break this sickening cycle of violence, condemnation and inaction. Because women don’t just deserve to be safe, they have a right to be safe.”
