COWERING on her doorstep desperately trying to protect her face with her arms, Delia Balmer was convinced she was going to die.
Her crazed ex-boyfriend John Sweeney had battered her with an axe handle, stabbed her twice and was now about to swing the weapon down on her head.
She was only saved when a neighbour who heard the commotion came out and hit her attacker with a baseball bat, causing him to flee.
It marked the end of a reign of terror Sweeney had inflicted on Delia for years. But she wasn’t his only victim. In fact, she was the one who had survived a serial killer.
What Delia didn’t know was that before they had even met he had already killed at least two former girlfriends, chopped up their bodies and thrown them into canals.
And Delia remains convinced that she too would have met the same fate if he had had his own way.
“First with the wooden handle of the axe he bashes me,” she recalls in a new Channel 5 documentary I Survived a Serial Killer: Delia Balmer.
“I put my arms out for protection. With the large wooden handle of the axe, bang.
I tried to kick him, hit him in the right place, but I missed.
“So with my broken, bleeding arms I pulled my bicycle on top of me to try and have some protection, then he stabbed me through this breast into the lung.
“And then he stabbed me through the thigh. He had the axe over his head ready to finish me off.
“I put my hands over my face and shut my eyes ready to die.”
In an interview with the Guardian, writer Nick Stevens – who has created an upcoming drama about the pair, entitled Until I Kill You, for ITV – reveals his experiences talking to Delia and how she has bravely rebuilt her life since the ordeal.
He says: “Amazingly, Delia still sleeps in the bed Sweeney made for her and to which he tied her for four days. I can’t be sure how she processes all this. But I’m certain she’s in a better place than she was.”
Violent origins
Delia was a young Australian nurse living in London when she first met John Sweeney in the Hawley Arms pub.
He was an unsuccessful artist making ends meet by working as a carpenter and was living in a squat nearby.
Originally from Skelmersdale near Liverpool, he married local woman Ann Bramley and had two children. But there was violence within the marriage, Sweeney was arrested and Ann moved with their kids to another part of the country.
He travelled around England and Europe working, and in 1986 he landed on his feet when he met American model Melissa Halstead. It was a passionate but turbulent relationship and Sweeney was convicted twice of assaulting Melissa – but the relationship continued.
I was tied to the bed all night log and he ranted and raved and he had my kitchen knife
Delia
Sweeney continued to be violent and controlling, so Melissa eventually fled to Vienna. But he tracked her down, stalking her, tying her up and attacking her with a hammer cracking her skull, which needed emergency surgery.
Sweeney was sentenced to 12 months in an Austrian prison for the brutal attack. He was released after just six months in 1989, and soon Melissa was back under his spell.
They moved to Amsterdam for a new start – but in April 1990 Melissa went missing.
Sweeney soon returned to the UK and he managed to charm his way into Delia’s life, moving into her flat where his controlling and violent behaviour soon reared its head.
Delia recalls: “He said he was going to Germany to work. He would phone me at 8pm on a Monday night and he would tell me when he would do it next. He would phone me twice a week and he would tell me the next time and I had to be there for the phone.
“He said, ‘You have to be there or I will be angry if you are not there to answer the phone’ and I thought that was because he was worried about me but it was just a control thing.”
Monster unleashed
After two years of a psychologically exhausting relationship, things came to a terrifying and violent head after another explosive row.
Delia had gone to see a friend and stayed overnight. When she returned home Sweeney was waiting for her.
“He interrogated me and I said ‘I am going to bed’,” she says.
“Later he opened the door and suddenly reached down to the bottom of the bed. Below the bed, he had ropes there ready – first he tied one ankle, then the other. I sat up and said, ‘What are you doing?’
“He grabbed my arms and put me back and tied my wrists to the bed.
I was tied to the bed all night log and he ranted and raved and he had my kitchen knife. He untied my ankles to have sex. I lay there all night long. I felt like I was in a padded cell with a complete maniac.”
One of Delia’s concerned colleagues tried to contact her, forcing Sweeney to explain her absence.
“I was an agency nurse,” says Delia. “The office phone, wondered why I wasn’t at work. And he said, ‘She’s had to go away for an emergency.’
“They took that, OK. But then Rosie phoned, the nurse I worked with. And she said if she’s not here by 12 I’m sending the police. He says ‘what? What? What?’ And he slammed the phone down and ran back and forth.
“He said ‘she’s going to send the police, what am I going to do?’ And he kept running back and forth saying that, and I said ‘I don’t know.’
Panicked that Delia’s colleague might raise the alarm, Sweeney decided to allow Delia to return to work.
She says: “Once he settled down a bit he said, ‘Look I’ll let you go. Just phone Rosie and tell her everything is alright and you will be back on the following Monday.’
“He went with the phone to me, and I had to tell Rosie that. And my voice was shaking and she just went along with it. But she knew.”
The terrifying ordeal lasted six days.
“Escape was not an option,” she says. “I thought about how can I get out. I thought there is no way, if I try to escape, something is going to happen. I was afraid to think. I thought even if I think you will know what I am thinking. I blocked my mind. I tried to anyway because I just knew I was in danger.”
Living in fear Delia decided not to report the incident.
She explains: “Well I went back to work. I showed them the mark on my wrist and the other nurses thought I should tell the police and I said its no good, I can’t tell the police.
“It won’t work, if I did tell the police he would find out and I would be in worse trouble. There was this sister on the ward and she said you’re living on a knife edge and she was right and I knew. I had to find a way out but I didn’t know what to do.”
Breaking free
Days after tying Delia to the bed, Sweeney announced that he was once again returning to Europe for work. Relieved, she decided she had to act.
Delia says: “He said he was going to go to Germany to work. He’d been gone since the Monday and it was the Thursday I got the lock changed, but I had a feeling he was still lurking around.”
It was a move that would enrage Sweeney.
“I creeped into the flat, always afraid that somehow he may still be there” she says. “I opened the door to the flat but I was uneasy all the time. The door flung open, he came out, he said ‘what did you do that for?’”
Once again Delia found herself held hostage in her own home.
She says: “He pulled me up and dragged me through to the living room and sat me on two large cushions near the wall so I was hostage again. And then he says, ‘I want sex now’.”
I thought I wanted to die. One the finger was gone, one I saw that, I thought I’ve had enough
Delia
This time Delia’s work colleagues were so concerned for her welfare that they contacted the authorities.
He asked her to answer the door to the police, pretending everything was ok. Instead, she rushed out of the door, on to the street.
John Sweeney was arrested for various offences including assault.
When he was removed from the flat by police, Delia pointed out his belongings and behind the bath panel officers found what can only be described as a killer’s kit bag – a tarpaulin rubber sheet, lengths of rope, surgical gloves and rolls of duck tape.
All the things you might need if you were cleaning up a crime scene.
Roaming free
Sweeney was now safely behind bars on remand, but in a cruel twist of fate he was about to be released back on to the streets.
As it approached Christmas 1994 there was an amnesty. Prisoners in custody for certain offences could be released, which meant they could spend Christmas at home with their families.
One of them was John Sweeney.
Delia says: “I told police what he would do to me, what time he would do it, when he would be there and how he would do it. But I was given no protection.”
On December 22, 1994, a couple of days after Sweeney’s release, Delia was coming home from work. As she climbed the few steps to her flat with her bicycle, he emerged from the basement.
Delia’s desperate screams alerted the attention of a neighbour. He came out armed with a baseball bat and he could see Sweeney attacking Delia.
“I looked up, saw him with the axe still, so I covered up again. I heard another noise and the neighbour had bashed him on the back with a baseball bat,” says Delia.
He fled the scene, leaving Delia fighting for her life and with life changing injuries.
She says: “I thought I wanted to die. One the finger was gone, one I saw that, I thought I’ve had enough.
“My body had been damaged. I had always looked after it, I danced, I wanted to be a ballet dancer, I wanted to be a decent enough body and I didn’t want it ruined.
“I used to look after myself and I never had scars like that and I didn’t want to live in anger and pain.”
On the run
Sweeney was on the run and there was a huge manhunt, but the trail ran cold.
Brazenly, it later emerged he had been working on building sites cash in hand, hiding in plain sight.
But Delia was able to provide police with terrifying new information about his past after finding a picture of a young woman in his belongings.
Sweeney told her he had come home one day, found her in bed with two German men so he shot all three of them.
Delia says: “When I was tied to the bed and he was ranting and raving with the kitchen knife… first he interrogated me about things and then he said, ‘I suppose you are wondering what happened to Melissa?’
“‘She was in the apartment in Amsterdam, two Germans were there and I killed them all. I didn’t know what to do with the bodies so I sat with them for three days and on the third day I cut them up and threw them in the canal.’”
I am the one who is being punished. I have this pain and scars for the rest of my life
Delia
Police in London contacted their counterparts in the Netherlands who revealed they did have a record of a body discovered in a canal in Rotterdam in 1990.
In 1992 another female body was found dismembered in a suitcase in a canal – the fingertips had been removed from her hands. The Amsterdam police thought this could be the remains of Melissa.
Dutch police contacted her family in Ohio to request a DNA sample – but it was not a match.
Six years after John Sweeney’s brutal attack on Delia, three young boys in London made a harrowing discovery – some holdalls in a canal which contained the remains of a woman.
The Met launched a murder inquiry and DNA from the remains matched that of missing 31-year-old Liverpudlian woman Paula Fields.
Paula had moved to London hoping to make a new life for herself, but sadly entered a spiral of drugs and prostitution and the mum of three found herself in despair.
When she went missing the police looked into her lifestyle and background and discovered that she was friends with a man called Joe.
It became a priority to track him down and associates said he lived at Digby Crescent in Hackney. But when police went to the address they spoke to a man called Anthony Sweeney, who they put under observation by undercover officers as they couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t Joe.
Whilst under observation he met with another man – his brother John. When they ran his details through the police national computer detectives were amazed to find he was wanted for the attack on Delia Balmer in 1994 and had been on the run for over five years.
Detectives were about to discover the true scale of Sweeney’s violent and murderous past.
After his arrest officers searching his house found a collection of guns, ammunition, a machete, a garrotte, a wig.
In 2001 he was charged with the attempted murder of Delia Balmer along with firearms offences. He was also arrested on suspicion of the murder of Paula Fields.
He admitted that he knew Paula and that on occasion their relationship had been quite violent.
But the case was difficult – police didn’t have a crime scene or CCTV and evidence was thin, so the CPS made the decision not to charge him with Paula’s murder.
Sweeney was found guilty of the attempted murder of Delia Balmer and was given a life sentence with a minimum tariff of just nine years, meaning he would be eligible for parole in April 2011.
Delia says: “All they gave him was nine years and one month after all the hell I had been through. I am the one who is being punished. I have this pain and scars for the rest of my life.”
Police continued to search John Sweeney’s former properties in London and Liverpool as well as his cell at Gartree prison in Leicestershire.
Who are the UK's worst serial killers?
THE UK's most prolific serial killer was actually a doctor.
Here’s a rundown of the worst offenders in the UK.
- British GP Harold Shipman is one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded history. He was found guilty of murdering 15 patients in 2000, but the Shipman Inquiry examined his crimes and identified 218 victims, 80 per cent of whom were elderly women.
- After his death Jonathan Balls was accused of poisoning at least 22 people between 1824 and 1845.
- Mary Ann Cotton is suspected of murdering up to 21 people, including husbands, lovers and children. She is Britain’s most prolific female serial killer. Her crimes were committed between 1852 and 1872, and she was hanged in March 1873.
- Amelia Sach and Annie Walters became known as the Finchley Baby Farmers after killing at least 20 babies between 1900 and 1902. The pair became the first women to be hanged at Holloway Prison on February 3, 1903.
- William Burke and William Hare killed 16 people and sold their bodies.
- Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was found guilty in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven others between 1975 and 1980.
- Dennis Nilsen was caged for life in 1983 after murdering up to 15 men when he picked them up from the streets. He was found guilty of six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder and was sentenced to life in jail.
- Fred West was found guilty of killing 12 but it’s believed he was responsible for many more deaths.
They found an alarming insight into Sweeney’s warped mind, including specific references to Melissa Halstead who had been missing since 1990.
Journalist Paul Cheston who covered the case says: “They found the most extraordinary array of artwork and poetry of the most dark and sinister nature. There were pictures of Sweeney self-portraits labelled ‘seal hunter’ portrayed as a devil with a blood-soaked axe.”
A lot of the paintings and sketches were about Delia and Melissa, and when police looked at them more closely, some of them also contained what appeared to be messages.
But the most significant piece of evidence was a scrap of paper that appeared to have a poem written on it.
Paul Cheston says: “This poetry included the most callous rhymes. He wrote about Melissa being fed to the fishes and chopped into bits, Amsterdam was the pits.”
But despite such chilling clues, Melissa’s case fell outside of the Met’s jurisdiction.
In 2008 and with Sweeney’s prison term nearing its end, the Met received an unexpected phone call.
Retired detective Inspector Steve Smith recalls: “I was at my desk and the phone rang. It was a detective from Holland who told me that he was part of a newly formed cold case investigation team in Rotterdam.
“He also went on to tell me that due to the particular case they had been given, which was a dismembered female body found in a canal in Rotterdam in 1990, they had managed to find a blood sample that had been taken from that body.
“When they ran a search through their missing person’s database that came back as a match for Melissa Halstead.”
This meant the Met police could confirm a link between the death of Melissa Halstead and the murder of Paula Fields which had been unsolved – and that link was John Sweeney.
Sweeney was in a relationship with both of the women at the time they went missing.
Beast snared
With Sweeney still serving his sentence in a landmark international murder investigation, British and Dutch police joined forces to build the case against him before his potential release from prison.
Police needed Delia’s help, but she couldn’t bear to relive the trauma Sweeney had put her through.
As his trail began at the Old Bailey, Sweeney pleaded not guilty. But despite his denials it was his own artwork that proved damning.
“From the moment the jury saw the artwork they knew that whatever he said in his defence that they were sitting opposite a seriously, seriously dangerous man,” says Paul Cheston.
After a trial lasting five weeks John Sweeney was found guilty of all charges over the murders and ordered to serve a whole life sentence, meaning he will spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole.
But while Sweeney will never be released, some detectives believe he is responsible for other unsolved crimes and that he may have killed others.
Police have already named three possible women in London – a Brazilian, a Colombian and a British trainee nurse who they think may be linked to Sweeney.
The chilling reality of coming so close to death at the hands of John Sweeney will live with Delia Balmer forever.
She says: “When he had the ropes tied ready on the bed that he was ready to tie me down with, it was all there, the green canvas bag ready to chop me up. He had done it to Melissa and Paula Fields, he would have done the same to me.
“There is no such thing as justice. I am the one paying, I am the one with the scars, there is no such thing as closure. He’s got his own way, I am the one who is being punished, I have got the life sentence. He is making sure of that still.”
I Survived a Serial Killer: The Delia Balmer Story airs on Channel 5 at 10pm tonight
