John Sweetman

You know, if you're a guard in Athlone, you don't know what some chap in Tullamore is doing, you know.

So I started to group the cases together and I sent out a report to each of the guards saying this ties with such and such, such and such, other cases and stuff like that.

I went back through the records then and I found a letter even going back as far as 2004.

I'm trying to remember now, I think it was the end of 2015 was the first one that I examined.

but i got one in the records going back to 2004 which was even before i was in the section so we were able to put all these together and say this is the same guy it's the same writer like you know and really really nasty stuff like he was threatening to go out and kidnap teenage girls and you know assault them and rape them and kill them and he was going to be the next big serial killer and all that sort of stuff and he wouldn't believe the detail like he had

times and distances between towns.

He'd had all planned out that he'd go out on this Saturday night and he'd look here and this is the way he'd catch a girl and how many minutes it took then to get back to his hideout in the woods, how many minutes to kill her, how many minutes to bury her, all this sort of stuff.

And as it went on, it was getting more and more, that's the word I'm looking for, he was escalating, you know.

The 2004 letter that had come in had been found in a makeshift hide out in the woods.

I think it was near Tullamore where there was, you know, there was pornographic material out there and then a kind of a cable ties and ropes and stuff like that.

It was kind of like a place that he was going to bring people after kidnapping them.

But, um,

Yeah, it went quiet then for a little while, but the guards out in the Midlands were looking for suspects then and they had traced some of the letters had been sent through a certain post office, say, you know, and they were looking at CCTV footage at different individuals and there were other people that lived, you know, in the area or near where this hide had been found in 2004.

And they were getting handwriting samples and sending them in to me.

And I wasn't finding any matches, you know, and it was the same with the DNA.

There was a girl in the DNA section and she was finding the same DNA profile on all the letters.

But there was nothing in the database, you know, to hit against it.

Same with fingerprints.

There was fingerprints on them, but nothing on the system.

Yeah, he hadn't come to notice before.