John Sweetman

But it kept going on a bit like that for a while and eventually one of the investigating members showed the CCTV footage from the post office

to a retired guard.

He'd been a detective in the Tullamore area for years and he had good local knowledge and he knew a lot of, you know, the local heads and whatnot.

But he happened to twig this guy in the footage and he said, did you check him out?

Like, you know, he's a bit of an oddball.

Might be worth checking him out.

And they watched him and they called to his house and stuff like that.

His house was full of the stuff.

It was everywhere.

They'd written all this more stuff, like, you know.

And it was him and...

he led them to another hide that he'd only completed but this was much more a much more complete kind of thing he'd a hut made out in the woods he'd cleared out all this trees and stuff like that he had more rape kits all this sort of stuff i think he'd really been buried in the ground or something as well where he was going to keep them and all this kind of crack and

He was ready to go.

He was ready to make that next step because you could see over the years from between 2004 right up till it was 2017, I think, before he was gone, that he was getting more and more vicious in the writing and stuff like that.

No, they checked it and nothing, no.

But he was watching certain named schoolgirls and stuff like that.

A lot of the stuff in his letters was that he said he'd done and who he'd killed and who he'd raped or attacked or whatever.

A lot of it was fantasy, like it was made up stuff.

The later letters were identifying individuals, school girls, and he knew their ages, he knew their addresses, all this sort of stuff.

So it was getting to the point that he was going to maybe tip over into going from fantasy into reality.