fractured skull. Byrne continued to squeeze her throat whilst kissing her, then he bolted the door and undressed himself.
He removed Stephanie’s jumper and committed various sex acts upon her body. By now she was dead or dying. He’d later say, ‘I seemed to be in a hurry to do everything to her and hadn’t the patience.’ He undressed down to his shoes and socks then rolled all over her and entered her corpse. The fantasy had been to make girls scream by putting them through a circular saw – but now that he’d inadvertently killed his victim, he wanted to defile her body as much as possible, an extension of his sadism.
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Patrick Byrne
When he tired of necrophiliac sex, he went into her cupboard and fetched a table knife, carving around her right breast until it was fully excised. He then scored her chest with the blade and cut her back. He also attempted to cannibalise one of her breasts after putting sugar on it, and sawed her head off – an act which took between 15 minutes and half an hour.
Halfway through these mutilations, which doubtless brought him to orgasm, Byrne scribbled a note on an envelope which said: ‘This was the thing I thocht (sic) would never come.’ He would later say that he thought he might rape a girl but didn’t believe the day would come when he would murder for sex.
He left her body on the floor but placed her head and the knife blade on the bed. He seemed confused at his own motivation for removing the head, later telling the police
‘It’s been puzzling me since why I took the head off. It’s not connected with sex in all the books I’ve read.’ It’s likely that his hatred was aimed at another woman, and he was only able to depersonalise Stephanie’s body by removing her face.
Attempted murder
Byrne now dressed but he had the desire to kill another female victim, specifically an attractive one. With this in mind, he went into the hostel’s garden and took a bra from the line, wrapping a heavy rock in it. Thus armed, he made his way to the YWCA’s ironing room where he found 20-year-old Margaret McDonald Brown. He switched off the light then struck her on the head, but when she screamed loudly (her thick hair had cushioned the worst of the blow) he ran away. Margaret Brown collapsed and another resident phoned the police.
They began to search the hostel for the attacker, finding, to their horror, the decapitated body of Stephanie Baird. Her headless corpse was so horribly mutilated that one of the two policemen who found her vomited and the other went into deep shock and remained off work for many weeks.
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SADISTIC KILLERS
Meanwhile, Byrne hurried back to his lodging house a mere 400 yards away, changed out of his bloodstained work clothes and wrote a suicide note to his mother which said ‘I am very sorry youse will have to receive this horrible letter.’ He went on to suggest that he had a split personality but that the real him was good. Then he remembered that it was Christmas, a time of year which was incredibly important to his religious mother, so he decided to live and tore up the note.
He went out drinking with his cousin but was so shaken by the murder and attempted murder that he was afraid to sleep alone and so slept in his cousin’s room. The next morning, he took the train to his mother’s home in Warrington.
Manhunt
Meanwhile the police began one of the biggest manhunts in British history, employing bloodhounds and setting up roadblocks. Every sexual offender in the area was rounded up and interviewed. They also checked 4,000 handwriting samples against the note, painstakingly pieced together by the police, that Byrne had left behind.
By January, the Birmingham police were cooperating with half a dozen other British forces, ranging from York to West London. When this still didn’t bring in their killer, they got in touch with
John R. Little and Mark Allan Gunnells
Sean Thomas Fisher, Esmeralda Morin