Axeman beheaded Irish emigrant’s son
“I’ve known him for 20 years. It’s complicated,” the killer told shocked witnesses to the axe attack in upmarket Hampstead, north London on March 14.
At London’s Old Bailey court this week deranged waiter Joseph Sheehan, aged 37, pleaded guilty to gay pensioner Brian Messitt’s manslaughter.
Mr Messitt, aged 67, was a cousin of legendary Dublin athlete Bertie Messitt, 74, who ran the marathon in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and represented Ireland in cross-country events for seven years between 1956 and 1964. “It was a shock to everybody,” said Mr Messitt, from his south Dublin home yesterday. “I didn’t know the chap at all - I never met the man. I knew his father.”
On his retirement the victim’s father went to live in Waterford, where he died.
Police suspect Sheehan, who was a paranoid schizophrenic, carried out his attack on Mr Messitt as revenge for being sexually abused as a boy - both by his foster father Michael Reilly and possibly Mr Messitt, who lived a few doors away and was former paratrooper Reilly’s best friend.
