Decapitated ex-top model ‘fed to fish’

A FORMER top model was decapitated and “fed to the fish” by her boyfriend, the Old Bailey has heard.

Melissa Halstead’s head and hands were never found but her mutilated body was discovered floating in a Dutch canal in 1990.

It was another 18 years before she was identified using DNA, Brian Altman QC, prosecuting, told jurors.

John Sweeney had gone on to kill another girlfriend in similar circumstances, it was alleged.

Paula Fields’s dismembered body was found in bags in the Regent’s Canal, Camden, north London, in 2001, a few weeks after she went missing.

The 31-year-old Liverpool-born mother of three’s head, hands and feet had also never been found, said Mr Altman.

Both relationships had been volatile and Ms Halstead, 33, had predicted her own death when she told her sister: “He will see to it that nothing is left of me.”

She was from Ohio, US, and had worked for top US modelling agencies.

After turning to photography and moving to London, Ms Halstead began a relationship with Sweeney which was often violent, said Mr Altman.

They moved to Amsterdam where she disappeared and her unidentified remains were found in a canal in Rotterdam.

Sweeney was a man with an obsessive hatred of women who expressed himself in lurid paintings and verse, said Mr Altman.

He had “confessed” to Ms Halstead’s murder in the words and pictures, it was alleged. He wrote on the back of a scratchcard: “Poor old Melissa, chopped her up in bits, fed her to the fish, Amsterdam was the pits,” jurors heard.

Correction fluid was removed from a drawing of a woman revealing a gravestone with the words “RIP Melissa Halstead”.

Mr Altman said Sweeney returned to Britain where he started a relationship with nurse Delia Balmer before going on the run after attacking her with an axe in 1994.

He was arrested in March 2001 and jailed the following year for her attempted murder.

Sweeney had boasted to Ms Balmer that he had killed Miss Halstead, said Mr Altman.

Sweeney, 54, who is in prison, denies two counts of murder and one count of perverting justice.

The trial continues.