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Musashi Miyamoto
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Canal killer John Sweeney faces life in prison for murder of his two ex-girlfriends
John Sweeney, a carpenter who killed two ex-girlfriends and threw their bodies into canals, faces spending the rest of his life behind bars.
Melissa Halstead (left) and Paula Fields
John Sweeney and Melissa Halstead whose body was found in a Rotterdam canal Photo: PA
1:09PM BST 04 Apr 2011
John Sweeney, 54, will be given two life sentences at the Old Bailey for murdering Melissa Halstead and Paula Fields.
He is likely to be told that he is so dangerous, he will never be released from prison.
Detectives say Sweeney may have killed other women and will continue to try to trace former girlfriends.
Sweeney is already serving four life sentences for attacking another girlfriend, Delia Balmer, with an axe in 1994.
Former model Miss Halstead, 33, from the US, was killed in 1990. Her dismembered body was thrown into a canal in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. She was only identified 18 years later by DNA, although her head and hands have never been found.
The body parts of Paula Fields, 31, were found in six holdalls floating in the Regent's Canal in Camden, north London, in February 2001. Her head, hands and feet are still missing.
Now detectives want to know what happened to two South American former girlfriends of Sweeney who have not been seen since the late 1990s.
Little is known about them, except that one was a Brazilian woman known as Leani, the other a Colombian called Maria.
There may also be a third missing woman reportedly featured in Sweeney's "confessional" artwork.
And Dutch police are understood to be looking into Sweeney's claims to Miss Balmer that he killed two German men whom he caught with Miss Halstead.
