THE ENGLISH EYEBALL KILLER

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be talking about a case that i've been requested literally since i started my channel this is quite a big case here in the uk i forgot to say we're finally back in the uk i feel like i've done nothing but american cases for so long and my roots are always in the uk cases so i'm happy to be doing a uk case again this is gonna be part one of another two-parter look i blame you a lot for the fact that these are all two parters because these are all requested cases so maybe you should start requesting shorter cases but yeah part two of this case is going to be posted in the next few days so make sure you've got your eyes open for that make sure you've got the bell notification on so you don't miss when i post it but before we get into this video i just want to thank our sponsor for making this video possible bbc sounds if you follow me on instagram you'll know that bbc sounds is my favorite place to get podcasts but they're so much more than just podcasts you can get music on there too all of your favorite live bbc radio there's music mixers for every mood curated by bbc talent as well my personal favorite music mix on the app is sounds of the 90s with fern cotton every single song on there it's just amazing just in case you were wondering but like i said their podcasts are where it's at for me i am obsessed especially with all of their true crime podcasts you guys know i love the bad people podcast and my latest obsession is the assume nothing podcast and this whole podcast every single episode focuses on the same murder this murder of a young girl called minnie reed and they're basically investigating conspiracy theories as to whether the right person was found and hung for the murder of minnie reed now i don't want to give too much away with this one because it is literally all just about this case but it is so gripping i'm not gonna lie i've listened to it pretty much like all day while i was making my breakfast while i was in the shower while i was doing my makeup literally to film this video i had it playing in the background i personally love using podcasts when i'm doing something physical you know like cleaning or doing my makeup something where you can't necessarily look at a screen to watch a youtube video or a documentary you can multitask you can be doing your things and you can be listening to a true crime podcast at the same time it's brilliant and it makes your cleaning go a lot faster i'll tell you that so if you want to discover more about bbc sounds whether that's the podcasts or the music mixers the live radio then you can click the link down below in the description make sure you're following me on my instagram story as well because i'm going to be giving you guys podcast updates ones that i'm loving ones that i recommend you don't want to miss it they'll all be on my stories i'd like to keep you all updated with podcasts that i like ones that i recommend so make sure you're following me thanks again to bbc sounds for sponsoring this video make sure you click in the link down below in the description now let's get into it but before we do i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video on the case so this case takes place in colchester which is a town in essex in the south of england and you know it's supposedly quite a nice place i couldn't find much on what colchester is actually like but on the morning of march 29th 2014 around 6 a.m police received a rather shocking phone call a woman had been walking through castle park when she'd found what she initially believed to be a dead body laying in the middle of the path so police rushed down to the scene to see a white male in his 30s laying as this woman described in a pool of his own blood however what they realized was that he was actually still alive he was just clinging to life he had a lot of clear stab wounds all over his body some kind of deep stab wounds and also just lacerations so like slash wounds these were particular to his hands his face he also had a very large wound near his eye i mean they couldn't really see his eye to make sense of this wound because he was laying on his back and so his eye socket had just filled with blood police did everything they could to save this man for like 45 minutes however he'd already lost way too much blood there was nothing that they could really do at this point and eventually they pronounce this man dead at the scene this man was identified as 33 year old father of five james atfield better known as jim jim was known for being extremely caring extremely loving kind affectionate his family meant everything to him he was the one in the family that was always cracking jerks he was the funny one in the family his mother absolutely adored him she was so proud of what a polite young man he'd turned into she said he was always really smiley really happy and from a very very young age his manners were impeccable he had a sister who i believe was younger than him named joe and when they were younger just said that they used to go out on his chopper bike and he used to try and like push her off as a jerk that was just the kind of guy he was he was always playing pranks on people joking about that was more in their childhood and then in 2014 around this time jim was just a typical uk man in his 30s he was always down the pub he loved pints he loved a bit of karaoke when he was intoxicated as many people do he just liked to have a good time whenever he went out he was a fun person to be with everyone liked being close to jim jim's life had been really good all the way up until his mid-20s like i said he was a father of five he had a girlfriend everything however in the year 2010 so four years before this took place jim was walking home one day when he was actually hit by a car and this incident was so serious that it actually left him in a coma for eight weeks in fact the hospital very nearly turned off his life support machine and it was actually his mother that fought to you know keep him alive she said that she wasn't happy with them turning off his life support machine unless they'd tried absolutely everything that they could and so the hospital staff did they kept him on and they did everything that they could and thankfully he survived it worked however when jim did wake up from this coma he was left with severe brain damage along with this he also had serious memory loss he was left with slur and slurred speech and he lost a lot of the fine motor skills in one side of his body so he could no longer hold things properly and all of this as i'm sure you can imagine seriously affected jim atfield and it was only as of very recently in this case like towards 2013 2014 that jim actually started to get his life kind of back on track afterwards he'd moved to colchester in the last two years before this in around 2012 and he actually moved there with a charity called headwear headwear are a charity in essex that specifically help people with brain damage to try to recover get back on their feet become a little bit more independent and i think the main reason that jim actually moved to colchester and moved away from his old life i don't know where he originally lived it might have still been in essex he might have just lived in a different part of essex however the reason for this move is because his memory loss was actually so severe that he'd forgotten who his own children were and so his girlfriend at the time decided that it would be best for everyone especially those children that were still growing and developing to probably have some time away from their dad because that could be so mentally damaging for these children to you know want to develop a relationship with their father and he just doesn't know who they are so that's exactly what jim did he moved away and he just spent those last two years recovering and slowly but surely he was getting his memory back he remembered who his children were and around the time of this case in 2014 he was actually meeting up with his ex-girlfriend again to talk about kind of getting back together him seeing the children on the night of his murder jim atfield had gone to his local pub he lived kind of within walking distance of the pub it was a bit of a walk but doable so he would always walk there and walk back home in the evening he would do this by himself he didn't really go to the pub with friends he would more just meet people there and talk to them while he was having a drink and it's believed that it was when he was on this walk home from the pub that is when he was attacked and killed it's also believed that he wasn't attacked straight away so he left the pub maybe around 11 p.m that night he was walking home and he walked through this big park called castle park on his way home which was actually where his body was found now i don't know how police actually know this but the official believed timeline of events is that jim was walking through castle park when he got a little bit tired and he decided to sit down on a grass verge and have a nap so they believed that he was actually attacked while he was laid asleep in the grass so jim's body was found the next morning and taken for autopsy where it was found that he'd actually sustained a turtle of a hundred and two separate wounds all over his body 102. these injuries ranged from deep stab wounds that some of them were like 10 11 12 centimeters deep one of which was actually straight through his eye and that was why his eye was full of blood because that's exactly where the blood was coming from so there were these deep wounds but then there were also just a lot of superficial slash wounds like lacerations on his arms and his legs and these lacerations were all pretty light like if he would have just had those he wouldn't have died he would have bled but he would have recovered quite quickly so it's already very evident that this attacker jim's killer wasn't in a hurry to kill him they wanted to kill him they wanted that to be the end product of this attack however they were prolonging the process they were enjoying this process of just inflicting pain and terror on their victim in total jim's autopsy actually took a whole nine hours because each one of these individual wounds had to be you know examined registered nurtured down so now police were faced with the task of finding out who exactly did this to jim who his killer was and they had to do it fast as well because whoever was capable of such a heinous crime like this was still just on the loose and if police didn't act fast then this person could strike again they could kill again jim's mother was informed of his murder around seven hours after his body was found she said that she opened the door and there were already two female police officers standing there she was on her way out of the door they asked if they could come in and speak to her she let them in and she says from that moment everything was just a blur all she can remember was just screaming when they told her eventually when jim's family were ready to talk to the police police asked them who do you think could have done this to your son like is there anyone that dislikes him is there anyone that could benefit from him no longer being here and his mother said that she couldn't think of anyone jim was such a harmless person he avoided any kind of altercations confrontation any any kind of upset he wanted everyone to be happy he never just argued with strangers he never got into bar fights especially physical altercations because he knew he was weak and vulnerable because his body was still so damaged from when he was hit by the car he knew not to get into fights he wasn't the type to do that they said that whatever had happened to jim they were certain that he hadn't done anything to provoke it that this must have been a random attack as all of this was going on as police were interviewing all of his family and getting an idea of the kind of person that jim atfield was other officers were back at the crime scene searching the whole of castle park and further they were searching for clues everywhere they sent divers into the rivers even the smaller kind of ponds and things they completely drained trying to look for anything particularly like a discarded weapon but they couldn't find anything they couldn't find any weapons anything that the killer dropped any clues like that literally the only thing that they found at this whole crime scene was a partial footprint not even a whole footprint so this really wasn't gonna help them like at all so now in an attempt to try to find more leads police decided that they were going to try and pin together a timeline of events so jim atfield's last steps on the night that he was killed jim's family were able to tell the police the exact pub that he was likely in that night they went down there and the people at the pub confirmed that he was there but he seemed fine he wasn't acting off you know the landlord said that he just seemed like jim just his normal self however there was one thing that the landlord thought was a little bit off and that was that jim actually only drank a quarter of his pint and left three quarters of it when he left which wasn't like him at all he would always finish his drink before he left the pub you know it's nothing too serious but it made the landlord think that maybe jim was going somewhere in a hurry you know maybe he had to get somewhere that night but still jim's manner wasn't concerning at all it wasn't like he seemed like he was in a rush or like he was anxious it was just as if he'd like had enough and he was leaving the pub and he did leave the pub that night on foot walking home the pub provided police with cctv footage of the outside and they can see jim leaving absolutely fine they follow him onto a couple more streets i think until eventually they lose him on the cctv there's no more cameras close to the park i don't think there wasn't anything suspicious on the footage that they did have there wasn't anyone following jim they didn't see anyone running in the opposite direction there was nothing it seemed like he was just walking home normally but police did decide to release this camera footage to the public in hopes that maybe someone would see it and it would remind them of maybe something they saw that night along with this cctv footage that was now all over the news jim's mother started doing public appeals for anyone to come forward with any information that they might have about who killed jim or anything that they saw that night and all of this seeing the cctv footage on the news knowing that this was still unsolved seeing all of these appeals it all really really scared the public just the fact that it was so brutal it seemed so random and they were watching in real time as police struggled to find who did it and so everyone was very much aware that this person that was capable of this was still at large but what scared the public even more i think was the fact that the little details weren't published you know they just knew that it was a brutal murder and this man was stabbed a lot they didn't know that it was 102 times they didn't know that he'd been stabbed in the eyeball because the media deemed these little details too gruesome to post which i mean naturally as you're watching the news and they say the details are too gruesome for us to say then your mind is gonna start to wander people's minds were filling in the blanks and they were thinking how horrific could this murder be and they knew that that killer was still out there to strike again at any moment so now police didn't have really any leads to go off so they had to start doing their own digging and they decided to look into people in that general area around castle park they decided to look into everyone's criminal records criminal history any you know charges or convictions that anyone might have especially knife crime convictions they actually ended up seizing loads of knives during this investigation to have them all tested and they didn't really find anything that way they managed to find over 100 people in a radius of castle park i don't know how big this radius is because that sounds like a lot of people that actually had previous convictions or history with knife crime they were all questioned they were all interviewed by police and every single one of them was ruled out actually a couple of them were arrested but then they were later ruled out so arrests were made but there were no evidence that could back up any of those arrests so still there at square one again months were going by in this case and police had just pretty much run out of leads they had no more people to look into no more suspects they had absolutely nowhere to go with this case and they were really worried that they just weren't gonna find justice for jim atfield or his family but then two and a half months after jim's murder his killer struck again on june 17th 2014 just two miles away from where jim was killed in castle park another man had called the police saying that he'd stumbled across a very similar scene to the guy that found jim's body this time this member of the public had been walking down this footpath when he'd seen a woman laying in the middle of the path clinging to life in a pool of her own blood she wasn't quite dead yet he could tell that she was still trying to breathe she was still mourning however she had clearly lost a lot of blood and it was only a matter of time this man said that he'd originally seen this woman laying on the path when he'd actually opened the curtains of his apartment building that day he lived just behind this path where he found her he opened the curtains and saw her laying there on the ground so he ran outside to go and see what was going on and what was wrong with her he had no idea how long this woman had been there but he knew that they didn't have much time so paramedics raced to the scene as quick as they possibly could and they tried to treat her there were severe stab wounds all over her body mainly in her abdomen a couple in her head they did all they could to try to patch up these wounds and stop the bleeding however it was just too late she'd already lost so much blood and eventually they pronounced her dead at the scene this woman was identified as 31 year old nahid almanaya a university student that lived literally just a few meters away from where she was killed on that footpath this footpath led from some flats so she lived in kind of an estate that was all flat this footpath led from there behind them and then into some fields and it was just as you get into these fields that she was killed so she hadn't been out of her house for long at all naheed was known to be a very kind caring gentle person a very loving person her family said that she was a very very hardworking very classy lady she was devoted to her religion her culture her family she was originally from saudi arabia and i think she did a lot of her education in saudi arabia she had a phd in something i couldn't find what that was in but at the time of her murder she'd actually come over to the uk to live with her brother in colchester they shared a flat and the reason for her doing so was because she wanted to learn english a little bit better just to further her career options so she was going to the university of essex to do so and the saddest part was that she hadn't even been in england that long when she was killed sources range on how long she was actually here some say six months some say literally just six weeks i think it was a couple of months around six weeks to three months and she was actually on her way to university on the morning that she was murdered her brother said that she left the house around 10 a.m to go to her lectures and it was as she was walking along that footpath something that she did every single day that she was attacked naheed's autopsy revealed that she had 16 separate wounds again some of them were deeper stab wounds some of them were lighter lacerations like slash wounds they were mainly to her back and her head so it seemed as though part of this attack had taken place when she was facing away from her attacker so perhaps she was attacked from behind a lot of the stab wounds were in her liver in her ribs behind her but two of her most notable and most severe injuries were two stab wounds one in each eye one of which was actually so deep into her skull that it went into her brain and somehow she still survived for a couple of hours after this attack took place you can't imagine how much pain she must have been in until she eventually passed away again police searched the whole area this whole footpath down the sides of it were like rivers and everything so they had to be drained they sent divers in everything they searched this crime scene meticulously and again nothing they didn't even have a partial footprint this time so very much like the murder of jim atfield they didn't really have much to go on they didn't have any leads they didn't have any suspects right now in the immediate aftermath of nahid's murder social media was going crazy with the thought that this murder could have been racially motivated this was a very white area and naheed was a muslim immigrant that had literally just moved there and she was killed within a couple of months of being there this was theorized mainly due to the clothes that she was wearing on the day that she was killed she had on the abaya you know there's long dresses a hijab and this is probably something that's not seen very often in colchester and i don't know a lot of people just kind of took this idea and ran with it and they really believed that this could have been racially motivated although these ideas were pretty quickly squashed once people remembered jim atfield's murder i think a lot of people had kind of forgotten about it but as soon as they were reminded of it these crimes looked so similar that it didn't seem like naheed was targeted for one reason and jim was targeted for another reason it looked as though these two murders were done by the same person and these two victims were so different that they couldn't have been targeted for anything in particular like race or religion or anything police had no doubt in their mind that these two murders were linked the similarities between these two crimes were just insane there were so many the way in which these people were attacked so brutal and unexplained with seemingly no motive the types of injuries that they sustained as well both stab wounds deep stab wounds and also just slash wounds superficial ones not to mention the stab wounds literally in their eyeballs that's not very common at all and now for colchester to find two victims both been stabbed in their eyes just two miles apart two and a half months between each other i mean they had to be linked and so colchester police were now thinking that they have a repeat murderer on their hands they knew that it was even more important now that they solved this fast because their killer was willing to kill again it was only a matter of time now they didn't know when the next one was going to be colchester police bear in mind colchester is a town it's not a city they felt that this case this repeat murderer was just too big of a case for them to deal with they couldn't do it all by themselves so police were drafted in from police forces all over the south of england some from the midlands literally they had so many people coming in to work on this case to search the crime scenes to patrol the roads to help the communities feel safer to act as a deterrent if this murderer looked outside and there's police officers literally walking along every single street they're not going to want to go out and commit another murder and while police had avoided this whole time releasing too much information too much gruesome information that would terrify the public the public was still terrified it wasn't the things that this murderer was doing to their victims that scared people it was the fact that there was a serial killer in their town and what was even worse is that anyone could be next it seemed as though this killer wasn't targeting any specific type of person in particular they killed a 33 year old man then a 31 year old woman it just seemed as though they were trying to kill anyone that they could find that was walking alone and that they felt like they could get away with so no one felt safe in colchester at all everyone thought that they could be next just to help the community feel that little bit safer the colchester essex council actually sent out a bunch of gardeners to go and cut back all of the hedges and things in like public parks footpaths anything like that just so that this murderer didn't have anywhere to hide again to deter them because they couldn't hide from their victims and it made people feel a lot safer knowing that they could see everything when they were walking down a footpath there was no possibility that someone could have been hiding in a bush again in the aftermath of naheed's murder police then looked in that area all the different people that had previous knife crime charges previous violence charges in general but just like last time they did find people they arrested a couple of people as well brought them in for questioning and eventually ruled them out as suspects overall in these two murder cases over 1 300 different statements were taken through the whole thing they interviewed at least 20 different suspects they also seized and tested over 139 as well as countless different tv appeals police were going on tv asking people to come and give them any information that they had so was jim's mother but still despite all of this they still had nothing to go on this murderer was getting away with their kills but finally after a couple of months after naheed's murder so now it's been six months since jim's murder police were speaking to a particular person that had called in about a lead and they said that they'd seen a man running away from the crime scene when naheed was killed and they could give a little bit of a brief description of this man they couldn't say much about his face or his hair or anything like that because they really weren't that close to him they just said that he was a young male probably in his like late teens early twenties but what they could give police was a description of this man's coat they said that it was kind of a long-ish cut it had a belt it was like a tan pale brown color it had buttons and police found a picture of a similar jacket and they showed it to this witness and they said yeah it was kind of like that style and so police aired this jacket everywhere this was finally the first clue that they had to try to identify another suspect so they were putting this everywhere all of the news do you know anyone that wears a jacket like this you know people were calling in and police were investigating these but every single person that they looked into that had this cut could be ruled out as a suspect and they were starting to lose hope again months and months and months had gone by at this point these two murders happened in 2014 and it was now breaking into 2015 and they were still no closer to finding this killer that could strike again not only must this have been so hard for the community to know that you know there was a killer in their town but also for the victims of the families to know that they're still no closer to getting justice now than they were around the time of the murder but then almost a full year after the murder of nahid al-manaya police got exactly the huge break in this case that they needed they received a phone call from a woman fearful that she had just come into contact with the colchester serial killer michelle sadler was a local hairdresser she'd been out walking her dog that day on may 26 2015 she was walking along the exact path that naheed almaneau was killed on by now it had been pretty much almost a full year as well she said that as she was approaching a bridge on this footpath she looked underneath it and saw a young man hiding in some bushes when he heard michelle walk past he turned to look at her and just stared into her eyes and she described the feeling that she got from this man as pure evil and this man didn't drop his gears from michelle for quite a while he was just staring her straight in the eyes until eventually he got up and ran into a nearby woods michelle got out of there as quick as she possibly could she was gonna call the police but she thought it was probably safest to do so once she was home she could lock the doors and she knew that she was safe and that's exactly what she did she just arrived home when she made this call so police came to speak with michelle at her home and they asked for a description of this man that she'd seen hiding under the bridge and she said well it wasn't so much a man it looked to her as if this was a teenage boy he was maybe early 20s at a push but she thought that he was a teenager he was white he had short hair he had quite thick rimmed glasses on but the one thing that made michelle think that this could be the serial killer that she was face to face with the one thing that sent chills down her spine was the jacket that he was wearing he was wearing a tan light brown jacket with a belt on it with buttons down the middle the exact jacket that the police had been talking about on the news for weeks and that to her confirmed that she had just come face to face with the colchester serial killer and she feared that in that moment she could have been his next victim so police ran straight to the trail where michelle had seen this boy and they were looking everywhere for him they got to the bridge of course he was no longer there they went to this kind of wooded area that wasn't really a wooded area but they were looking around there for him they couldn't find him until eventually one officer broke away from the group a little bit and walked towards the other side of the trail and then he saw something in the bushes moving and that is where i'm gonna leave part one of this case the cliffhangers are just getting worse and worse i know part two will be out in the next couple of days i promise i won't leave this one too long i'm getting good at uploading them quite quickly after one another aren't i to make sure you don't miss part two make sure you've got my notifications on make sure you subscribed first and then put my notifications on thanks again to bbc sounds for sponsoring this video honestly one of my favorite apps right now both for music and for podcasts absolutely obsessed with the true crown podcasts especially assume nothing maybe try that one out if you want to discover more about bbc sounds there'll be a link down below in the description i really do recommend huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed make sure you leave a thumbs up because that really helps me out if you want to subscribe to my channel there'll be a link to do so right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there'll be a link right here there'll be some unexpected videos on that channel in the next couple of weeks and if you want to watch another true crown video there'll be a playlist on the screen right here bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,276,358

Rating: 4.9486861 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, netflix, forensic files, colchester, colchester murders, colchester stabbings, stabbings, murders, essex, uk, england, english, eyeball killer, eyeball, james fairweather, schoolboy, schoolboy serial killer, english eyeball killer, true crime daily, 2021, 2014, fairweather, james, jim attfield, nahid almanea

Id: 3EF_vIC9PVA

Length: 33min 14sec (1994 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021