Handwriting expert tells how gardaí tracked vile creep whose letters sent shockwaves of fear through Ireland
Over the years, Liam Findley’s depraved threats had gone unanswered, until Sweetman’s analysis connected the letters, providing gardaí with the critical evidence that helped pinpoint the suspect.
“Even for a seasoned handwriting expert, this was not normal, this was something darker,” Sweetman told his Lines of Enquiry podcast, recalling more than a hundred pages of letters that laid out soundproof rape dens he had built, the tools and implements he had stockpiled, and his obsessive tracking of victims.
“This was a horror film come to life, and it was sitting on my desk. Each new page I read was a window into a sick, dangerous mind.”
The first letter, sent to the Institute of Technology in Athlone in late 2015, contained 23 handwritten pages, each filled with graphic threats and sexualised violence.
“My plans are to abduct, rape and kill female college students,” the writer boasted.
Suffering
He included photographs cut from newspapers and magazines, pornographic images and detailed fantasies about real cases, such as the murders of 24-year-old Karen Buckley in Glasgow, Scotland and 29-year-old Jill Marr in Melbourne, Australia.
The author promised their suffering would be mild compared to what he had planned for his own victims.
“I would have made Karen suffer in agony with some of the most extreme, horrific, sexual torture, raped over and over,” he wrote.
The writer also boasted of having gotten away with raping an unnamed 19-year-old student and fantasised about what he thought had happened to 18-year-old Deirdre Jacob, who had disappeared in 1998.
Former Detective Garda John Sweetman, a forensic handwriting expert
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“As a seasoned garda, I had already witnessed several gruesome crime scenes and investigated many disturbing handwriting cases, but I had never seen anything like this,” Sweetman told the podcast.
Two months later, new letters began to arrive, each sent from different Garda stations, expanding the horror.
One ran over 30 pages and claimed abuse of his own daughter and niece over a four-year period, beginning when his daughter was just 11, even claiming to have made her pregnant.
Again, the main focus remained fantasising in excruciating detail about the sexual abuse and murder of pre-teens and teenagers across the midlands.
Pleasure
“I will keep their bodies for my pleasure…college girls should start feeling afraid because I’m going to get them soon,” he wrote.
Another letter, found stuck to a railing in Tullamore, Co. Offaly, claimed responsibility for the 1996 murder of Fiona Pender, a 25-year-old woman seven months pregnant, whose disappearance had long been part of Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle investigation.
“I am the person who killed pretty Fiona Pender in August 1996,” he wrote. “I strangled her, tortured her and buried her naked body in a deep grave.”
Whether it was all sick fantasy or genuine recollection, the letters revealed a mind consumed by obsession and capable of unimaginable cruelty.
Sweetman’s forensic expertise was central to unmasking the author.
Handwriting analysis is based on the subtle, often unconscious habits in how letters are formed, spaced and connected.
“You’re looking at everything – block capitals, joined up, cursive script, individual letter constructions, relative proportions, the spacing between them. You look at all the variations contained within somebody’s writing,” Sweetman told the Crime World podcast.
“It’s not like fingerprints or DNA, it’s supportive evidence. But if you follow the correct methodology, you get results.”
And that’s what helped link these letters together, giving gardaí the patterns they needed to see the author’s hand across years of obsession.
Using this skill, Sweetman compared the hundreds of pages of letters and identified matches that spanned over a decade, connecting the 2016 letters to a 2004 case marked by similar letters, along with the discovery by schoolboys of a hidden den in woodland outside Tullamore.
Inside the den were adult magazines, plastic wrapped letters containing his handwritten plans, and tools consistent with what the writer described, including saws, hammers and ropes.
Sweetman described it as “meticulously planned madness”, a record of obsession that had been simmering for years.
The investigation finally yielded a suspect after gardaí traced stamp serial numbers to a Tullamore post office and reviewed hours of CCTV.
Oddball
A retired detective recognised Liam Findley, a middle-aged “oddball” part-time construction worker living on the outskirts of Tullamore.
Routine documents provided handwriting samples, which Sweetman confirmed matched the letters.
“The individual letter constructions, their proportions relative to where they appeared within words, the spacing of them, and the height of the writing relative to the lines on the pages. They were all consistent with what I’d seen throughout the many pages of the anonymous letters … I was sure beyond any doubt, we had found the beast of all sex beasts.” he recalled.
A search of Findley’s home revealed a chilling level of preparation.
There were 994 newspaper clippings of mostly local young women, female clothes and maps of Ireland, biscuit tins containing more letters, adult magazines, clippings of past murder trials and books about Larry Murphy, as well as items described in his letters.
Gardaí, following his admission, found a newly constructed den in Meelhand’s Wood, hidden in undergrowth, with levelled ground and a sturdy hut covered in plastic.
During interviews, Findley admitted to sending the letters and building the dens but claimed some acts were fantasies.
Psychological assessments described him as socially isolated, on the autism spectrum and suffering from sexual sadism disorder.
Escalating
He confessed to abusive behaviour within his family and escalating sexual preoccupations after his mother’s death in 2015.
“He was escalating,” Sweetman recalled. “Each letter, each new den, was a step further — the fantasising was like his gateway drug. The risk was very real.”
Findley pleaded guilty to sending obscene material and possessing child pornography.
Judge Keenan Johnson described the case as “one of the most bizarre, extreme and disturbing cases” he had encountered, sentencing him to 15 years with a further period of supervision.
The Midlands Letters case is remembered not only for its grotesque content, but for how forensic work made the difference. DNA and fingerprints initially produced no matches, but handwriting analysis, combined with archival research and local insight, identified a suspect who had eluded detection for over a decade.
“The public rarely hears about crime prevention, even though it’s often more important than crime investigation,” says Sweetman.
“This was the case with the Midlands Letters investigation. The combined effort of the tenacious investigating gardaí, the forensic lab and the handwriting section might just have stopped a ticking time bomb from going off.”
Those wanting the full story on how John Sweetman cracked the case can hear him discuss it in detail on the Crime World and Lines of Enquiry podcasts.