Horror movie-obsessed Polish dad who murdered and dismembered pensioner before flaying off his face calmly took his sons to the cinema and CHURCH on the same day he dumped 27 hacked-up body parts at beauty spots

Set amid the post-industrial backdrop of western Manchester, Blackleach Country Park serves as a tranquil oasis for residents of the nearby semis and redbrick terraces.

Parents bring their children to feed tufted ducks and great-crested grebes that glide serenely across its reservoir, anglers fish for carp and bream, and dog-walkers stroll around the shady perimeter path.

Mercifully, this busy park in Worsley had been cordoned off when police divers hunting for the dismembered remains of 67-year-old Stuart Everett made their grisliest discovery.

In a spine-chilling scene that could have come from psychological thriller What Lies Beneath, one of the divers saw a human face floating in the murky lake.

It had been flayed away from a skull with surgical precision, but there were holes where the eyes and nose had been, so that, by the chilling description of search team co-ordinator Detective Sergeant Danielle Bullivant, it looked like the ‘mask’ people wear for beauty treatments.

This hideous find was not the work of a killer in the throes of frenzy.

As prosecutor Jason Pitter KC remarked grimly before Mr Everett’s lodger Marcin Majerkiewicz (who may also have been his romantic partner) was convicted of murdering him yesterday: ‘The removal of the facial skin, whilst broadly keeping it intact, would have required patience and skill to achieve.’

Pieces of Mr Everett’s head, which had been sliced into quarters, and one of his ears, were also found in the reservoir, together with the hacksaw believed to have been used to dissect him.

As the search team discovered during the unseasonably warm Easter holiday last year parts of his dismembered body had also been left at five other beauty spots dotted around the western fringes of Manchester.

After wrapping them carefully, Majerkiewicz took them to locations popular with outdoorsy folk, such as Worsley Woods, Linnyshaw Colliery and Boggart Hole Clough (an ancient forest which, by sombre irony, takes its name from the ‘boggart’ – a northern term for an evil spirit), often travelling on buses whose passengers could never have suspected what his shopping bags contained.

The largest part, comprising of Mr Everett’s abdomen, buttocks and upper thighs and weighing 12kg, was left amid crushed beer cans in a graffiti-daubed concrete bunker where winos and drug users doss down for the night, just yards from a car wash on the busy Bury New Road.

It had been wrapped in bloody clingfilm, so the person that made this nauseating find – a foreign-language speaker who alerted a passing driver – must have realised immediately what the package contained.

All this caused one senior officer to ponder whether Majerkiewicz acted out some ‘weird fantasy’ and deliberately disposed of the body parts in a manner designed to shock. 

This theory would gain credence when police explored his computer search history and video downloads.

They discovered the 42-year-old Pole, who had migrated to Britain to find work in his early 20s, had a fixation with gory horror films, some of which featured scenes of cannibalism, says Detective Inspector Rachel Smith, who led the investigation team.

Majerkiewicz also had tattoos of monsters from his favourite movies: Alien, the deadly extra-terrestrial creature; Jason Voorhees, the machete-wielding psycho in the Friday The 13th series; and Predator, the humanoid killer who, perhaps tellingly, keeps his victims’ body parts as trophies.

In all, police recovered 27 separate pieces of Mr Everett – a stocky man little more than 5ft tall. 

Many fragments were very small, however, and only one-third of his body has been accounted for. 

After seeking the rest of his remains for months, police are confident they have been lost to nature – yet they cannot rule out the possibility of some further ghastly discovery.

So what drove Majerkiewicz to commit a crime of such cold brutality that DI Smith says it simply ‘beggars belief’?

She and her team explored several theories, to which we’ll return. But though Majerkiewicz was convicted of Mr Everett’s murder at Manchester Crown Court yesterday, none of them was established with any certainty.

Nothing about the smartly turned-out man we saw in the dock – who remained dispassionate as the jury pronounced him guilty – suggested he was capable of this painstaking butchery, which must have taken many hours or even days.

And former colleagues at the takeaway outlets he managed in the city’s Trafford Centre describe him in glowing terms, as does his former common-law wife, Agnieszka Majer, by whom he has sons aged 13 and 11.

Speaking exclusively to the Mail, Ms Majer (who once used his surname but has shortened it since his arrest) told me he was never aggressive in the ten years they were together and described him as ‘a devoted dad’ who liked nothing better than watching Manchester City with his boys.

Astonishingly, on March 31 last year – at the very time he was dropping bits of body around Manchester – he found the composure to take them to the cinema. He seemed similarly relaxed the following day when – immaculately dressed and every inch the proud patriarch – he attended a Holy Communion service with one of their sons at their Roman Catholic church.

However, police discovered that after disposing of the body he had been searching for long-term apartment lets in Spain.

Describing her ex as a ‘normal, nice guy’, Ms Majer, 39, who unwittingly lent him the vacuum cleaner with which he hoovered the murder scene, said: ‘This would be a horrible story if it were true –– (but) I still can’t believe Marcin did it.’

‘Normal and nice’ are certainly adjectives worthy of his victim. Born in Derby to Polish parents, Mr Everett was christened Roman Ziemacki but anglicised his name in keeping with his quintessentially English lifestyle.

Jocular and gregarious, he loved cricket, listening to Rat Pack singers such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, pottering about in the garden and having a flutter on the horses.

Mr Everett, who had worked for the Department for Work and Pensions, never married or had children, but was close to his brother Richard,and niece Marie, who called him ‘Uncle Benny’.

That Majerkiewicz knew all about these family members, and that they lived a two-hour drive away from Manchester, was crucial to his cynical murder plot.

For after killing and dismembering his landlord, he sent WhatsApp messages to Richard and Marie using Mr Everett’s phone, so that, for several weeks after the murder, they thought he was still alive and well.

After the verdict, Mr Everett’s brother said his family were ‘haunted’ and ‘traumatised beyond belief’ by his brutal murder and the way he was ‘systematically and comprehensively disposed of’.

He also praised the ‘exceptional’ police work that had trapped the killer and returned Mr Everett’s remains to the family.

Majerkiewicz and Mr Everett were both members of Manchester’s Polish community, but police couldn’t establish the precise nature of their relationship.

However, in an email to a friend sent in 2021, Mr Everett sent a photo of his ‘partner’ who he called ‘Kamil’. The man in the picture was Majerkiewicz.

He also sent a snap of Majerkiewicz in a Polish snowscape and told his friend: ‘Kamil has many tattoos but is too shy to show them. I will see if I can slip one out and send it to you which he won’t notice (he has access to my email account haha).’

If the two men did have a romance, Agnieska, for her part, says she never suspected her ex was bisexual.

She and Majerkiewicz arrived in Britain some 20 years ago and met while studying English at a Manchester language school, later setting up home and starting a family.

Asked why they parted, Agnieszka alludes vaguely to ‘family issues’, but insists it had nothing to do with violence and claims to have been ignorant of his obsession with horror.

She says their relationship ended in 2017. Curiously, however, records show Majerkiewicz first shared a house with Mr Everett in the Cheetham Hill area of Manchester four years before that, in 2013.

Then, in 2017, the two men began living together again. Mr Everett rented a redbrick semi in Worsley Road, Eccles, and sublet one of its three bedrooms to his young friend.

A third tenant at the house was fellow Pole Michal Polchowski, 68. He was originally charged with murder along with Majerkiewicz, but his case was dropped because police found no evidence to disprove his story.

Depicting himself as a reclusive creature of habit, he said his days followed the same pattern. On returning from work in a food processing factory, he always ate the same meal then retired alone to his room to watch Polish TV.

It has not been established whether Mr Polchowski was in the house when Mr Everett was beaten to death with a blunt instrument and dismembered, but if he was, he maintains he neither heard nor saw anything.

Shortly before his death, Mr Everett enjoyed a few days’ break with his family and friends, in Derby. Though he had suffered a stroke three years earlier, and was still in poor health, he was working at home for a call centre and seemed as ‘jolly as ever’.

The last time anyone saw him alive was on March 27, back in Manchester. Police believe he was murdered later that night or in the early hours of March 28.

Majerkiewicz, who had left his job at a chicken shop the previous November, then had debts of £60,000 and was taking out loans to cover them. That he had also complained to Agnieszka about Mr Everett putting the rent up and wanting him to contribute more to other household bills was another motive explored, inconclusively, by the police.

Yesterday, trial judge Mr Justice Cavanagh said he wishes to ascertain whether Mr Everett was murdered for financial gain before setting the minimum prison term Majerkiewicz must serve when he is handed a life sentence next Tuesday.

Intimate exchanges between the killer and his victim also led investigators to explore the possibility they had a romantic relationship. But again, this was never substantiated.

One intriguing piece of trial evidence suggests Majerkiewicz may have weakened his victim in preparation for the attack. It came from Mr Everett’s regular taxi driver, Cressida Dickinson.

When she drove him home after a shopping trip a week before the murder, she said, he seemed ‘intoxicated’ and ‘fell like a dead weight’ as he got out of the cab.

He was accompanied by a man with an Eastern European accent who fitted Majerkiewicz’s description. This second passenger was completely sober but ‘seemed a bit shifty and avoided eye contact’, leading Ms Dickinson to reflect, presciently as it transpired, that he could easily ‘kill’ the vulnerable Mr Everett.

The mystery surrounding this disquieting episode deepened when she picked up Mr Everett again, a week later, and mentioned his drunkenness when last she saw him. Nonplussed, he replied: ‘You’d have a job – I don’t drink.’

Even in full possession of his faculties, however, this tiny, bespectacled man, whose wheezy chest was not helped by his heavy smoking, would have been no physical match for his relatively youthful tenant.

The forensics strongly suggest that the murder or dismemberment – or both – took place in Majerkiewicz’s bedroom. Traces of Mr Everett’s blood were found on his blue sofa-bed, later recovered from a skip, and an oblong piece of the carpet which had been cut out from beneath the bed.

The blood stains had seeped through to the floorboards, which had been freshly sandpapered but still bore hacksaw marks.

Hair containing Mr Everett’s DNA was also found in the fridge-freezer, giving rise to the macabre possibility that the killer may have stored parts of him there before the disposal.

Soon after the murder, Majerkiewicz began using Mr Everett’s bank cards to withdraw money.

Bogus messages he sent, posing as his victim, included a birthday card to his brother which read: ‘To Rich. Happy birthday and the all the best, my old man. Benny xxxxxx’. This was not a phrase he would usually use.

Using Mr Everett’s phone, Majerkiewicz also covered his tracks with a string of other messages to people in his circle. For example, his other tenant, Polchowski, received a text saying he had suffered another stroke while in Derby, and would be staying there permanently.

It meant that his disappearance went unnoticed for almost a month after the murder.

And though Greater Manchester Police, along with forensic scientists and pathologists, are to be commended for the meticulous investigation that led to Mr Everett being identified, the truth is his killer might never have been caught but for a stroke of luck.

The discovery of the first body part, the torso found at Kersal Dale on April 4, prompted a trawl of nearby CCTV cameras.

On the footage, detectives quickly found their prime suspect – though, with his scruffy clothes and straggly, shoulder-length hair, Majerkiewicz then looked very different from the man we saw in court.

The film shows him struggling to lug a heavy blue carrier bag along Bury New Road. He then disappears into the woods where the torso was found and emerges, a few minutes later, with the bag folded under his arm.

Forensic tests threw up few clues as to the victim’s identity. There were no DNA matches in the police computer and no fingerprints on the skin or clingfilm.

However, the ‘heavy bag man’, as police dubbed him, had gone to the area by bus and, after identifying his travel pass, they traced the starting point of his journey to the Winton estate in Worsley, several miles away.

Even then, finding out who he was and locating his address threatened to be an enormously difficult task.

But on April 25, as the surveillance team watched local people coming and going, fortune fell in their favour: they spotted the ‘heavy bag man’ boarding another bus. When it was stopped, Majerkiewicz was found with Mr Everett’s bank cards, phone and other ID documents. Police had caught their real-life Predator.

Yet it would take many more months, during which they sifted through 2,000 hours of CCTV recordings from streets and parks across western Manchester, before the full enormity of Majerkiewicz’s evildoing could be unravelled.

On March 28, soon after dismembering Mr Everett, his killer had left his genitals, heart, and other internal organs on land close to their house.

The following day, he disposed of his spinal column in Boggart Hole Clough and left ten more body parts in Linnyshaw Colliery. Then, on April 3, came the trip to the reservoir, where he left the mask-like face and skull parts.

When they were pieced together, and a 3-D image was created, a pathologist concluded Mr Everett had been repeatedly bludgeoned with a blunt implement. It is also feared he was still alive when some of the cuts were inflicted.

As Majerkiewicz declined to testify at his trial, we may never know what possessed a man Mr Everett had counted as his close friend – at the very least – to dispatch and dispose of him with such stone-hearted cruelty. As DI Smith says, it defies comprehension.

Perhaps, though, the answer lies somewhere in the vile movies that engrossed the Body Parts Killer when he wasn’t playing the perfect father.