Daily Mail
December 4, 2013
A paranoid schizophrenic laughed as he brutally knifed his flatmate to death before decapitating him with a meat cleaver.
Karl Addo, 30, launched the ‘prolonged and horrific’ attack on Spanish student Sergio Marquez at their Bournemouth flat on the 23-year-old’s birthday.
Addo repeatedly stabbed his victim during the 20-minute attack, knifing Mr Marquez in the chest before striking him numerous times with a meat cleaver.
A court today heard Addo struck Mr Marquez with such force that the handle of the cleaver snapped.
A neighbour heard Mr Marquez beg Addo to stop the attack by repeatedly yelling ‘please, Karl’ and then the sound of laughter.
Mr Marquez’s headless and mutilated body was discovered a short time later when three of his friends turned up at the flat for the celebrations.
The trio – two girls and a man – fled the gruesome scene screaming for help after Addo fled the property covered in blood.
Bournemouth Crown Court heard that Addo, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter after denying a charge of murder, had a history of mental illness and was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2005 when he was living in Atlanta, US.
He came to UK in 2008 to study aerospace engineering at university in London but endured delusions of being attacked by a gang and injected with drugs.
In October 2011 – nine months before he killed Mr Marquez – a Mental Health tribunal ruled Addo should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
But Addo absconded the hearing and disappeared. In February last year he was thrown out of Heathrow Airport for sleeping rough and moved to Bournemouth a month later.
He moved in to the flat but was due to be evicted on the day of the killing after his flatmates complained to their landlord about Addo’s behaviour.