Daily Mail
April 13, 2015
A violent Jamaican drug dealer who evaded deportation for years before he launched a frenzied hammer and knife attack on a young woman in front of her six-year-old daughter could spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Lloyd Byfield, 48, pursued a relationship with 26-year-old Leighann Duffy before he armed himself with a claw hammer and a large red handled kitchen knife and smashed his way into her flat in Walthamstow, east London, on September 1 last year.
After pleading guilty to murder, he was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 26-and-a-half years by Judge Nicholas Cooke who told him he may never be released.
Judge Cooke told Byfield he must have had a ‘heart of stone’ to have killed Ms Duffy despite the presence of the young girl who was herself attacked when she tried to intervene.
During the Old Bailey hearing, Judge Cooke also expressed his ‘unhappiness’ at the failure of authorities to deport Byfield back to Jamaica when he attacked another woman with a chisel and was jailed for burglary in 2005.
He said the murder could have been prevented if he had been sent back to Jamaica then.
Byfield came to the UK in 2000 and was granted indefinite leave to remain on June 29, 2004 after getting married to a British woman despite being in another relationship with the mother of his child, Patricia White.
Nine days before leave was granted, he stabbed Ms White with a chisel.
Two months later, he broke into her husband’s home and ransacked it.
In March 2005 he was jailed for 30 months after pleading guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm and burglary. He was ordered to be deported on May 29, 2007.