Inside GMP’s race to find the Salford torso killer

On 5 April 2024, Lewis Hughes, then a detective superintendent at Greater Manchester Police’s serious crime division, clocked into work. Hughes, 40, has been in the force since he was 18 years old. That day, he was covering as senior detective, and it was a particularly busy day. There had been three potential murders in the last 24 hours: one in a prison, another a stabbing of a teenager in South Manchester. 

The third case was different: a dismembered torso had been discovered by a member of the public in Kersal Dale nature reserve, in Salford, wrapped tightly in clingfilm and left in an old concrete bunker. 

Out of the three, Hughes was assigned to work on the torso case long-term. But it was unique in its complexity. Not only was there no suspect, but there were no witnesses. Worst of all, given the partial remains found, there was no identifiable victim. Hughes turned to detective sergeant Heidi Cullum, who leads GMP’s Visual Evidence Retrieval and Analysis Unit (VERA), to begin gathering as much CCTV footage as possible from around Kersal Dale. Whoever had left the torso must have been on foot, at least upon entering the park. 

“So I made the decision,” Hughes says, speaking to me in GMP’s force headquarters with Cullum, “that you’re looking for someone carrying a heavy bag.”

Heavy bag man 

Three days before Hughes walked into three homicides, Marcin Majerkiewicz was having a busy day of his own. The 42-year-old former fast food worker was in the middle of a move; he wanted out of Manchester. He began planning how he would do that, searching the kinds of things someone who perhaps had never moved out alone before would search: how to change a password on a British Gas account, screenshotting letter templates for giving notice to your landlord. 

But not all of his tasks were so anodyne. He also received texts to sign into the Universal Credit account and PayPal account of Stuart Everett, his 67-year-old housemate who he had lived with for some five years. Yesterday, a jury at Manchester Crown Court found Majerkiewicz guilty of murdering Everett, dismembering his body and scattering it across Salford and North Manchester.

That day in April, about a week after he is presumed to have killed Everett, Majerkiewicz had changed the password on his victim’s phone and was accessing his other private accounts. But, outside the bounds of his phone screen, there were matters that Majerkiewicz found more pressing. 

That afternoon he boarded a bus at Eccles interchange — not far from where he, Everett and another man named Mikal Polchowski lived — heading towards Prestwich. He got off on Great Cheetham Street West carrying a blue Aldi bag for life out of which protruded a large, heavy object seemingly wrapped in a bin liner. He eventually reached Kersal Dale nature reserve and went in. When he emerged from the woods, the bag had been folded into a neat square.

Kersal Dale, remote and wooded as it is, lacks CCTV cover. So Cullum and her team had to set wide parameters around the park, gathering footage from nearby businesses. Hughes had directed the team to look for someone by then termed Heavy Bag Man. Hughes, though nearly a year has passed since the start of his investigation, often speaks about it in the present tense. “There’s hundreds of people going about their daily business. It’s a busy, arterial route – cars, pedestrians,” he says, describing Bury New Road as Majerkiewicz walks up it. “But no one does what he does.”

Every few steps, Majerkiewicz swaps the hand carrying the bag, or drops the bag to rest, shaking the lactic acid out of his forearms and putting his hands on his hips. The contents of the bag weighed around 18 kilograms. Eventually, he lugs the bag into the park. The detectives presumed he would have entered the park somewhere not far from the bunker where the torso was found. “People are lazy. Body parts are heavy,” explains Hughes.

Cullum’s team managed to gather thousands of hours of footage. And one camera that happened to look over a fence and directly into the woodland showed Majerkiewicz wading deeper toward the bunker. Once he came back out, he caught a bus back towards Manchester, the number 98. “I remember all the buses religiously,” Cullum says. 

Majerkiewicz was the only person to board the 98 at that stop, so Cullum could work with Transport for Greater Manchester to track the trips made using the day saver he bought. “It was all evolving quite quickly from that one bus transaction, which was cash, but it kind of imploded.”

Catching a murderer, catching a bus

Detectives work within a timeframe that is in a constant state of collapse. CCTV footage gets deleted. Witnesses’ memories fade. Bodies decompose. Cullum’s team were a day late in getting the CCTV from the 98 bus that Majerkiewicz boarded outside Kersal Dale — it had been overwritten — so her team started gathering CCTV around the areas Majerkiewicz’s buses stopped at. 

In doing so, they managed to hone in on Winton, in Eccles, as where his home address had to be. They also found footage of Majerkiewicz making other journeys to remote locations, which became search sites. By the end of the investigation, it had covered 19 individual crime scenes, making it one of the biggest investigations in GMP’s history.

On 25 April 2024, Cullum went for lunch. Her team were out gathering CCTV on Liverpool Road in Eccles, and she was sitting in the car park of a Sainsbury’s near headquarters when one of them called her. They hadn’t seen Majerkiewicz on any CCTV, instead, he was right in front of them, about to board the number 100 bus. 

Cullum kept them on the phone but told them not to engage. Instead she radioed uniformed officers and rallied them to the bus. “Sat in Sainsbury’s car park, trying to have a three-way conversation and arrest our mystery man,” Cullum remembers. The CCTV operatives were describing Majerkiewicz — in a coat with striped sleeves and a beanie hat, of medium height, long hair — while Cullum relayed his features to the officers on their way to the bus. They boarded it on Eccles Old Road and arrested Majerkiewicz. 

Hughes, meanwhile, was abroad on another case, about to catch his flight back. “When you lock the suspect up,” he told a colleague on the phone, “find out who he lives with, find out where he lives, secure his house as a crime scene, arrest anyone else who is there and find out who is unaccounted for.” 

By the time he stepped off the plane in Manchester, that had been done. Majerkiewicz had been arrested and was found carrying Everett’s cards. His housemate Mikal Polchowski was arrested — and later released, becoming a witness rather than a suspect — and Everett had been established as missing from his address. 195 Worsley Road was now a crime scene.

The centre of the web

By the time police arrived at 195 Worsley Road there was a skip outside of it, filled with potential evidence. In the weeks after the murder, between his trips to dispose of Everett’s remains, Majerkiewicz wove a false narrative about what had happened to his housemate. He masqueraded as Everett to his family, using his phone to text them explaining he was moving out of the house on Worsley Road and back to his old address. To the other housemate Polchowski — and their landlord — Majerkiewicz said Everett had suffered a stroke and was moving back in with his family in Derby. Without Everett, Majerkiewicz and Polchowski would be unable to afford the rent. So Polchowski started looking for somewhere new to live.

This gave Majerkiewicz a good cover for cleaning the house and clearing it of evidence. As well as ordering the skip, he had a white van man clear other pieces of furniture from the house, which were taken to a storage unit on the Woolfold trading estate in Bury. On 17 April 2024, Richard Hubert, a neighbour and friend of Everett’s, saw Majerkiewicz bringing industrial carpet cleaning equipment into the house. “Good god,” Hubert said to his wife. “The carpets can’t be that bad, to need that.” 

In court last week, Simon Telford, a forensic scientist, described how a section of carpet in Majerkiewicz’s bedroom had been cut out of the floor and replaced with carpet from another room in a botched attempt to hide evidence. When the removed piece of carpet was retrieved from the skip and sent to forensics, it was still leaking brown liquid. 

However, the blood it had absorbed had been diluted by cleaning, and no DNA could be salvaged. But the blood had also seeped through to the carpet’s underlay, which had the new carpet nailed on top. DNA retrieved from the blood on the underlay was a DNA match to the blood taken from the torso, which by then had been identified as Everett’s. The nails that had been used to tack the new carpet to the ground also displayed DNA that matched Majerkiewicz’s.

Beyond the hidden crime scene found in the house itself, establishing Majerkiewicz’s address meant Hughes and his team could gather more information on his movements following the murder, thereby opening up new search areas. As Hughes explains: “so the CCTV, telephone billing data, data from his handset” — by which he’s referring to the location data embedded in Majerkiewicz’s phone — “all those things put together (meant) we were able to have conversations around the different, remote locations he had been to.”

It meant the recovery of more of Stuart’s body — which was a central motivation for the 20-strong core investigation team as well as the hundreds of supporting officers who were drafted in to search and manage crime scenes. However, while evidence from remote crime scenes and 195 Worsley Road was stacked against Majerkiewicz, detectives wanted to find the final piece of evidence to dispel any doubt that Everett had been murdered: the cause of death. They didn’t want there to be any way Majerkiewicz could say his housemate died accidentally and he just disposed of the body which, while still horrendous, would be “something lesser”, says Hughes. 

The reservoir

Blackleach Reservoir — near Walkden Town Centre, in Salford — is a rare pocket of serenity. It’s hemmed in by terraced houses on one side and the A666 on the other, but standing at its edge you can watch the placid water stretch out and easily forget that. On 3 April, the day before Stuart’s torso was discovered, Majerkiewicz made a late afternoon trip there. 

The handset data GMP used to track him there placed him at various corners of the reservoir. “On one of them, it looks like his feet were wet,” says Hughes, like he had stepped out into the water, rather than picked his way along its edge. Hughes deployed an underwater search team into the mile long, half-mile wide reservoir. 

They found a hacksaw thought to be used to dismember the body. They also found part of Everett’s body. “We find the victim’s head,” Hughes says. “Broken into four pieces, and we find his face, which has been degloved, floating in the water.” 

Even in a case replete with hideous details, I can still register Hughes’s discomfort in recalling that discovery. But awful as it was to uncover, finding the head meant that it could be reconstituted. This in turn meant that Dr Philip Lumb, a pathologist, was able to determine the cause of death: blunt force trauma to the head, causing fatal injuries. From the first CCTV image of Heavy Bag Man, to the bus ticket tracking, to the arrest of Majerkiewicz and the discovery of the home crime scene; to the phone location data, to an underwater search, to the reconstitution of a skull to show that Stuart’s death was no accident, it all helped further prove Everett had been murdered.

No murder weapon, however, has been found. Lumb told the court that the semi-circular nature of the depressions in the back of the skull would suggest Stuart was hit by something curved, like a hammer. But he discounted the masonry hammer found at the property for being too flat.

Only a third of Everett’s body was found as part of the investigation. Other bags were found in other woodlands containing some of Everett’s DNA but there were no human remains. This is likely heart-breaking for the family, who attended the court proceedings via video link. “They’d probably love to lay Stuart to rest intact,” Hughes says, “but that isn’t possible in the circumstances Marcin has created.”

‘Wake up Benny’

Everett was a good neighbour. Hubert remembered in his statement to the court how they would speak over their garden fence while Everett fed birds. “I didn’t think of him as a neighbour, more as a friend, really.”

He was a keen gambler and cricket fan. He used to send scratch cards to his niece on her birthday. Majerkiewicz did the same following the murder, even sending a handwritten birthday card to Everett’s brother signed “Benny”, his family nickname. On 13 April his brother messaged Everett’s phone saying “wake up, you have a fiver bet today”, then sending another message: “wake up Benny”. 

It is unclear what relationship Everett shared with Majerkiewicz. But based on emails he sent to friends, it appears they were particularly close. In one email, he talks about his partner, who he refers to as Kamil. In another, he attached a photo of Kamil to show his friend. “The photo was of Marcin Majerkiewicz,” prosecutors said. 

After the murder, while Majerkiewicz was masquerading as Everett to his family, housemate and landlord, messages were also exchanged between Everett and Majerkiewicz’s phones. And in one such message, Majerkiewicz seems to tailor it just for himself. The message is Everett saying that, because of his stroke, he would be moving out of 195 Worsley Road. It was sent both to Majerkiewicz and to his housemate Polchowski. But Majerkiewicz’s had a different ending. Writing to himself as Everett, he said: “I’m sorry things turned out this way and you’re only just finding out, but that is health,” ending it with: “thank you for the good times. I hope you find your place and will be happy.”

Majerkiewicz accepted that he distributed Everett’s remains across Greater Manchester, but denied murdering him. Yesterday morning, a jury found him guilty of Stuart Everett’s murder. He is due to be sentenced on 28 March, almost a year to the date it is thought Everett died.