The tiny signs that gave away Valentine’s Day killer who strangled his fiancee then cried for the TV cameras

The tiny signs that gave away Valentine’s Day killer who strangled his fiancee then cried for the TV cameras

Paul Dyson strangled his fiancee Joanne Nelson to death at their home, then wrapped her body in bin liners and dumped it in woodland - where it would not be discovered for five weeks



As a heartbroken lover, his girlfriend missing, Paul Dyson cut a figure of deep distress as he gave a tearful television appeal for anyone to help find her.
He cried, he spoke about his "beautiful" fiancee and wrung his hands as he appealed to the public at a press conference, clutching a photograph of his beloved.
But as he held the treasured image in apparent grief and desperation, detectives who had been unaware Dyson was going on television to do the appeal noticed two key marks that would give away his [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] lies.
The crescent-shaped marks, on each of his thumbs, betrayed the violence that Dyson had tried to hide and were likely to have been caused by Joanne Nelson fighting back in the final moments of his life as he strangled her to death.
And still he continued to lie.
Joanne was killed on the eve of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] by Dyson, a murderous act of violence apparently triggered by an argument he eventually claimed was about loading a washing machine.
Her body was not found until five weeks later in woodland, dumped in a ditch and wrapped in bin liners.
Despite eventually confessing to her killing, Dyson had told officers he couldn't remember where he had dumped her, heaping further pain on her parents and sisters.
Dyson - who was known to colleagues at the nightclub where he worked by the nickname 'Psycho' - kept up the pretence of the anguished fiance for police and Joanne's family after he reported her missing.

A prop for television betrayed guilt

He rang 999 on Valentine's Day to report Joanne missing. The then 31-year-old former bouncer said they had cuddled before he left for work that morning, but when he returned to their home in Hull she was gone and there was no trace of her. Joanne's parents were with him as he made the call.
And in an emotional television interview Dyson told reporters: "She's absolutely beautiful, real bubbly, real outgoing, real friendly."
Ray Higgins, ex-head of major incident team at Humberside Police, said: "He came across initially as a man who was suffering from real grief."
But Dyson made a key mistake as he used a prop - a photo of Joanne - during the interview. This betrayed the two giveaway marks on his thumbs as cameras zoomed in on his hands and the picture he was clutching.
“In the interview, there was two marks on his thumbs," added Ray. "I knew from dealing with other previous assaults and murders that involved strangulation the first thing a victim will do is to try and pull those hands away from their neck.
"Sometimes in doing so, they can leave sort of crescent-shaped fingernail marks in the skin of the offender and certainly in this particular case, when the news crew zoomed in on Dyson’s hands, you could see quite clearly what appeared to me, to be two similar crescent shaped marks on the back of his thumbs.
"That was the first time I’d been aware of those marks on the back of his thumbs.”

Cliff Lansley, a body language analyst, watched Dyson's television appeal and appears on Investigation Discovery show Faking It to reveal his findings.
He said: "We've got this display of sadness which we would expect to stay on [the face] for a short period of time, then smoothly come off over a period of a few seconds. We didn't get that. What we got was a sudden offset the eyebrows flattened and not just a relaxation of the sadness muscles, a smile starts to come on his face."
"What is going on here? Why should he take pleasure in something so painful?"
Cliff said this could be an indication of psychopathy. He also points to Dyson 'squeezing' his eyes in a bid to try and make it look like he was crying for the cameras.

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