Jamaican Drug Dealer Jailed For LifE Today For Stabbing Woman To Death In Front Of Her Daughter, 6 (Photos)

 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. Continue...



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.

At the hearing, Judge Cooke said: 'I do not know whether when you were in custody any steps were taken to minimise the risk which was represented to women, particularly those with whom you had a relationship.

'It is on any view essential that when men are sentenced for crimes of domestic violence the underlying risk to women is addressed. If it was, it was not successfully addressed.

'You were to be deported but for reasons which cannot be explained to me that was never actioned with the result you were here and able to kill a woman.'

Byfield claimed he was in love with Ms Duffy and that she was sleeping with other men.
But Judge Cooke said: 'That is not love. Love is caring and cherishing. This was obsessive, possessive, brutality mirroring a wholly wrong attitude to women.

'This was the pinnacle of domestic violence, a scourge which effects the lives of women and children.'

Byfield had previous convictions for dealing cannabis in Jamaica and continued to do so in the UK, the Old Bailey heard.

He had been staying with a friend in Hackney in the days leading up to the killing but was thrown out on August 31 last year.

Byfield repeatedly tried to contact Leighann Duffy but she did not answer his calls until the next day.
Prosecutor Crispin Aylett QC said: 'It seems that Miss Duffy had some sort of relationship with this defendant.

'The defendant appears to have become fixated with Leighann Duffy in the weeks leading up to the murder.'  

Byfield was captured on CCTV travelling from Hackney to Walthamstow in the early morning of September 1.

He appears to have spoken to Miss Duffy several times up until 2.33pm and launched his attack some time before 3pm.

He banged 18 times on the front door of the flat and then burst into the victim's living room and stabbed her in the arm and neck.

When she begged him to stop, he replied: 'Shut up, I don't love you any more. I hear you are sleeping with other men.'

Her six-year-old daughter tried to intervene but was hit on the arm and forced away.
Witnesses saw Ms Duffy stagger out of her home bleeding heavily shouting 'help me, help me' as the killer fled the scene.

She was taken by London Air Ambulance to University College Hospital but died of her injuries two days later.

A post-mortem at Walthamstow Mortuary gave the cause of death as a stab wound to the neck.
The six-year-old girl received treatment at the scene for an injury but did not need to go to hospital.
The murder weapons were recovered from the scene and Byfield was quickly identified as a suspect, police said.


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