A man whose relatives were killed by a delusional paranoid schizophrenic has reacted with "despair" to details of another mental patient killing.

Charles Little said there are some "key similarities" between the stabbing of his 83-year-old parents-in-law Michael and Marjorie Cawdery in Portadown and a more recent case in Sheffield.

The more recent case involves the lethal stabbing of 74-year-old dog walker Roger Leadbeater by mental patient Emma Borowy, 32.

Occult-obsessed Borowy (who has since died) had already been sectioned for killing two goats with a knife, but had run away from mental facilities eight times - and was absconding on the day she stabbed Mr Leadbeater in 2023.

placeholder image — Marjorie and Michael Cawdery, both 83, were fatally stabbed in Portadown in 2017 by a dangerous mentally-unhinged man

A coroner this week criticised the police in the case for not implementing changes that had since been recommended for dealing with "vulnerable" mentally ill people (in particular, for not rolling out a form to be used when handing people over from police custody to hospitals or other forces).

Asked his own reaction to such fatal cases, Mr Little told the News Letter: "It's despair. It really is. These cases keep happening and nothing changes.

"We've got to start learning and being able to change the way we deal with people to ensure we start to get these things to be dealt with quickly."

Mr Little had come across his parents-in-law lying rolled up in carpet at their home in May 2017 shortly after they had been fatally attacked by Thomas McEntee, 43.

McEntee was later jailed for at least 10 years for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Mr Little said the main similarity between that case and the one in Sheffield is that in each instance there was "no system for looking after these 'chaotics' properly" ('chaotics' being the term he gives to mentally-unstable people who are spiralling).

The Cawdreys' killer had turned up at a police station looking to talk about cults, had then been taken to hospital, and "the hospital said 'oh there is nothing wrong with him' and let him out", he said.

"As the week progressed he was getting increasingly worse," said Mr Little.

"He went from looking for help being just delusional on Monday, to on Wednesday looking for help having just self-harmed, then on the Friday he was looking for help stark naked having slashed his arms and claiming to be Jesus.

"And still he couldn't get help."

That is one "big difference" between McEntee and Borowy, he said: McEntee killed the Cawderys while looking for help, whilst Borowy killed Mr Leadbeater while fleeing from help.

Mr Little (now aged 73 and living in Newtownstewart in Co Tyrone) said one of the main things he wants to see is the setting up of a specialist team for each region to handle 'chaotics' before their behaviour escalates to violence.

"We need to have a team in place who's responsible for doing it, and we need to have a system - a real system - of learning when things go wrong where we actually do implement change," he said.

"That's the key message, I think."