Murder of Karen Hastings 1987 - Weston-Super-Mare The case of the cold-blooded killer After being dumped by his girlfriend Karen, Dean Westwood took his revenge by shooting her and her friend Mandy both in the head It was said in court that 22-year-old psychopathic Dean Westwood had planned the murders of attractive, happy-go- lucky Weston-super-Mare girls, 19- year-old Karen Hastings and her 18- year-old friend Mandy Cotton, like a military operation, even boasting of his intentions. Westwood chose army gear - a khaki shirt and camouflage trousers, plus a Bowie knife - when he set out on his macabre mission on a warm and peaceful September Monday in 1986. He carefully parked his Ford Cortina out of sight and then walked up to the front door of the neat Hastings family bungalow in Cherrywood Rise, Worle. Then, after having had a brief conversation with the two girls, in which they apparently told him to go away and stop being a nuisance, he returned to his car to collect his father's single-barrelled shotgun, which he had stolen from a locked room. He then marched back to the house carrying the loaded gun across his shoulders. Within a few minutes both girls were dead from shotgun wounds to the head - Mandy in the kitchen and Karen, who had tried to barricade herself in the living room, and then run off in an attempt to escape - in the street outside. In a bizarre letter, found later in the bungalow bathroom and admitting the murders, he said that the girls had ridiculed him and he could not stand the pressure that they had subjected him to. Another note, to his parents, read: 'Mom and dad and family. I'm sorry things had to end this way ... I love you very much and beg you not to be upset or hate me for what I have done. I love you all, Dean.' Violence seems to have played a big part in Dean Westwood's life as he swaggered around Weston-super-Mare. Well known to the teenagers who frequented the clubs, bars and arcades in the centre of the seaside town, to many he appeared an odd character, desperately seeking the limelight. Others thought him evil. Those police officers who came into contact with him when, as a 19-year-old in 1984, he had made a drunken, vicious attack on a railway guard who refused him a lift home, were among the few who knew just how close he had then come to facing a murder charge. They realised even then that he was quite capable of killing someone in cold blood - and those fears were soon to become a reality. Born in Lichfield, in Staffordshire, Westwood had moved to Weston when he was 10, living in a seafront nursing home run by his parents. His brother Lee joined the army and carved out a successful career, but Westwood never seems to have achieved much. At his secondary school, Broadoak, he was never popular, although an attention seeker, leaving as soon as he could, at 16, without any qualifications. Passionately interested in guns and military matters, however, he immediately joined the Junior Leaders Regiment, later transferring to the prestigious King's Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery. Here he became the Regimental Sergeant Major's batman. But service life somehow didn't live up to his dreams. He couldn't cope and often went absent without leave - at one time coming home and then beating up his father when he threatened to report him to the authorities. Another time he said that he was off to join the French Foreign Legion. Matters went from bad to worse and he made no fewer than four suicide attempts. After his conviction for his attack on the railwayman - 15 months in youth custody - he was sacked from the army. He was depressed he said, after his release from Horfield prison, and wanted to take out his feelings on someone. He started hanging around Weston's clubs and bars, being banned from one for smashing up the toilets. It was in Mr B's Fun Pub, where both girls worked as barmaids three nights a week, that he met Karen Hastings and her friend, Mandy, showing off his physique and tattoos. He started going out with Karen but she thought he was a bit of a joke, and, after six weeks, stopped seeing him. Westwood could not accept her decision and blamed friend Mandy for the break-up. On the day of the killings, Karen's father James, together with her brother, Andrew, arrived home from work to see Westwood, still brandishing a gun, but sobbing and crying, standing next to his dead daughter, lying in a pool of blood on the pavement. Andrew went berserk and tried to floor the murderer with a spirit level, but by this time two brave policemen, PC's Bradley and New, patrolling nearby, had appeared on the scene to take control of things. After Westwood had put the still loaded gun to his own mouth they found him a cigarette, calmed him down, and then arrested him. The ex-soldier and keep-fit fanatic showed no emotion when, in May 1987, Judge McNeill jailed him for life at Bristol Crown Court. Karen's father Jim, facing him in the public gallery as he was taken down, shouted 'Rot, then'. He later told the Post: 'I think he's still dangerous and will always be dangerous.' He had already written a note to his family telling them what he meant to do - and on his way to kill the girls he even called in to confide in a friend, Darren Owen. He was so astonished when Westwood told him of what he was about to do that, thinking it just wild talk and refusing to believe it, he did nothing and informed no one.