Liam Finlay name-checked murdered Irish student Karen Buckley in some of his twisted letters
Sally Hind and Carrington Walker GAU Writer
09:05, 30 Dec 2025
Liam Finlay obsessed over murdered Irish student Karen Buckley in some of his letters
A fantasist who obsessed over the murder of Irish student Karen Buckley in a series of twisted letters before terrorising schoolgirls is set to be freed from prison.
Liam Finlay, from Tullamore, Co. Offaly, crowned himself the “beast of all sex beasts” in the letters before being locked up more than a decade ago for threatening to kidnap, rape, torture and murder young women and girls.
The now-51-year-old had sent several handwritten messages to Gardaí stations, a secondary school, and a college, detailing his vile plans before detectives identified the labourer, uncovering a secluded woodland hideout he’d built for his ‘victims’ in the process.
Former detective and handwriting expert John Sweetman going through cuttings from Karen Buckley murder case(Image: Video Grab)
Finlay’s case became interlinked with that of Karen Buckley, a student from Mourneabbey, Co. Cork, who was brutally murdered by Alexander Pacteau in Glasgow in 2015, after the fantasist included the woman in his sordid notes.
“One page showed a photograph of Karen Buckley, a 24-year-old student from Cork who had been murdered in Glasgow earlier that year,” described former Gardaí detective and handwriting expert John Sweetman on an episode of his Lines of Enquiry podcast.
“The haunting details from that crime were fresh in everybody’s minds. Pacteau’s sentencing was just two months before this letter was sent. The author was now promising that Karen’s horrific suffering would be mild in terms of what he had planned for his victims.”
Pacteau, then 21, was jailed for 23 years in 2015 after admitting he had bludgeoned Karen with a spanner and strangled her in his car before hiding her body in a barrel he stored at a farm.
Finlay’s letters also referenced the 2012 killing of 29-year-old Jill Meagher, originally from Drogheda, who was murdered by a serial rapist on a night out in Melbourne, Australia.
“I have read these letters, and I can’t bring myself to repeat the sick language and graphic accounts of torture and suffering he had imagined for these two young women,” Sweetman told listeners, adding that Finlay also boasted of preparing a “soundproof and escape-proof torture chamber”.
Alexander Pacteau (left) murdered Karen Buckley in 2015.
One letter read: “College girls should start to feel afraid because I’m coming to get them soon”. Sweetman ran DNA examinations and other tests on the pages, but to no avail.
“There was rage in the words. Rage and a deep, horrifying depravity. This was a horror film come to life sitting on my desk,” he recounted.
“If it were fantasy, how long before it became a reality? I knew I needed to find the author of these letters, and I feared our time was running out.”
As more pages arrived, Sweetman trawled other anonymous letters sent to police in previous years before matching them to one sent more than a decade earlier, in 2004. Gardaí worked to create a profile of who they thought the writer was based on the contents.
More letters arrived in 2016 and 2017, some addressed to the police and others found by members of the public fixed to railings. In one, the author gave himself the title ‘The Beast of all Sex Beasts’.
Then two new letters, sent to girls’ schools, singled out six teenage girls and boasted of how the author had been stalking them. Soon after, detectives managed to trace the serial numbers from some stamps to a post office in Tullamore, Co. Offaly.
A retired Gardaí detective scanned through hours of CCTV footage and suggested Finlay should be a suspect, based on the profile created.
Sweetman found writing samples from Finlay were a “conclusive” match with the letters, and a search of his home revealed a “mountain of evidence”, including hundreds of newspaper cuttings and more twisted letters. Finlay admitted his guilt and led detectives to a new forest den covered in plastic with more clippings of young women inside.
John Sweetman worked extensively on the case(Image: Video Grab)
He admitted to charges of threatening to abduct, torture, rape and kill teenage girls at Tullamore Circuit Court and was refused bail before being found guilty of other charges in 2018, including sending packages containing obscene material by post.
He was sentenced in 2019 to 15 years in prison, with the final three suspended for 10 years. A psychiatrist described the criminal as suffering from “sexual sadism disorder”.
Finlay was added to the sex offenders’ register and told he could not go back to the areas where he committed his crimes. He is reportedly due for release from Arbour Hill prison in Dublin in six months.
Sweetman described the case as “one of the most unnerving investigations” of his entire career: “The combined efforts of the tenacious investigating Gardaí, the forensic lab and the handwriting section might just have stopped a ticking time bomb from going off.”