Liam Finlay, 51, was locked up more than a decade ago after threatening to kidnap, rape, torture and murder young women and girls.
13:10, 30 Dec 2025Updated 13:10, 30 Dec 2025
A fantasist who obsessed over the murder of Karen Buckley in Glasgow and sent terrifying letters about terrorising schoolgirls is nearing the end of his sentence.
Self-confessed “beast of all sex beasts” Liam Finlay, 51, was locked up in Ireland more than a 10 years ago after threatening to kidnap, rape, torture and murder young women and girls, reports the Daily Record.
The brute had written a series of letters sent to Gardaí stations, a secondary school and a college in which he detailed his vile plans before detectives identified the labourer and discovered a secluded woodland hideout he’d built for his ‘victims’.
And now a former Gardaí detective and handwriting expert has told how the chilling case became interlinked when that of tragic Karen, a student brutally murdered by Alexander Pacteau in Glasgow in 2015, when she featured in his letters.
John Sweetman tells his podcast series, Lines of Enquiry: “One page showed a photograph of Karen Buckley, a 24-year-old student from Cork who had been murdered in Glasgow earlier that year.
“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.”
Alex Pacteau, then 21, was jailed for 23 years after admitting bludgeoning Karen with a spanner and strangling her in his car before hiding her body in a barrel he stored at a farm.
Alexander Pacteau(Image: © HEMEDIA / SWNS Group)
The letters also referenced the 2012 killing of 29-year-old Jill Meagher, originally from Drogheda, Ireland, who was murdered by a serial rapist on a night out in Melbourne, Australia.
Sweetman added: “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.”
The depraved letter writer also boasted of preparing a “soundproof and escape proof torture chamber”.
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 they drew a blank.
He said: “There was rage in the words. Rage and a deep horrifying depravity. This was a horror film come to life sitting on my desk.
“If it was 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.”
When 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.
More letters arrived in 2016 and 2017, some direct to 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 stamp to a post office in Tullamore, Co. Offaly.
A retired Gardaí detective trawled hours of CCTV footage and suggested local man Liam Finlay should be a suspect, based on the profile created.
(Image: Supplied)
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.
He admitted 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.
One physiatrist said he suffered from “sexual sadism disorder”.
Finlay was added to the sex offenders’ register and told he could not go back to the areas 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.
He said: “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.”