Freed Patient Stabbed Health Worker To Death

A young mental health worker was stabbed to death with four knives by a patient who had been freed from a psychiatric hospital after threatening to murder the Queen.

{mosimage}Ashleigh Ewing, 22, was on a routine visit to the home of Ronald Dixon, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, when he launched an attack that left her with 39 stab wounds.

Dixon, 35, thought that he was the son of Henry VIII and had been arrested at Buckingham Palace four months earlier, when he told police that he wanted to see his mother – the Queen – and planned to kill her.

He was treated at a psychiatric hospital in January last year, but by May he had been allowed to return to his home in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Metropolitan Police had taken his threats on the Queen’s life seriously enough to order checks on his whereabouts before she visited the North East in April.

Ms Ewing, who was sent to Dixon’s flat to deliver a letter, was six months into her first full-time job after graduating from Northumbria University.

She was employed as a support worker by Mental Health Matters, a charity that provides community services to clients with psychiatric problems and that managed the property where Dixon was living.

Newcastle Crown Court was told that Dixon, who called himself King Ron, had been refusing to take antipsychotic drugs, was drinking alcohol and had become distressed by mounting debts. He was showing signs of a relapse into a psychotic state.

The letter that Miss Ewing took to him confirmed that he had agreed to pay compensation for a telephone that he had damaged.

Paul Sloan, QC, for the prosecution, told the court that “it would seem the content of the letter played some part in triggering the frantic knife attack”.

He said that the assault had begun in the sitting room, where Ms Ewing, from Hebburn, South Tyneside, had been sitting. “There was a struggle . . . [Ashleigh] then made her way to the kitchen, bleeding freely from knife wounds. She remained upright for a period, still trying to fend off knife blows. She eventually fell to the floor in the kitchen, where the defendant continued his attack, sitting astride Ashleigh while stabbing her in the chest and inflicting a deep wound to her neck.”

Mr Sloan said that Dixon had used four knives. As one broke, he would use a replacement. The broken blade of one knife was found in one of Miss Ewing’s chest wounds. When he had finished the attack, Dixon, who was given a two-year probation order after attacking his sleeping parents with a hammer in 1994, walked to a police station and said a woman was lying dead in his home. During police interviews he responded to most questions with the reply: “King.”

Dixon was charged with murder but the prosecution accepted his plea of guilty to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. Judge David Hodson ordered that he should be detained indefinitely in a secure hospital. He told Dixon his frenzied and sustained attack had cut short the life of “an active, intelligent young woman with enormous potential”.

“She was just embarking on a life of doing good for others and you ended that. In the months leading up to your attack on Miss Ewing, there were a number of indicators, which we can now see . . . were building up inexorably to the explosion of violence that occurred on that tragic meeting.” Ms Ewing’s parents, Aileen and Jeff Ewing, said that their daughter’s dream had been “to make a difference in the world”. They demanded to know why she was asked to pay an unaccompanied visit to a client “who was known to have a violent past” and why Dixon’s medical care had not been monitored more closely.

Dixon’s barrister, Patrick Cosgrove, QC, also questioned why Ms Ewing had been sent alone. “If responsible persons had taken rational decisions at the crucial time, Ms Ewing would never have been put in the situation of grave risk and perhaps Mr Dixon would not have been at liberty to commit the crime,” he said.

A Health and Safety Executive investigation is to be published. An inquiry has been ordered by the North East Strategic Health Authority.