A cinematic murder took place on May 13, 2011, in an Asian shop in the popular Valdés shopping center in Los Cristianos, Tenerife. On that day, 60-year-old British woman Jennifer Mills-Westley was decapitated in broad daylight. Her murderer was 28-year-old homeless Bulgarian Deyan Deyanov Valentinov, who lived in a shack and suffered from religious delusions. The paranoid Deyan believed he heard angelic voices telling him what to do. He was firmly convinced that he was Jesus Christ, who was supposed to found a new Jerusalem. On that day, Deyan seriously believed that he was starring in the movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he happened to run into Jennifer Mills-Westley. He pursued the woman who had dared to look him in the eye. She fled from him into the employment office. There she got help from a security guard who chased Deyan away. When Jennifer thought he had gone away, she went into the Asian shop. She had no idea that Deyan had been waiting for her and had followed her there. What happened next could have come straight out of a horror movie. In the store, Deyan took a large knife from a shelf and attacked Jennifer from behind, slitting her throat and severing her head with several knife strokes. All of this was filmed by the surveillance camera. With her head and the knife in his hand, Deyan ran out of the store, leaving behind the completely horrified and shocked staff and customers. He put the knife down outside, while keeping her head and repeatedly shouting that he had cut off the head of a crazy woman until a courageous Italian tourist had the presence of mind to throw his motorcycle helmet at Deyan. When Deyan was hit and staggered, security guard Juan Antonio Hernández lunged at Deyan and threw him to the ground. Other people helped to subdue Deyan, who was screaming incessantly and lashing out wildly. When Deyan was arrested and taken away by the police, they even had to protect him from the angry passers-by who wanted to lynch him. As it turned out, several complaints had already been filed against Deyan. He had repeatedly been violent towards Africans and had repeatedly thrown beer bottles at shopping centers. He had also attacked a security guard and knocked out his teeth, which is why he had been admitted to the psychiatric ward of the University Hospital de la Candelaria in Santa Cruz 15 days before the heinous crime, but had been discharged without a diagnosis. This was not Deyan’s first stay in a psychiatric ward, as he had been released from the British psychiatric institution in Cheshire, Wales, five months before the crime. The jury reached a verdict after only three hours. They unanimously found Deyan Deyanov Valentinov guilty of the murder of Jennifer Mills-Westley. He was sentenced to 20 years in a psychiatric prison. The surviving relatives of Jennifer Mills-Westley, her two daughters, received €100,000 in compensation. This was little consolation, as both Spain and the UK were urged after the verdict to pay more attention to the care of mentally ill people so that such a terrible crime would never have to happen again.
The decapitated woman in the Asian shop
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