On April 2, 2024, a man was caught on surveillance footage walking a quiet street in Salford carrying a large, heavy blue bag. He moved without urgency, blending into foot traffic the way anyone running an errand might. Nobody stopped him. Nobody looked twice. Two days later, a member of the public found a human torso wrapped in cling film inside an isolated concrete bunker in Kersal Dale Nature Reserve.
The man on the footage and the body in the bunker were connected. Greater Manchester Police did not yet know that. They did not know who the victim was. They did not know who the man with the bag was. They gave him a working name: Heavy Bagman.
The investigation that followed would span six separate recovery locations, more than 2,000 hours of surveillance footage, 3,000 exhibits, and statements from over 450 witnesses. It would also reveal that the victim had been dead for more than a week before his body was ever found, because his killer had been answering his phone the entire time.
Stuart Everett
Stuart Everett was born Roman Ziemacki, a Derby man through and through, though he spent much of his adult life in Manchester. He came from proud Polish roots. His parents had survived two brutal years in a Soviet concentration camp during the Second World War before managing to escape and build a new life in Britain. Growing up alongside his brothers and sister, Stuart absorbed a deep sense of community and respect for others. He changed his name to reflect his British upbringing, and those who knew him said there was no shame in the decision. To family and close friends, he was known simply as Benny.
Over a working life spent in public service, first with the NHS and then the Department for Work and Pensions, Stuart earned a reputation as a civil servant who genuinely cared about the people he served. He never married and had no children of his own. He gave that energy to his community instead.
By 2013, after health complications including a stroke had forced him into semi-retirement and left him reliant on a walking stick, he was running several English classes each week for newly arrived Polish immigrants in Manchester, teaching language and offering a sense of belonging in equal measure.
He was also, by all accounts, a true historian and collector. His home was full of decades of family documents, photographs, and personal papers that charted not just his own life but the life of his family going back generations.
He lived in a rented three-bedroom house on Worsley Road in Winton, Salford. Rather than rattle around the property alone, he rented the other rooms to fellow Polish migrants. It was through this arrangement, around 2017, that Marcin Majerkiewicz came to share his home.
Majerkiewicz Moves In
Marcin Majerkiewicz was born on April 10, 1982. He had known Stuart for well over a decade before moving into the Worsley Road property following the breakdown of a relationship. He had two children with his former partner, remained on good terms with her, and visited the children regularly. For most of his adult life he had worked in fast food restaurants, including at the Trafford Centre, taking work when it was available.
Friends and neighbours regularly saw the two men together. In emails to an online friend, Stuart had referred to Majerkiewicz, using the name Kamil, as his partner and provided a photograph of him. The jury was told that Kamil’s birthday matched Majerkiewicz’s date of birth exactly. Despite the age gap of roughly 25 years, the bond between them ran far deeper than that of ordinary housemates. Stuart treated Majerkiewicz with genuine care, acting as mentor, confidant, and in many respects, family.
Police would later note that Majerkiewicz had an obsession with gore and horror. He had a tattoo of Jason, the slasher-film character from the Friday the 13th franchise, on his body.
Behind that relationship, Majerkiewicz had spent several years digging a financial hole he could not climb out of. He had accumulated more than 60,000 pounds in loan debt and maxed out credit cards to the value of over 14,000 pounds. Every borrowed penny was spent as fast as it arrived. By November 2023, he had stopped working entirely. No job, no plan, and a growing list of creditors.
The Murder
Sometime during the night of March 27, 2024, Stuart Everett was in his bedroom, settled on the sofa in his pajamas, watching a football match. Majerkiewicz approached him from behind with a hammer and struck him on the top and back of the head at least four times, each blow cracking deeper than the last with enough force to fracture his skull. Medical evidence presented at trial indicated Stuart clung to life just long enough to draw a few ragged breaths. Blood was found in his lungs.
What followed was methodical. Using a knife and a hacksaw, Majerkiewicz dismembered the body into 27 pieces. Some parts were wrapped in cling film. Others were placed in black bin bags. Over the following week, he made multiple trips across Salford and north Manchester, depositing remains in secluded parks, open spaces, the Kersal Dale bunker, and Blackleach Reservoir. Hundreds of people passed him on those trips, none of them aware of what he was carrying. The hacksaw went into the reservoir as well.
When the Easter weekend brought larger crowds, he paused the disposal and stored remaining parts in a freezer at the house. Concerned that Stuart’s face might enable identification, he then separated it from the skull.
He had also cut out the bloodstained section of carpet in his bedroom and replaced it with a patch taken from Stuart’s room. He hid the cut piece under his bed and, in what would later prove costly, forgot to throw it out.
The Impersonation
Majerkiewicz already knew the password to Stuart’s phone. He used it to send messages to Stuart’s family claiming Stuart had moved out of the property, was unwell following his stroke, and was not taking calls. He impersonated Stuart over telephone conversations, reportedly slurring his voice to mimic the effects of the stroke.
He wrote a handwritten birthday card to Stuart’s brother, Richard Ziemacki, and posted it. The handwriting was later confirmed as his. His fingerprints were on the paper.
He told the landlord that all three residents were moving out. He told the other housemate that the landlord had served notice to leave. When the other housemate asked about Stuart’s belongings, Majerkiewicz told him Stuart’s family had already collected everything.
He then hired a skip company, using Stuart’s money, to dispose of Stuart’s possessions, including those decades of family documents, wedding photographs, and birth certificates that could never be replaced.
He took over all of Stuart’s bank accounts and withdrew cash at ATMs across the city, spending the money on fast food. On at least one occasion, he stopped at a KFC after depositing a body part in a local park.
He went after Stuart’s pension. When Stuart’s family, who had received no photographs or video of Stuart’s supposed new home, began to grow suspicious, Majerkiewicz visited an open house viewing and filmed it to send to them as proof Stuart was living there.
He stored the blood-soaked sofa in a rented storage unit, hoping it would never surface. He scrubbed surfaces with bleach and antibacterial wipes. He had also begun researching rental properties in Alicante, Spain.
The Investigation
Greater Manchester Police launched a murder investigation on April 4, 2024, the day Stuart’s torso was found at Kersal Dale. The location was sealed off and declared a search scene, remaining active for 12 days. Forensic teams found no additional remains there. When the victim’s DNA was run against the National Police Database, it returned nothing. Stuart Everett had no criminal record.
The breakthrough came from the force’s Visual Evidence Retrieval and Analysis unit, a team of ten investigative support officers and a detective sergeant. Trawling through CCTV from access points around Kersal Dale, they identified footage from April 2 showing a man arriving with the heavy blue bag and leaving without it.
The same figure appeared on multiple cameras across the city on subsequent days. Detectives named him Heavy Bagman. They still did not know who he was.
As body parts continued to surface at locations across north Manchester and Salford, investigators used phone data analysis to build a picture of Majerkiewicz’s movements. The analysis placed him at all four corners of Blackleach Reservoir.
On April 29, VERA officers reenacted a journey on foot from the Worsley Road address, approximately eight minutes return, and located significant parts of Stuart at Chesterfield Close. A dive team entered Blackleach Reservoir and recovered the hacksaw. Stuart’s blood was on the blade.
Divers also found Stuart’s skull, broken into four separate fragments during the attack and scattered across different parts of the reservoir.
The Arrest
On April 25, 2024, an investigative support officer from the VERA unit was walking a quiet residential street in Winton when she noticed a man matching the description of Heavy Bagman. She alerted colleagues, kept him in sight, and tracked him discreetly until uniformed officers were in position. They boarded the same bus and detained him. Marcin Majerkiewicz was placed under arrest on suspicion of murder.
When officers searched him, they found two mobile phones, one of which belonged to Stuart Everett, and several bank cards in Stuart’s name. He had been due to vacate the Worsley Road property that same day and had been researching properties abroad. Had the arrest come a few hours later, he may well have been gone.
A search of the property confirmed the scale of what had taken place. Blood was found on the carpet, wall, and chest of drawers in Majerkiewicz’s bedroom. Under UV light, extensive additional bloodstaining covered the room, having soaked through the underlay and deep into the floorboards. The blood-soaked sofa, retrieved from the storage unit, was examined under UV light. It was drenched in Stuart’s blood.
Majerkiewicz’s DNA was all over it. DNA matching Stuart was also confirmed in the fridge freezer. The cut carpet patch, hidden under the bed and never discarded, was recovered. A forensic pathologist reassembled Stuart’s fractured skull and confirmed he had been killed by multiple blows from a hammer-type weapon.
Trial and Verdict
Following a three-week trial at Manchester Crown Court, a jury found Marcin Majerkiewicz guilty of murder on March 21, 2025. He had offered no evidence in his defence throughout the proceedings and denied any involvement in Stuart’s death. He called it one giant misunderstanding.
The jury was not convinced. Detectives had poured over more than 2,000 hours of surveillance footage, collected over 3,000 exhibits, and taken statements from more than 450 witnesses. His DNA was on the murder weapon and across dozens of other pieces of evidence. The prosecution presented his purchase of the hacksaw and hammer in advance, the messages sent on Stuart’s behalf in the days following the murder, and the handwritten birthday card sent to Stuart’s brother while Stuart’s body was being scattered across the city.
On March 28, 2025, Mr Justice Cavanagh sentenced Majerkiewicz to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 34 years. The judge described the murder as pre-planned and motivated by financial gain, carried out so Majerkiewicz could steal Stuart’s money and pay off his mounting debts. He told Majerkiewicz: “You acted in an almost unbelievably cold-blooded and macabre way and showed complete disrespect and contempt for your friend’s remains.
This denied dignity to Stuart Everett even in death, and greatly increased the pain suffered by Stuart Everett’s family when the murder came to light.”
By the time of sentencing, only a third of Stuart’s body had been recovered. The remaining two-thirds had not been found. Majerkiewicz has remained uncooperative.
Stuart Everett was 67 years old. He had spent his working life in public service, taught English to strangers for free in his retirement, and kept close to his family until the end. His family told the court: “Even though it has been almost 12 months, we are still haunted by Benny’s death, which has now been made even more painful knowing the lengths that were taken to plan it.” Friends described him as jolly, gentle, sociable, easy to talk to, and always ready with a warm welcome. He was, those who knew him said, the kind of man that everyone got on with.
Stuart was also a historian and collector, and when Majerkiewicz threw his possessions into a skip, he did not just discard the belongings of a man he had killed. He discarded decades of wedding photographs, birth certificates, and personal papers. He discarded an entire family’s documented history. Stuart’s family lost both a man and the record of where he came from.
