From graduate to police killer

Glaister Earl Butler has a long history of mental instability

Glaister Earl Butler's story is that of an intelligent and once successful man driven to kill a policeman in a state of chronic mental illness.

One of the paranoid schizophrenic's many delusions was that he was the victim of a conspiracy by police who, he maintained, were responsible for him losing his job at Rolls Royce.

At various times during his 49 years, Butler also believed he had been infected with Gamma rays from his microwave oven and that atomic bombs had been exploded secretly, which accounted for the world's depleted ozone layer.

The Jamaican-born mechanical engineering graduate had seemed destined for a stable life after joining Rolls-Royce as the company's first black graduate trainee in 1979.

'Coming to get me'

But after he was made redundant from his job as a design draftsman in 1982 and found it difficult to get work, his mental state began to worsen.

Butler first came to the attention of social services in Stafford in 1992 when they found he had been living without electricity in his flat for two years.

Two years later he kicked a neighbour in the head in an unprovoked attack.

Neighbours told police investigating the assault that Butler could often be heard shouting to himself: "They're coming to get me, they're persecuting me."

'Tipped over the edge'

Butler went on to be held under the Mental Health Act on several occasions, including March 1994 to 95, the second half of 1999 and in April 2001, after he burned down his flat.

The court heard that during his stays in hospital, he was often hostile and both verbally and physically violent towards staff and other patients.

He also refused to accept he had a mental illness and did not take his medication regularly.

Being confronted by a number of police officers on 21 May 2004 was likely to have "tipped him over the edge", one of Butler's doctors believed.

The court heard that although improvements had been made in his condition since the killing, medical staff were agreed he had an abnormality of mind at the time of the attack which substantially diminished his responsibility.