By Andy Hughes, LBC Crime Correspondent

In the summer of 2018, police searched a house in Chester and found a collection of hand-written notes.

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They were small, the kind of Post-it notes you might stick to a fridge as a reminder to buy milk. But every inch was covered.

The handwriting did not run in lines. It sprawled. Words were crammed into corners, turned sideways and squeezed into gaps between other words, as if the writer kept returning to the page and finding less and less room. Some phrases were in capitals. Some were underlined. No beginning and no end, just a crowd of thoughts jostling for space.

And those thoughts contradicted one another, sometimes within an inch. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” “Not guilty.” “Why me?” Then, elsewhere on the same scraps of paper: “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them.” “I am a horrible evil person.” And, in capitals: “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.”

It was a confession. It was also a denial. It was an outpouring of emotion, a cry of despair, a howl of self-loathing, and a plea of........

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