Leeds man who killed fiancee after ‘love bombing’ her jailed

A man with a history of violence against former partners has been jailed for life for murdering his fiancee.

Jack Johns, 53, killed 51-year-old Malgorzata Wiktor, also known as Gosia, six months into their relationship after “love bombing” her when they met, Leeds Crown Court heard.

Gosia and her friends and family had raised concerns about Johns’s “intense” behaviour in the days and weeks before her death on 11 June this year.

Sentencing the defendant to a minimum of 29 years in prison, Judge Tom Bayliss KC described him as an “obsessive, possessive, domineering and unstable individual”, telling him: “You are, Jack Johns, an extremely dangerous man.”

The judge said there were “classic markers of coercing and controlling behaviour” in Gosia’s relationship with Johns, who pleaded guilty to murder in September.

Her friends and family had used the terms “overwhelming” and “love bombing” to describe his initial behaviour towards her, according to prosecutor Geraldine Kelly KC.

“In the last week or so before he killed her, she too had raised concerns with her cousin about over-the-top behaviour and over-the-top affection.”

Gosia, who lived in the Belle Isle area of Leeds after moving to the UK with her son Gracjan from Poland about 20 years ago, had complained of feeling “suffocated” in the relationship.

The mother-of-one said Johns, of School Street in Tingley, was “too intense […] watching her when she was sending texts to other people, overly emotional [and] too clingy”.

He would also complain about some of the clothes she wore, the court heard.

The pair were engaged within three months, which Gosia, who worked as a receptionist at a dental practice, said “felt rushed and that [Johns] was putting pressure on her”, Kelly told the court.