TORMENTED Jimmy Johnson has always blamed the horror and hatred of Northern Ireland for turning him into a murderer.

The tragic hero became a cold-blooded killer within weeks of leaving the army. He battered Teesside security guard Keith Culmer to death in 1974.

He was given a mandatory life sentence but, after convincing a parole board he was no longer a threat to society, he was freed in 1983.

Two years later, in an unprovoked attack, he smashed the skull of 41-year-old lab technician Robert Harwood, hitting him six times with a lump hammer at his home in Lynwood Road, Blackburn.

He then collected legal documents belonging to bachelor Mr Harwood and, pretending to be the victim, used them to arrange a £2,000 loan.

Johnson was arrested four days later at a family wedding in Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland.

On both occasions Johnson, now 49, beat his victims to death after befriending them.

Shortly after starting his second prison term, Johnson started to write a "diary of death" in a desperate cry for help.

He hoped his graphic "autobiography" of his terrifying tours of duty in Northern Ireland would persuade Dr Roderick Orner - a specialist in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - to help him.

Johnson had discharged himself from the army in 1974 after suffering the horror and hatred of Northern Ireland.

He soon became a down-and-out and a shadow of his former self.

That "former self" had won a medal and a mention in dispatches for his courage in trying to rescue a woman from a public toilet block in Lurgan, which had been bomb-blasted by the IRA.

The former Royal Tank Regiment corporal has now told psychiatrists that that courage changed his personality and turned him into a killer.

He has also told psychiatrists that a second incident, when he battered a civilian almost to death, led to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a condition unknown when he murdered in 1974 and 1985.

Johnson is now in Frankland Prison in Durham where his son, jailed on an assault charge, is in the adjacent cell.

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