“I was present with the victim of an axe attack when the assailant returned to complete the act.”

A police officer was stationed at the location of a violent axe assault, where the victim’s brain was exposed on the ground. The attacker returned with the intention to complete the act. Sukie Madahar, a former detective from the Metropolitan Police, describes the mundane task of guarding the crime scene transforming into a scene reminiscent of a horror movie.

Sukie told podcaster Dodge Woodall about the night, just after Christmas 2010, when a random attack left a man with life-changing injuries. None of his colleagues like doing night shifts, he says, “but I love doing night duty. That’s when everything happens!”

“We got a call to Finsbury Park,” he recalls. “It said ‘we’ve got an axe murderer in Finsbury Park’ – you could see it was like a scene out of a horror film… the mist has just started setting in.”

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Sukie added: “It was me and another detective named Tommy there, a Geordie fella, and he said ‘f*****g hell mate, we’re gonna have to cordon off the whole park, we’re going to have to stop everyone coming in’.

“As he said that [the victim] is just being carted off to hospital. He’d been attacked with an axe and we’ve still got parts of his head on the ground.”

Moments later, Susie’s attention was attracted by a shadowy figure emerging from the mist. “Have you ever seen that film I Know What You Did Last Summer?” he said, “Yellow anorak…raincoat?

“The guy’s walking over to us with an axe in his hand, and he’s dragging it along. And I turned to Tommy is and said ‘is that a joke? The guy had come back… I don’t know if he’d come back to finish the job off, I don’t know why he came back.”

The attacker, 26-year-old Thomas O’Connell, was a paranoid schizophrenic who was living without any supervision and hadn’t taken his medication in at least six months. He had selected his 27-year-old victim – completely at random and savagely mauled him with an axe he’d bought from Homebase.

The attack was at around 11pm, but it was three hours later that O’Connell was arrested after returning to the scene holding the bloodied axe. Subsequent forensic tests confirmed it was the weapon used in the attack and searches of O’Connell’s home revealed clothing with the victim’s blood on.

O’Connell initially claimed start he had “found” the weapon, but later pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to attempted murder.

When the case came to trial in November 2011, Judge Timothy Pontius said: “It was nothing short of a miracle that this man survived at all. It is nothing short of a tragedy that he has been left with such grievous disability.”

Investigating officer Det Ins Keely Smith, from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, said the victim’s “injuries were so severe he would die but he has recovered remarkably well considering what he has been through. But the fact remains his life will never be the same again and our thoughts are with him and his family.”

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