Inside Airbnb where Dexter-obsessed student murdered woman in ‘kill room’
Images show the completely normal looking Airbnb where a 20-year-old forensics student obsessed with Dexter murdered a woman inside a plastic-lined ‘kill room’.
Benjamin William Day, an undergraduate at the University of Worcester, lured sex worker Maria Saceanu, 24, to the property and stabbed her 78 times before dismembering her body, Wolverhampton Crown Court was told.
In court, prosecutor Rachel Brand KC said: “He lured Maria Saceanu to a room that he had rented via Airbnb.
“He had prepared himself to kill her.
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“He had planned to dispose of her body without leaving signs of what had happened and he planned to get away with it.
“But it all went wrong and he was caught.”
Images of the Airbnb, in Tividale, West Midlands, show a modest-looking property with three bedrooms on offer: a ‘deluxe room’, a ‘cosy double room’, and a ‘compact and elegant single room’.
The property also includes a living room and large kitchen.
It is not clear which room Day, who was 19 at the time of the killing, rented.
Brand told the court that on 18 November last year, Day had made a gruesome ‘shopping list’ of things that were required for the killing, including knives, scissors, a mask, an apron, disposable gloves, plastic sheeting, duct tape, a staple gun, a T-shirt, trousers, cleaning chemicals, microscope slides, a pipette and ‘hefties’ – a word used by Americans to describe heavy-duty black bin bags.
The prosecution claimed that he then spent ‘several hours’ preparing the room.
After the killing, Day left the £40 rental home at about 12.30am on 21 December, walked some distance away and then called 999 at 12.50am asking for medical help for an injury to his hand.
Day had previously been expected to claim self-defence, but pleaded guilty on Tuesday (6 October) on the second day of his trial after speaking to his legal team.
In court, defence barrister Gurdeep Garcha KC said of Day: “He is well aware of the nature and inevitability of the sentence that must follow.
“It seems to us that given his age and the absence of (previous) criminal offending, the court would be assisted by a pre-sentence report.”
Judge Justice Bryan decided to delay sentencing for further psychiatric assessments.
Prior to him changing his plea, the jury were shown police bodycam footage in which Day could be heard saying the injury to his hand had been caused by a ‘wild dog’ and that he had ‘four fingers’.
After looking over his tape-wrapped hand, one of the officers appeared to become suspicious and questioned where he got the tape from.
Day replied: “I brought it with me. It was in my car.”
The officer then asked Day: “What’s gone on? Have you been attacked?
“Have you been somewhere to meet someone and something’s gone on and you’ve ended up injured?
“To be honest with you, your story doesn’t quite check out.”
He was taken to Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley and was placed under arrest a short while later.
Topics: UK News, Crime, True Crime
Claire Reid