Jennifer Joan Mills-Westley was a 60-year-old retired grandmother of five from Norwich in the United Kingdom. She had retired to the Spanish island of Tenerife in 2006, where she owned two two-bedroom apartments on the Port Royale complex in Los Cristianos, one of which she rented to tourists. On 13 May 2011 she was killed in a shop in the resort of Los Cristianos, in an attack that received extensive coverage in British and international media.
Officials cited in reporting said the assailant appeared to choose his victim at random. The attack began at around 10:20 am on Avenida Juan Carlos in the town centre, when the man began stabbing Mills-Westley without warning using a large knife that some reports described as possibly a ceremonial samurai sword. He stabbed her in the neck 14 times and then decapitated her, carrying her severed head into the street while shouting phrases including "This is my treasure" and "God is on earth." He threw the head to the ground and was restrained by a security guard before police arrived.
Police named the suspect as Deyan Valentinov Deyanov, a 28-year-old unemployed Bulgarian man reported to have paranoid schizophrenia and to have been living rough in a semi-derelict beach house. He had a police record for violence toward strangers. Three months before the attack he had been released from a psychiatric unit at the Hospital de la Candelaria after a short stay that followed an unprovoked assault on a security guard on the Los Cristianos seafront. Two days before the killing he had been briefly detained for harassing women at a nightclub in nearby Playa de las Américas.
In the years before the attack, Deyanov was understood to have moved between Edinburgh and Bradford in the UK, Cyprus and Tenerife, and Flint in north Wales, where he had relatives. In the summer of 2010 he spent time in a psychiatric unit at Glan Clwyd Hospital in Bodelwyddan, north-east Wales. Later British media reports suggested that shortly before her death Mills-Westley had sought help at a nearby office, saying she feared she was being followed.
Deyanov was detained at a psychiatric unit and charged with murder. His trial at the provincial court in Santa Cruz began on 18 February 2013, when the court was shown CCTV footage of the attack. He denied murder and claimed insanity. After a week-long trial he was found guilty on 22 February 2013 and sentenced to detention in a psychiatric unit for 20 years, the maximum applicable term.
After the conviction, Mills-Westley's daughters issued a joint statement describing their mother as "our mum, mentor and best friend, a highly gifted and selfless person" and noting that she had "become known as the lady who was beheaded in Tenerife." They called her death "preventable and needless" and referred to a "catalogue of failings" in how Deyanov had been handled as a mentally unstable man.
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