Suicide pact twins with ‘superhuman strength’ ran into M6 before killing Good Samaritan | UK | News
An eyewitness who watched two sisters dash into M6 traffic before one of them fatally stabbed a Good Samaritan said he thought they had “superhuman strength”. The bizarre case of Ursula and Sabina Eriksson, who surprised police by running onto a major UK motorway in 2008 and set off a chain of events that led to the horrific death of a former RAF soldier, is revisited in a new Channel 5 documentary.
The two-part series, titled Twisted Sisters: Madness and Homicide, will attempt to make sense of what experts describe as a rare psychological phenomenon called “folie a deux,” or the madness of two people. The Swedish twins arrived in north-west England in May 2008, first taking a National Express bus from Liverpool to London, after running away from mother-of-two Sabina’s home in Ireland.
The driver made an unplanned stop after the 40-year-old sisters started acting erratically and they got off at an M6 service station, before being captured running into oncoming traffic by film crews for the BBC series Motorway Cops.
In the apparent suicide mission, Ursula is first seen dropping her bag and being thrown onto the busy road before her legs are crushed by a truck. Sabina later followed suit and was hit by a Volkswagen Polo; horrified onlookers feared both had died from their wounds.
But they miraculously survived and, in what eyewitness Richard Cussons described as a display of “superhuman strength”, Sabina jumped to her feet and punched a female traffic warden in the face after regaining consciousness, the Daily Mail reported.
“To me, that wasn’t really a humane thing to do,” he continued. “You won’t get crushed under a car going 60 or 70 speeds.[mph] “First on the highway, then he gets thrown into the air by another car, is knocked unconscious for 10 minutes, and then runs and tries to do it again.”
Ursula also resisted medical attention, yelling and spitting at officers who tried to help.
After being taken to hospital by air ambulance, Sabina was taken into custody and pleaded guilty to charges of trespassing on a highway and assaulting a police officer. He was sentenced to a day’s imprisonment, which he had already served during his night in custody, and was released without a full psychiatric evaluation.
After his release, the 40-year-old wandered the streets of Stoke-on-Trent looking for his twin sister, where he first met former RAF paramedic Glenn Hollinshead, 54, who was walking his dog.
Sabina asked Mr Hollinshead and his friend Peter Molloy if they knew of any local B&Bs or hotels, and the kindly man, 54, took pity on her and offered her a place to stay at his home in Duke Street.
The next day, he tried to help her find Ursula, but it ended in disaster when Sabina fatally stabbed the landlady four times with a kitchen knife.
He managed to stumble outside and tell a neighbor “he stabbed me,” before collapsing and passing away in a nearby alley.
The 40-year-old made a wild escape from the scene in which he hit himself with a hammer, attacked another motorist with a roof tile and jumped from a 12-metre bridge onto the A50, fracturing both his ankles and skull.
He was arrested on June 6, 2008, while recovering in hospital. Forensic psychologist Carol McDaniel, who was instructed to prepare a report on Sabina for the prosecution, said experts concluded that Sabina “suffers from a serious mental health problem” linked to “the presence and influence of her sister.”
“Their diagnosis was folie a deux, a French term meaning the madness of two people,” he said. “A person will have what we call a primary diagnosis of a true mental illness. Then, because of their closeness, they can persuade the other person to think just like them.
“It’s almost as if you thought it was contagious. As far as the sisters were concerned, there were indications that Ursula was the real patient.”
A spokesperson for Staffordshire Police said: “While in custody, Sabina underwent a mental health assessment under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act and was seen by a psychiatric consultant, a doctor and an approved social worker. They did not separate Sabina or feel she needed it.”
Sabina pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was sentenced to five years behind bars. Ursula is believed to have returned to Sweden, while Ursula is thought to be living in a “tight-knit Christian community” in the US.
