A man with serious mental health problems who was released from prison without any support attacked a young woman with a screwdriver and his teeth, an inquest has been told.

The landlady of the hostel in south Wales where Matthew Williams was staying unlocked his bedroom door after screams were heard, to find the 34-year-old brutally assaulting shopworker Cerys Yemm, 22.

In a 999 call she told the operator: “He’s eating her … he’s actually chewing her face.” When three police officers arrived they Tasered Williams several times. Both Williams and Yemm were pronounced dead at the scene.

The inquest jury in Newport will hear the circumstances around Williams’ release from prison, his mental health history and his contact with health professionals. It will also look at whether the force used by the police contributed to his death and was reasonable.

Yemm, who lived at home with her mother, Paula, met Williams on a night out in Blackwood, south Wales, shortly after his release from prison and a relationship began. Williams picked her up on the afternoon of 5 November 2014 and the pair smoked cannabis and drank lager at a friend’s house, the inquest heard.

Yemm’s mother had expected her home that night, but jurors were told that screaming was heard coming from Williams’ room in the Sirhowy Arms hotel in Argoed, near Blackwood, in the early hours of 6 November.

The landlady, Mandy Miles, unlocked the door to discover what she described as a scene from a horror film.

In the 999 call, played to the jury, she said: “I went into the room and he’s killed her. Oh my God. Is this real? There’s blood everywhere and it looks like a horror film. He was using the screwdriver and stabbing.”

Miles told the inquest that when the council sent him to stay with her, he was given a form to fill in.

She said: “The form asked: ‘Do you have any mental health issues. He circled ‘no’.”

Miles said Caerphilly council paid her to allow homeless people, vulnerable teenagers and released prisoners to stay at her hostel, but told her she couldn’t evict anyone without the council’s say-so.

She said Williams regularly broke a list of council rules the hostel was told to enforce, including stopping out all night, getting drunk in the day and bringing women back to his room.

Miles added: “I rang the council and said I’m really not happy about him being here. He doesn’t listen. They told me just to see how it goes.”



The inquest into both the deaths heard Williams had paranoid schizophrenia but had been released from prison without any medication or supervision despite complaining of hearing voices in his head.

His mother, Sally Ann Williams, told the inquest her son had once claimed he was a tree and believed his food was being poisoned.

She said he had been placed in foster care as a teenager after being caught stealing to buy drugs, and his drug addiction “set in” after he returned from a young offender institution.

His mental health deteriorated further after he split up from the mother of his son about three years before he attacked Yemm, and he had been sectioned twice, his mother said.

Sally Ann Williams said he had been jailed for two and a half years and had been given medication in prison, but, she added, he received no support when he was released from HMP Parc in Bridgend on 23 October 2014. He was provided with accommodation at the Sirhowy Arms by Caerphilly county borough council.

She said: “There was no mental health support whatsoever. He told me he’d been released without any medication. Matthew was released without a licence and had no probation restrictions.”

Williams said her son had complained “the voices were back” in the days before the killing. “He told me his head wasn’t right,” she said.

His friend, Rhodri Moore, told the inquest Williams seemed fine after his release from jail, but deteriorated quickly. He said: “He was taking drugs on a daily basis. He wasn’t very well. He was seeing things, hallucinating.

“He couldn’t get any medication. His mother was trying very hard to get someone to see him. He was willing to be helped. He wanted to be helped.”

The inquest, which is expected to last around a month, continues.