The message came through while I was at work, and I remember staring at my phone screen, my stomach dropping. It was from Dean, who I hadn’t heard from in months. He wrote, “I’m here cuz if you want to vent at me, call me on this number. ”
I tried calling the number later, but it was already dead.
That text was the first sign that something terrible had happened to my cousin, Kirby. She had gone quiet before, sometimes for weeks at a time when she and Dean were living on the streets. But after November 2016, she stopped replying to my messages completely. For three months, I checked her social media, waiting for her to come online.
She never did. She had simply vanished. I grew up in Winsford, a small market town in Cheshire. I knew Kirby my whole life.
She was quiet and artistic, with a gentle soul. You could tell her anything and she wouldn’t judge you. I thought the world of her. My cousin Dean was different.
He was funny and outgoing, the class clown, but he had a wild, reckless streak. Even as a kid, there was something unpredictable about him. I remember one unsettling memory from when we were young. Dean took me to a swimming pool and told me to hold my breath underwater for as long as I could.
When I tried to come up for air, he pushed me back down and tried to hold me there. Even then, I knew something wasn’t right. Kirby and Dean started dating when they were just 14. They seemed to love each other deeply, and to Kirby, Dean was everything.
She idolized him. But they were nothing alike. Kirby was too innocent and kind for someone like him. Right around the time they got together, Dean’s behavior started to change.
He got into drugs, and his temper became unpredictable. At one point, his father called me to ask if Dean could stay at my house because he had gotten into violent fights in the neighborhood. One fight ended with him biting someone’s nose off. Their relationship was on and off for years.
When Kirby turned 20, they finally split up, and she started seeing someone else. During that time, Dean became even more volatile. When he was 25, a family member told him that her partner had cheated on her. Dean flew into a rage, stormed over to the man’s house, and stabbed him with a screwdriver.
When the man collapsed, Dean dropped a television on his head. For five years, Kirby and Dean were apart. She had a child with another man, but that relationship eventually fell apart too. By 2010, she and Dean found their way back to each other.
They called themselves soulmates. It was them against the world. Shortly after reuniting, they had two children together. But Dean’s drug use spiraled out of control.
His addiction to heroin drew the attention of social services, and their children were taken away. It devastated Kirby. At first, she worried about Dean’s use, but over time, she fell into the same addiction. Her family tried desperately to talk her out of the relationship, but Dean wouldn’t allow it.
He forced her to choose between him and her family. She chose him. In 2011, they became nomadic, moving from place to place before settling about 250 miles away in Devon. I managed to stay in touch with Kirby, but it wasn’t easy.
They never had a fixed address or a working phone for long. When I did reach her, she often texted me saying she wanted to get clean, but every time she tried, Dean would drag her back into it. By 2013, they had moved to a coastal town in Cornwall. A former neighbor, Ellie, remembered Kirby as bubbly and kind-hearted with a big smile.
Kirby confided in her that she wanted to turn her life around, get her children back, and finally get sober. But Dean wouldn’t let her go. He sabotaged every attempt she made. Within three weeks of Kirby moving in, Ellie could hear sounds of violence from upstairs.
Dean would shout and Kirby would scream and cry. One thing he often shouted was, “I will end you. ” Ellie went upstairs to confront him a few times, but it made no difference. The violence eventually spilled into Ellie’s own apartment, and after that, Kirby stopped speaking to her.
I believe that was Dean’s doing—he was afraid that if Kirby kept talking to Ellie, she might see a way out. And if that happened, he’d have no one left to control. Not long after, water started dripping down Ellie’s wall. She suspected Dean had deliberately left the taps running to drive her out.
Mold began to spread, and Ellie finally moved away. She later said she regretted not pressing the police harder or doing more to help Kirby. By 2015, the couple moved again into a single-bed flat in another Cornish town. Then, one day, Dean started sending me strange messages.
He claimed he had a video of someone breaking in during the night and attacking them. He sent me a photo of his face swollen and bruised. He said it was probably Kirby who attacked him, but that she had been mind-controlled by someone into doing it. It was a baseless accusation.
I brushed it off, assuming it was just the drugs talking. Then Kirby stopped replying to me altogether. After three months of silence, in January 2017, I received that strange text from Dean offering to hear me vent. It made no sense at the time.
Looking back, I think he was feeling the weight of guilt for a crime he had already committed. Around that time, Dean had killed the girl who loved him more than anyone else in the world, in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable. But no one suspected a thing. For months, Dean deflected and misled everyone.
When Kirby’s family and friends tried to reach out, he claimed she had left him for another man. Then, on May 17th, 2017, at around 10 p. m. , Dean sent me and some other relatives a message that was far more disturbing than anything I had ever seen.
It read, in part: “I had a blackout hazy argument. Woke up with a body on the floor. Put body in the bin down the road. I remember cutting it up and putting it in the bin… The carpet had to be lifted in the bedroom because of all the body matter.
It was in my flat for a week… Either way, Kirby’s gone. I hope for her sake the body I chopped up was fake in a setup… It took a week to get rid of the body. It was horrible. Heads gone.
I know what I saw. ”
Along with the message, he sent photos showing blood spattered around his room. He had confessed to murder. I immediately called my mother.
Another cousin contacted the police, urging them to check on Dean and Kirby’s flat. The following evening, a police officer was dispatched to the apartment. When he arrived, Dean answered the door shirtless, disoriented, and wearing a necklace strung with what he claimed were Kirby’s teeth. Inside, the scene was a nightmare.
Blood was spattered across the walls, the air thick with the stench of decomposition. A metal bar lay nearby, along with a blood-soaked mattress and a rock that showed signs of heavy impact. Dean confessed to killing his girlfriend. He had killed Kirby and disposed of her body parts in a wheelie bin.
He couldn’t recall every detail, but he could still see the images in his head. Forensic tests later confirmed the blood was Kirby’s. Dean was arrested and charged with her murder. But Kirby’s body was never found.
Investigators plastered posters across town and set up Facebook pages, but there was nothing. Despite extensive searches and countless hours of investigation, no trace of her was ever found. Police pieced together what had happened. Between January 11th and 14th of 2017, Dean brutally murdered Kirby using a metal rod and a rock.
Evidence suggested he continued living in the flat for days after, eating, sleeping, watching TV, and taking drugs right next to her lifeless body. There was no clear motive, but detectives concluded the killing happened while he was high. In a strange turn, Kirby’s mother, Anita, had previously spoken to a psychic who predicted her daughter’s death. While on vacation, she had her palm read.
The psychic asked, “Who is the girl who had five children? ” Anita said that was Kirby; she had three children and lost two. The psychic said, “I saw prison bars and somebody behind them for a long time. I’m sorry to tell you this, but her body is in a mess.
” Anita thought the bars were for Dean, that he would be imprisoned for drugs, but she never thought he’d be put behind them for killing her girl. When Dean’s trial began on April 23rd, 2018, his story completely changed. He pleaded not guilty. On May 4th, when he took the witness stand, he shocked everyone.
He claimed he had been drugged and stabbed by two men, and that Kirby herself had staged the entire scene to frame him. He said she removed her colostomy bag inside the flat, spattering blood everywhere, before supposedly running away to South Africa with another man. He even went so far as to say that while he was incarcerated, he received a phone call from Kirby. He claimed she told him, “You’re finished now.
You’re stuck inside and I’m enjoying my new life. ”
It was a vile, manipulative lie. He gave her grieving family false hope that she was still out there somewhere. His trial stretched for over two weeks, and throughout every hearing, he showed no sign of remorse.
He sat coldly, expressionless. On May 10th, 2018, after nine-and-a-half hours of deliberation, a jury found Dean Low guilty of murder. The prosecution argued that Dean had beaten Kirby to death and disposed of her body to hide his crime. Kirby was already dead by January 14th, when Dean tried to withdraw money from her bank account at an ATM.
In her sentencing remarks, the judge stated that no one would ever truly know what happened to Kirby Noden, as there was no body to reveal the extent of the deadly abuse. She described the killing as a pitiless attack on someone who had done nothing but love him devotedly. She condemned Dean’s repeated denials as an act of cowardice and cruelty. She said, “Your lies about her are the very opposite of remorse.
You have never once expressed any regret… By all accounts, Kirby was besotted with you, following wherever you went, doing whatever you asked her to do. She described you as the love of her life. You, on the other hand, spoke of her as that skanky woman. ”
The judge ruled that Dean was not suffering from any mental illness at the time of the murder and was fully aware of his actions.
He was sentenced to a minimum term of 28 years behind bars. Even though justice had been served, I still mourned Dean in my own way. The Dean I knew growing up would have never done that to Kirby or anybody. But the man who committed this horrific act wasn’t the same person I once knew.
He had become someone entirely different, a hollow, cruel version of the boy I grew up with, a man capable of destroying not only Kirby’s life but also every trace of her existence, robbing her loved ones of the chance to say goodbye or hold a proper funeral. Kirby’s mother, Anita, still keeps a small box on her coffee table. She shared with reporters, “Now all that’s left of my beautiful girl is this small box. Just a few pieces of cheap jewelry.
No gold or silver, just some beads and rope she probably picked up in a charity shop. ”
Her family held a service for Kirby at St. John’s Church, near where her mother lives. There was no body, but they released balloons in Kirby’s favorite color, red.
Just as the service started, a butterfly fluttered past into the church. Anita said, “I was too busy crying to see it, but my friend caught it in a cup, and I released it into the sky with the balloons after the service. A heron flew up past the balloons at the same time. I wonder if that was a sign from Kirby, too.
”
In their garden, they have a bench with a brass plaque dedicated to her. Anita goes and sits on it sometimes to feel close to her. She tends a little shrine with statues, lights, and flowers that she weeds every day to be near her daughter. A few weeks back, her dog suddenly clung to the corner where they have a large picture of Kirby and started shaking.
The dog was a new addition to the household and had never seen her in life. Anita said, “I feel like she’s still with us. ”
She added, “If she died from cancer or was hit by a car, it might be more understandable. We could have said goodbye to her, but not this.
I just can’t get over it. ”
In the 2025 femicide census report, published under the haunting words “Every dead woman is one too many,” Kirby Noden’s name appears among more than 2,000 women killed by men across the United Kingdom. Her name, listed quietly among them, is a reminder that behind every statistic is a person who laughed, loved, and deserved far better than the violence that ended their life.
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