The messages from Dean started as confusing and ended as a confession that made Rebecca’s blood run cold. It was May 2017 when her cousin texted her with a story so bizarre and horrifying that she initially wondered if he was just high out of his mind. “I had a blackout hazy argument. Woke up with a body on the floor.
Put body in the bin down the road,” the message read. “I remember cutting it up and putting it in the bin for defo. I heard the bin men find all the meat. ”
Then came the most chilling part: “Either way, Kirby’s gone.
I hope for her sake the body I chopped up was fake in a setup. ”
Rebecca went numb. She had known Kirby Noden for most of her life. They had grown up together in Winsford, Cheshire, two girls who shared everything.
Kirby was the kind of person you could tell anything to without fear of judgment. She was quiet, artistic, and kind. Rebecca thought the world of her. “You could go to Kirby and tell her anything, and she wouldn’t judge,” Rebecca later said.
“She wouldn’t tell anybody. ”
Kirby had fallen hard for Dean Low when they were just 14. He was her first love, an outgoing, class-clown type with a wild streak that seemed to draw her in. Their families were close friends, so the two had grown up side by side.
Dean had been in foster care since he was a few months old, and maybe that explained the reckless, attention-seeking side of him. Everyone else saw a troublemaker. Kirby saw someone to adore. Even as teenagers, Rebecca could see a darkness in Dean that Kirby ignored.
She remembered an unsettling childhood memory where Dean took her to a swimming pool and told her to hold her breath underwater for as long as she could. When she finally tried to come up for air, he pushed her back down and held her there. Right around the time Kirby and Dean started dating, Dean’s behavior turned violent. He started experimenting with drugs, and his temper became unpredictable.
He got into street fights, one of which ended with him biting someone’s nose off. His own family began calling him the nightmare. Kirby stayed with him on and off from age 14 until she was 20. When things finally ended between them, she moved on and had a child with another man.
But that relationship fell apart too, and by 2010, she and Dean found their way back to each other. They called themselves soulmates. Despite their personal struggles, they were convinced it was them against the world. Not long after reuniting, they had two children together.
But by then, Dean’s heroin addiction had spiraled out of control. Social services stepped in, and the children were taken from their custody. The loss devastated Kirby. At first, she worried about Dean’s drug use and how it was affecting their lives.
But over time, she fell into the same addiction. Friends and family strongly believed that Dean’s influence had pulled her down the same destructive path. Kirby trusted Dean completely. She believed he would protect her no matter where they went, even if it meant living a hard, unstable life fueled by drugs.
That’s exactly what she did. In 2011, the couple adopted a nomadic lifestyle, moving about 250 miles away to Devon. Kirby’s family begged her to stay close, but Dean wouldn’t allow it. He manipulated her, forcing her to choose between him and her family.
Because Kirby loved him so much, she chose him. For a while, Rebecca managed to stay in touch with Kirby. The couple never had a fixed address or a long-lasting mobile phone. They slept on sofas, in doorways, wherever they happened to be.
“It was the most consistent way of being able to keep in contact with them,” Rebecca recalled. “They never really had a fixed address. It was just sofas and doorways and wherever they were. ”
Rebecca could see there were really three people in that relationship: Dean, Kirby, and drugs.
Kirby had texted her several times saying she wanted to get clean, but it was never easy. Every time she tried, Dean would drag her back into it. In 2012, the couple sought help from a charity. For a while, it seemed to work, and they stayed clean.
But eventually, they relapsed and fell back into the same destructive cycles. By 2013, they had moved to Cornwall. Sometimes they slept on the streets; other times they stayed in local social housing. A former neighbor named Ellie, who lived below them, remembered Kirby as bubbly, warm, and kind-hearted.
“Very bubbly, very northern, big smile, kind-hearted,” Ellie said. But Ellie never understood why Kirby was with Dean. To her, he always seemed distant and detached. Over time, Ellie and Kirby grew close, and Kirby confided that she wanted to turn her life around.
She dreamt of getting her children back, earning money, and finally getting sober. But Dean wouldn’t let her go. He manipulated and sabotaged every attempt Kirby made to rebuild her life. Within just three weeks of Kirby moving into the apartment above Ellie, Ellie could hear sounds of violence from upstairs — Dean shouting, Kirby screaming and crying.
One phrase Dean often shouted at Kirby stayed with Ellie: “I will end you. ”
Ellie even went upstairs to confront Dean a few times, but it made no difference. He didn’t seem to care who heard or what anyone thought. After one violent incident, Kirby stopped speaking to Ellie altogether.
Ellie believed this was Dean’s doing. He was afraid that if Kirby kept talking to her, she might start to see a way out of the relationship. And if that happened, he’d have no one left to control. Not long after, Ellie noticed water dripping down her wall.
She suspected Dean had deliberately left the taps running upstairs to drive her out. The constant dripping turned into a foul smell as mold began to spread. Ellie eventually called her property manager, moved out, and never heard from the couple again. Looking back, Ellie said she regretted not pressing the police harder or doing more to help Kirby.
By 2015, the couple moved once again, this time into a one-bedroom flat in a coastal Cornish town. Not long after, Dean reached out to Rebecca with strange, alarming messages. He claimed to have a video of someone breaking in during the night and attacking them. He sent her a photo of his face swollen and bruised, and said it was probably Kirby, but that she had been mind-controlled by someone into doing it.
Rebecca brushed it off, assuming it was just the drugs talking. Then, in November 2016, Kirby stopped replying to Rebecca’s messages altogether. The couple had gone quiet for weeks before, but this was different. Kirby had never gone completely silent before.
Three months passed. Rebecca kept checking Kirby’s social media, hoping to see her online, but she never was. Kirby had simply vanished. Then, in January 2017, Dean suddenly reached out.
He texted Rebecca: “I’m here cuz if you want to vent at me, call me on this number. ”
Rebecca was at work when the message came through. She tried calling the number later, but by then it was dead. Perhaps Dean was feeling the weight of guilt for a crime he had already committed.
Reporters would later reveal that in January 2017, Dean had killed the girl who loved him more than anyone else in the world — in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable. For a while, he got away with it. Whenever anyone reached out to him, he would deflect and mislead them, claiming Kirby had left him for another man. Then came the night of May 17th, 2017.
Dean sent Rebecca and other relatives those disturbing messages about chopping up a body and putting it in the bins. He also sent photos showing blood spattered all around his room. Rebecca was shaken to the core. In a way, he had confessed to murder.
But his messages were full of uncertainty. He seemed unsure whether Kirby was truly dead or if he had been set up. Former homicide detectives later explained that when a person with a heavy drug addiction sends messages like that, the line between reality becomes so thin that he can’t distinguish between what actually happened and what’s going on in his head. It was as if he were describing a nightmare.
Rebecca immediately called her mother. Another cousin contacted the police, urging them to check on Dean and Kirby’s flat. The following evening, May 18th, 2017, an 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.
As the officer stepped inside, he was confronted with a scene straight out of a nightmare. Blood was spattered across the walls. The air was thick with the stench of decomposition. A metal bar lay nearby, and a blood-soaked mattress had been flipped over and stuffed aside, along with a rock that showed signs of being smashed against a surface.
Dean boldly confessed to killing his girlfriend. He explained that he had killed Kirby and disposed of her body parts in a wheelie bin. Though he said he couldn’t recall every detail, he claimed he could still see the images in his head. He even admitted the blood spattered across the room belonged to Kirby.
He was immediately arrested. Forensic tests later confirmed that the blood was indeed Kirby’s. Dean was charged and prosecuted for her brutal killing, but Kirby’s body was still missing. Investigators plastered posters across town, urging the public to come forward with any information.
Friends set up Facebook pages hoping to gather clues. But there was nothing. Despite extensive searches, public appeals, and countless hours of investigation, no trace of Kirby’s body was ever found. Police pieced together that sometime between January 11th and 14th, 2017, Dean had brutally murdered Kirby using a metal rod and a rock.
Evidence suggested he continued living in the flat for several days after the murder — eating, sleeping, watching TV, and taking drugs right next to her lifeless body. There was no clear motive, but detectives concluded the killing likely happened while Dean was high on drugs. In a strange turn, Kirby’s mother, Anita, had previously spoken to a psychic who might have predicted her daughter’s death. While on vacation, she had her palm read.
“He looked at my palm and asked me who was the girl who had five children. I said that was Kirby. She had three children and lost two,” Anita said. “He said he saw prison bars and somebody behind them for a long time.
He said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, but her body is in a mess. ’ I thought the bars were for Dean, that he would get done for drugs, but I never thought he’d be put behind them for killing my girl. ”
When Dean’s official trial began on April 23rd, 2018, his story completely changed. He pleaded not guilty to Kirby’s murder, claiming the situation had been misunderstood.
Then, on May 4th, when Dean took the witness stand, the version of events he gave shocked everyone in the courtroom. According to Dean, he had been drugged and assaulted by two men, and that Kirby herself had staged the entire scene to make him look guilty. He claimed Kirby had removed her colostomy bag inside the flat, spattering blood everywhere to frame him before supposedly running away to South Africa to start a new life with another man. But that wasn’t even the most shocking part.
Dean went as far as to say that while he was incarcerated, he received a phone call from Kirby who allegedly told him: “You’re done now. You’re stuck inside and I’m enjoying my new life. ”
It was an absolute, vile, manipulative claim. By this point, Dean had already been in custody for nearly a year, completely sober.
And after all that time of no contact, no sightings, and no evidence of Kirby being alive, he had the audacity to give her grieving family false hope that she was still out there somewhere. Dean’s trial stretched for over two weeks. Throughout every hearing, he showed no signs of remorse. He sat there coldly, expressionless.
On Thursday, May 10th, 2018, after nine hours and thirty-five minutes of deliberation, a jury of six men and six women found Dean Low guilty of murder. The prosecution argued that Dean had brutally beaten Kirby to death and disposed of her body in an attempt to hide his crime. According to them, Kirby was already dead by January 14th, when Dean tried to withdraw money from her bank account at an ATM. “Having killed her, the defendant moved her body, probably in pieces, and cleaned up the worst of the blood,” the leading prosecutor told the court.
“For four months, he lived on in the flat in the state it was in. Living in the midst of what he had done must have been gruesome. ”
In a heartfelt statement following the verdict, Kirby’s family said: “Dean Low has taken away from us something totally precious, and although we welcome this verdict, it will never replace our loss. ”
Dean’s sentence was handed down on Tuesday, May 15th, 2018.
In her 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. No one there to mourn or say goodbye. She described the killing as a pitiless attack on someone who had done nothing but love him devotedly. She condemned Dean’s repeated denials, calling them an act of cowardice and cruelty.
“Your lies about her are the very opposite of remorse,” she said. “You have never once expressed any regret for all that you have done. 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 —. ”
The judge ruled that Dean was not suffering from any mental illness at the time of the murder and had been fully aware of his actions. He was sentenced to a minimum term of 28 years behind bars. Even though everyone, including Kirby’s mother, believed justice had finally been served, Rebecca still mourned Dean in her own way.
“The Dean I knew growing up would have never done that to Kirby or anybody,” she said. The man who committed this horrific act wasn’t the same Dean she once knew. He’d become someone entirely different — a hollow, cruel version of the boy she grew up with. A man capable of destroying not only Kirby’s life, but every trace of her existence, robbing her loved ones of the chance to say goodbye or hold a proper funeral.
But the people Kirby touched in her life continue to remember her for the kind-hearted person she was. “You could just not know her, and you just feel like you’ve known her forever,” Rebecca said. “She’s just one of them people. ”
Ellie held back tears as she remembered her.
“She was really lovely. She had a really big heart. She cared a lot. I do think that she tried to protect me, and that spoke volumes,” Ellie said.
“I wish she was still here. I wish you were able to have your daughter back. ”
Although the family had no body to bury, they held a service for Kirby at St. John’s Church.
“We gave her a nice sendoff at St. John’s Church,” Anita shared. “There was no body, but we released balloons in Kirby’s favorite color, red. ”
Just as the service started, a butterfly fluttered past Anita into the church.
“I think it was Kirby,” she 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. Wonder if that was a sign from Kirby, too.
”
In her garden, Anita has a bench with a brass plaque dedicated to her daughter. She sits on it sometimes to feel close to her. There’s also a little shrine with statues, lights, and flowers that she weeds every day to be near her. “A few weeks back, my dog suddenly clung to the corner where we have a large picture of Kirby and started shaking,” Anita said.
“They say a dog has a sick sense. I think it was Kirby paying a visit. The dog is a new addition to the household, so he had never seen her in life. I feel like she’s still with us.
”
Anita keeps a box on her coffee table. “Now all that’s left of my beautiful girl is in the small box,” she said. “Just a few pieces of tat — cheap jewelry. No gold or silver, just some beads and rope she probably picked up in the charity shop.
”
Kirby gave everything to the love of her life and the father of two of her children. But he did not care about her at all. “I wish I could have been there to save her,” Anita said. 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.
