The horrific story of Glyn Dix and his two brutal murders
Sometimes, people show you who they are right from the first moment in their company. Most of the time, it’s an offhand errant comment that takes on a different meaning once you get to know them better. However, Glyn Dix does not fall into that category; he showed his true colours instantly with a truly abhorrent crime.
On the surface, the Overbury family was one to be envied. Living in Hartpury, Gloucestershire, Pia Overbury was a model wife and mother during the late 1970s. She looked after her two daughters with everything she had, took good care of the shop her family ran, and was an attentive landlord to the tenants in the two flats above it.
However, as they so often are, things were very different when the curtains were closed. Pia’s husband was rarely around, and when he was, he was violent to both her and their daughters.
In 1979, Overbury couldn’t take it any more. She couldn’t see a way out and began asking men she was acquainted with whether they would kill her husband for £2000. The first two men she asked pulled out and couldn’t go ahead with it. Then, she thought of one of her tenants, an off-putting 26-year-old by the name of Glyn Dix. Despite having a few arguments with him regarding non-payment of rent, she went to the tenant and asked if he would take care of her husband.
What happened next was even more horrible than one can assume. Dix took the money, then decided that rather than end the life of Pia’s husband, he would instead “put her out of her misery”. In early October 1979, Dix tied her to a tree in a nearby wood, sexually assaulted her then shot her in the head. Leaving her in that wood, covered only by a few branches and leaves. Pia’s body was discovered after a month, and within days, her tenant was identified as the killer.
He then immediately tried to end his life when the police came to his door. With everything that happened next in mind, one can only wish that he had been successful.
How did Glyn Dix leave prison?
Dix pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison. While inside, he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, essentially a form of schizophrenia where the hallucinations and delusions come and go along with horrific, bipolar like mood swings between mania and depression. Despite this, Dix was housed in a regular prison and even gained a cellmate in 1997 by the name of Adam Denver.
Denver was much younger than Dix, inside for repeated diving offences. Dix never told his new friend the specific reason he was inside, only insisting he was framed and that his imprisonment was a miscarriage of justice. Denver’s mother, Hazel, would visit several times a week. Denver and Dix’s close relationship meant that eventually, Dix and Hazel struck up a friendship themselves. They began writing letters back and forth, and eventually, they found that their bond had become romantic.
On November 5th, 1999, Dix was allowed out on day release to marry Hazel at a registry office. Everyone who knew the couple only knew the story that Hazel was told. That Dix was a good man who had been shafted by the justice system, so when Dix was released on a life license in 2001, he moved in with Hazel and became close with her family. For the next couple of years, the couple lived happily. This was until December 17th, 2005.
Adam and his sister went over to their mother’s house to visit. They stepped into the house to find Dix, crouched over the dismembered body of their mother. Calmly and coldly, he explained that they’d had an argument over what to watch on television. One that he’d got so irate over, he’d stabbed her to death and mutilated her corpse. Dix was, obviously, rejailed. This time, in a high-security psychiatric hospital, where he died nearly a decade later in 2014.