00:00:05
-On the 7th of April, 2016, police were called to a flat
in South London after neighbors had complained
about a putrid smell.
00:00:15
-He opened up the letter box,
and he said, "Can you smell that now?" And I said to him, "Do you know
what it smells like?
00:00:22
It smells like a dead body." -Two police officers
knocked on the door, and the occupant, 49-year-old
Stefano Brizzi, answered.
00:00:32
-He said, "I've killed
a police officer. Satan told me to do it. I promised Satan that I would
kill at the first opportunity."
00:00:39
-Inside the flat was a scene
of unimaginable horror. -They go into the bathroom,
00:00:46
and the bath is full
of globules of fat, and they find remnants
of the body. -Stefano Brizzi had killed
a police officer
00:00:55
in a drug-fueled
sexual encounter. He then went on to dispose
of the body in the most horrifying way
00:01:03
and became one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ On the 7th of April, 2016,
00:01:32
when two police officers
arrived at the Peabody Estate on Southwark Street
in South London,
00:01:38
they made a gruesome discovery
inside one of the flats. They found the remains
of 59-year-old police officer
00:01:49
Gordon Semple, who'd been missing for six days. Neighbors had alerted the police
after they noticed a bad smell.
00:02:00
The tenant, 49-year-old
Italian national Stefano Brizzi, had been trying to dispose
of Gordon Semple's body
00:02:08
after killing him
the previous week. Tess De La Mare
reported on the case. -We got a phone call
from the neighbor saying,
00:02:18
"Something has been found. I believe it's
the police officer." Initially, we had
very little information.
00:02:23
We know that he had been found
on the Peabody Estate. When I and a colleague
went down, it was cordoned off.
00:02:30
At that point, we didn't know
exactly what had gone on. I think in hindsight,
it was a lot more
00:02:35
chilling than it actually --
it felt at the time. At the time, it just felt like
00:02:39
a relatively
straightforward murder. -On the the 1st of April, 2016, a week before
the shocking discovery,
00:02:48
Stefano Brizzi had used
the online dating app Grindr to meet men. -And it was at that point
that he contacted,
00:02:57
again,
through the dating app, a policeman called
Gordon Semple. -They were essentially both
looking for somebody
00:03:06
to hook up with
and have sex with. And this is the one thing that
really amazes me about this app
00:03:12
is that it enables people to see
who's geographically proximate and interested
in the same thing that you are,
00:03:18
and the speed at which
this happens, with which they meet
and with which Gordon Semple
00:03:24
loses his life
really is quite incredible. -This killer's story
begins over 50 years ago.
00:03:35
Stefano Brizzi was born
into a devout Catholic family in San Marcello Pistoiese
in the Italian region of Tuscany
00:03:44
on the 26th of June, 1966. He was aware of his sexuality
from an early age. -He knew he was a homosexual,
00:03:55
but Brizzi also knew
he was a Catholic, and that not only
is against his religion,
00:03:59
but it would really upset
his parents if they were that religious, so he was in
that kind of turmoil.
00:04:06
-I think his homosexuality
haunted him. He felt that somehow it wasn't what his family
would have approved of.
00:04:17
He felt that he was
out of step with his family. -Brizzi went to
the University of Florence,
00:04:25
which is a very reputable
university in Italy, not very far from where he
was born and where he lived.
00:04:31
From the university,
he graduated, and he got a very good job as a computer programmer
in Italy, as well.
00:04:39
-In 2008, age 42, Brizzi was diagnosed with
hepatitis C and as HIV-positive. -I think he would have felt
quite a sense of shame.
00:04:51
He would have felt
some sense of responsibility for the situation
that he found himself in,
00:04:56
and I think he would have
really felt that guilt, and then it seems
almost stereotypical
00:05:01
to talk about Catholic guilt, but I think that's certainly
what was going on with him.
00:05:06
-In 2012, age 46,
Brizzi decided to move to London for a better income
and a different lifestyle.
00:05:16
-I think when Brizzi
first arrived in London, he would have felt
quite liberated.
00:05:21
He's moved away from Florence
and his family and that quite rigid
Catholic set of values
00:05:27
that were so instrumental
in his upbringing. He's come to live
in this diverse, exciting city,
00:05:32
where I think,
for the first time in his life, he can be himself, and I think this is quite
a positive time for him.
00:05:42
-He was intelligent.
IT expert, well-trained, and coming away
from his native Italy
00:05:50
meant that he could perhaps
escape some of the family ties. He could reinvent himself,
if you like.
00:06:00
-In 2012, Brizzi found work
with a merchant bank as an IT consultant
and a web developer
00:06:08
earning £70,000 a year. -He seems to be working
in an industry that is quite kind of hedonistic
in terms of culture.
00:06:19
It's quite kind of fond
of instant gratification, and you don't really have
very much
00:06:24
in the way of brakes
on your behavior. You're encouraged to basically
work hard and play hard,
00:06:30
and I think that's where
the problems begin. -I think the guilt he'd found himself
suffering in Italy
00:06:40
was not completely dissipated
by changing countries. -In 2013, Brizzi started
experimenting with drugs,
00:06:51
including GHB and poppers. He soon became immersed
in a world of substance abuse
00:06:59
and eventually became addicted
to crystal meth. -Now, in itself, one can only
feel sorry for him
00:07:09
because
it's a dreadful addiction. It's very, very hard to attack
and to overcome,
00:07:17
but to some extent, he tried. -Brizzi joined a support group
to help overcome his addiction.
00:07:24
-Brizzi does seem to be
quite a dramatic and quite
an elaborate individual, and some of his behavior around
his crystal meth addiction
00:07:33
really does highlight that. He reached a point where he was
going to a support group
00:07:37
and he wanted to leave
his addiction behind. -He conducted a funeral service
for his crystal meth addiction.
00:07:44
I think at one point, he even
constructed a coffin for it and said he was
burying his addiction.
00:07:52
-He was basically saying,
"This is it. This is over. I'm burying this part of me,
and I'm moving on,"
00:07:57
and you can see those roots
of his upbringing there, that idea of the Catholic faith
and of ceremony and of ritual.
00:08:04
He's drawing on those
traditional values, those traditional beliefs
in this new lifestyle.
00:08:10
So, I think here
we've got somebody who's incredibly conflicted. He's somebody who feels like he
should be a good Catholic boy.
00:08:16
He knows that his behavior
isn't going to come up to the expectations
of his family and his community,
00:08:22
and he's really struggling. -Brizzi wrestled to overcome
his addiction, and in 2015,
he eventually lost his job.
00:08:32
His life was beginning
to fall apart. -It would be fair to say
that Brizzi was disintegrating.
00:08:40
He became more and more
introverted, almost nocturnal. He completely covered
the windows of his flat
00:08:54
so that no light came in. He didn't go out very much
during the day at all. He became addicted to
an American television show
00:09:02
called "Breaking Bad" in which at one point, two of the main characters try to dissolve the body of
a drug dealer in a bath of acid,
00:09:13
which, for one reason
or another, struck a chord in Brizzi. -Brizzi fell into a dark world
of his own creation,
00:09:24
a blurred reality
between fiction and fantasy. -I think he really did adopt
this "Breaking Bad" narrative.
00:09:34
He went along to
his support group wearing a
"Breaking Bad" T-shirt. Now, what that says to me is
that this is somebody who's not
00:09:40
thinking through the social
acceptability of their actions, and this is somebody
who needs help,
00:09:46
and I think at this point, there were quite
a few red flags. -So, you have a man
who is literally falling apart,
00:09:55
has descended into a kind of
madness of his own creation, fueled by crystal meth,
fascinated by sex,
00:10:05
desperately clinging to have
what he called chemsex parties. -Chemsex is pretty much a party
or a get-together where --
00:10:14
It's exactly
what it says on the thing. It's a party that's fueled by
chemicals, and it's a sex party.
00:10:20
The two biggest chemicals
that are used in the community for sex parties are ketamine and crystal meth.
00:10:27
Two big reasons -- ketamine is
a horse tranquilizer. It kills your gagging effect.
00:10:31
And crystal meth
because you don't sleep on it. The second reason why
crystal meth is very used --
00:10:38
it's known as
a huge aphrodisiac. Once you take it,
your libido just goes crazy,
00:10:44
and you just --
you don't stop. -Brizzi would use
the online gay dating app Grindr
00:10:55
to regularly meet men
for chemsex parties. -It's an escapism
from the real life.
00:11:03
You know, it's like nothing
they've ever seen before, and a lot of people, when they do something
completely different,
00:11:09
they go,
"Wow, I love this." -Brizzi became immersed in
a world fueled by drugs and sex
00:11:17
and would often go on
chemsex binges for days. -I think that Brizzi really
wanted to participate
00:11:24
in a culture in which he felt
that he belonged, in which he felt accepted, so I think he really did want to
embrace it all part and parcel.
00:11:34
-I think it started off
being quite fun, quite exciting, and then it became, like,
a full-blown addiction
00:11:38
that he just couldn't manage. -Stefano Brizzi's
chaotic lifestyle was quickly spiraling
out of control.
00:11:47
He was unemployed
and living alone in his flat
in Southwark, London. He'd become immersed in the
world of drug and sex addiction.
00:11:57
-The people who are around him don't necessarily have
his best interests at heart,
00:12:01
and there's nobody
to really step back and say, "Hang on a minute," you know, "You might want
to be careful here."
00:12:08
In terms of his lifestyle, there are lots
of enabling factors but very little in the way
of constraining factors.
00:12:16
-He was living a very sort of
hermit-like existence. He was only really
going out at night.
00:12:21
He wasn't working. He was not interacting
with many people socially. He was using the Grindr app
an awful lot,
00:12:32
but he wasn't having
sort of normal, everyday social interactions
such as, like,
00:12:35
going to the pub
or things like that. -On the afternoon
of the 1st of April, 2016,
00:12:43
Stefano Brizzi exchanged
messages with a man on Grindr and invited him round
to his flat for sex.
00:12:51
The man in question
was 59-year-old policeman Gordon Semple. Emily Pennink is a correspondent
at the Old Bailey.
00:13:01
-Gordon Semple was from
Inverness originally, in Scotland, and he worked for the Bank
of Scotland in Inverness
00:13:07
and then moved down to London where he became a police officer
30 years ago. He was working at
the city hall in Westminster
00:13:16
as part of
an antisocial behavior team. He was very popular
with his friends. His brother described him
00:13:23
as a Dixon of Dock Green
kind of character, the kind of beats bobby
who would solve crimes
00:13:30
with common sense
in the community. So, he was a friendly guy,
and he was very much well-liked.
00:13:39
-At approximately 3:00 P.M., Gordon Semple got off a tube
train at Blackfriars Station
00:13:45
and made his way to Brizzi's
flat on the Peabody Estate. -Gordon Semple
and Stefano Brizzi
00:13:51
didn't know each other.
They'd never met. They had arranged to meet
for casual sex.
00:13:55
It was the middle of the day.
It was a working day. We know that Gordon Semple
was on duty.
00:14:01
-According to Brizzi, the two men
spent the afternoon having sex and contacted other men
via gay-fetish apps.
00:14:10
-There were other people
who were -- had kind of indicated
they were interested in coming to this sort of --
this rendezvous.
00:14:16
-At around 7:00 P.M.
that evening, another man responded
to the messages and arrived at Brizzi's flat.
00:14:25
-Another of the men
that Brizzi invited to take part in the said chemsex party rang the doorbell.
00:14:32
-And after a while,
Brizzi answers and says, "Actually, somebody
has fallen ill.
00:14:37
It's okay," that
they're getting treatment. The party is over. -But Brizzi was lying.
00:14:45
At some point after
arriving at his flat, Stefano Brizzi had murdered
PC Gordon Semple
00:14:53
behind closed doors. -The night before
they actually met, Brizzi had been irritated,
00:15:02
and he'd had virtually no sleep, and he'd been let down
by another man that he'd been
talking to on Grindr.
00:15:10
He'd taken it quite personally,
so even before they met, Brizzi was irritated
and fractious and tired,
00:15:18
and I think he took it out
on Gordon Semple. -It is unclear exactly what
happened at Brizzi's flat,
00:15:25
but according to Brizzi, the two men engaged
in sadomasochistic sex acts that involved a collar,
a mask, and a dog lead.
00:15:36
-At some point during
the course of events, Gordon had lost his life. He'd agreed to some bondage
activity with Brizzi,
00:15:45
and it's believed
that Gordon was strangled, and that's how he died. -So, precisely why reduced
oxygen supply to the brain
00:15:54
enhances orgasm
and sexual pleasure, it's not something that's
tremendously well-understood,
00:16:01
but it is very well-recognized, and for forensic pathologists, finding autoerotic accidents
is not uncommon.
00:16:11
With pressure on the neck,
there is only about ten seconds before somebody
loses consciousness
00:16:18
if the pressure is too high. That means that if you don't
have some sort of fail-safe
00:16:25
in an autoerotic event, you can die very quickly because you lose consciousness,
00:16:32
and you can't save yourself. -Now, Brizzi, at one point,
tried to suggest that he'd been using the lead
00:16:42
to heighten the level
of sexual excitement, a familiar enough thing in both heterosexual
and homosexual relationships.
00:16:53
Cutting off the oxygen supply
is said to heighten the orgasm. -The interplay between
pressure on the neck
00:17:01
and sexual activity can be very, very difficult
to work out when it stops being an inexperienced person
in an accident
00:17:11
and when it becomes
deliberate homicide. -In the days leading up
to Gordon Semple's death,
00:17:21
Stefano Brizzi had
been abusing drugs, including crystal meth,
for several days.
00:17:30
-Something like methamphetamine
is a stimulant, very similar effect
to something like cocaine.
00:17:36
They get you high. You're more active, more agile. Sometimes core body
temperature goes up.
00:17:44
They're getting you agitated
rather than calmed. Stimulant drugs like
methamphetamine can have
00:17:51
significant psychological
and psychiatric effects, make people unstable,
make them unpredictable.
00:17:58
They can have all sorts
of very damaging consequences. -He lived in an extraordinary
fantasy world
00:18:05
of nocturnal oblivion, and so he just decided
to kill him. I think it probably
just came over him,
00:18:12
"I'm going to kill him,"
and it duly did. He did not know that
Semple was a police officer.
00:18:17
He was not aware that anyone would particularly miss
Gordon Semple. -I think that the circumstances
around Gordon Semple's death
00:18:27
were incredibly chaotic, and I think at this point,
he really was starting to panic.
00:18:32
I think that drug-induced haze
was perhaps starting to pass, and he realizes
what he's done.
00:18:39
He realizes that somebody
has died in his flat, and he really does need to work
out what he's going to do next.
00:18:46
-Brizzi was addicted
to crystal meth and had reportedly been
abusing the drug the night of the murder.
00:18:54
-Crystal meth is a known drug
for the escalation of it. You start slow,
and it's amazing.
00:19:01
You feel completely
out of your body, and you feel powerful
and everything, but then you start
taking more and more
00:19:07
because you need more and more
because the effect is so strong, and they go into
the paranoia phase.
00:19:11
They will have hallucinations.
They will have paranoia. They will have schizophrenia.
00:19:14
They will see people
that are not there. They will see
things that are not there.
00:19:18
It's a whole thing once you get
to the third phase, and Brizzi was on that phase.
00:19:27
-As Gordon Semple lay dead
in Brizzi's flat, his long-term partner
was expecting to meet him
00:19:33
later that evening. -On the day that
PC Semple disappeared, he discussed with his partner
00:19:43
what they were going to do
that evening. They'd arranged to meet
at a local pub near where they were
living in Dartford,
00:19:51
and they'd talked about having
shepherd's pie for dinner. It was already in the fridge,
ready and waiting for them,
00:19:58
and they talked about
recording a reality TV show they both liked so that
they could watch it later.
00:20:05
-Unaware that Gordon had
arranged to meet Brizzi, his concern grew. -Gordon Semple's partner
had become frantic with worry
00:20:15
after he couldn't
get hold of him on the night
of his disappearance. He'd phoned him 18 times
00:20:23
over the course
of an hour and a half and been unable to get through with leaving messages
on his answerphone.
00:20:29
The next morning, he reported
him missing to the police. -On Monday, the 4th of April,
three days after the murder,
00:20:38
the caretaker of the
Peabody Estate started to notice a strange smell
coming from Brizzi's flat.
00:20:46
-The caretaker didn't have
any idea what happened. He knew it was a very bad smell.
00:20:50
They had different theories
about drains, and they initially thought that the occupier of the flat
might have died.
00:20:56
-Steve Harris lives in the flat
above Brizzi's on the Peabody Estate. -I walked in through
the fraction,
00:21:04
and the porter come up to me
and said to me, "Excuse me.
There's been a complaint,"
00:21:11
and I thought
he was talking about me. Then he went on a complaint
about a smell in the block,
00:21:16
but where I live at the top, I didn't realize
what was going on. So, we both walked up
into the block.
00:21:25
He said to me,
"Can you smell it now?" "A little bit." So, what he done,
he opened up the letter box,
00:21:33
and he said,
"Can you smell it now?" And I said to him, "Yes.
Do you know what it smells like?
00:21:39
It smells like a dead body." -The idea of a dead body
in the building was hard to contemplate.
00:21:46
-Now, I've never smelled
a dead body in my entire life, so he wanted to call the police.
00:21:54
I come back up here,
opened up the window, had a fag, then all of a sudden, when, like, people turns
their central heat on,
00:22:01
you got actual, like, flue. So, I'm looking out the window
and I thought to myself,
00:22:06
"Well, hold on a minute, mate.
We just knocked at your door. You didn't answer, so how comes
your central heating is on?"
00:22:12
I went downstairs on my own.
I looked through the letter box. He walked straight past
and opened up the door.
00:22:22
I said, "Excuse me, mate." I said, "There's been
a complaint about a smell on the block."
00:22:28
So, he's gone to me,
"Well, I'm sorry about that. I'm just cooking for a friend."
00:22:32
Fair enough. I went back downstairs
to the porter, and I said to him, "Don't bother
calling up the police. He's in."
00:22:41
-The smell of the dead body was clearly
attracting attention, and Brizzi had to
dispose of it quickly.
00:22:49
-Brizzi, after the killing,
he went to a DIY store and bought various
different items,
00:22:58
including buckets,
rubber gloves, cleaning products, large perforated metal sheets,
00:23:06
which he used as part of
the dismemberment of the body. -Brizzi tries to dispose
of Gordon's body in the same way
00:23:13
that the Walter White character
in "Breaking Bad" tries to dispose of a corpse. He buys acid.
00:23:19
He tries to dissolve
parts of Gordon's body. He dismembers him. -He bought a combination
of chemicals
00:23:28
from a local hardware store. He didn't have exactly
what he needed. I think he just thought he was
going to make a cocktail
00:23:35
and hope that it was going to
have the effect that he wanted, but it only had
a partial effect.
00:23:42
-The truth is, it is very
difficult to reduce a body to so little evidence
that nothing will be found
00:23:50
or nothing significant
will be found. Yes, things like acids
will damage the body,
00:23:57
but very unlikely
to destroy it to the point
where something can't be found. To completely dissolve a body,
you're going to need
00:24:06
very, very powerful chemicals much stronger than you'd
get over the counter, and you're going to need
a long time
00:24:13
and somewhere to do it that you're not going
to get discovered. Practically speaking, outside
of the world of TV programs,
00:24:22
it's not a way
to get rid of a body. -It really is
incredibly gruesome, and this suggests to me
00:24:31
that this isn't somebody
who is disgusted. This isn't somebody who is
abhorred by what is going on,
00:24:37
and I think by this point, Brizzi has become so
kind of saturated with drugs, he's become so detached
from reality,
00:24:46
that that line between
fiction and reality really is completely crossed
and completely blurred.
00:24:52
-He also went on Grindr
and tried to cover his tracks and lay a false trail to put anyone off
from suspecting
00:25:01
that anything had happened
that was untoward. He disposed of other body parts by taking them and throwing them
into the river.
00:25:09
-And the disintegration
then takes over, trapped in this tiny flat, blackened windows,
00:25:15
with Gordon Semple's body. It is almost impossible
to imagine what that must have been like.
00:25:23
-On Sunday, the 3rd of April,
the Metropolitan Police, unaware of the fate
of PC Gordon Semple,
00:25:30
launched an official
missing persons appeal for their colleague. He'd been missing for two days.
00:25:37
By now, the smell
coming from Brizzi's flat was becoming unbearable. On Thursday, the 7th of April,
00:25:46
Steve Harris and his brother decided to
confront Brizzi again. -We both walked up.
00:25:54
He approached the door. He's got his little card
meant that he was a Sweeney. He opened up the door
and the same sort of thing.
00:26:02
He's going, "I'm sorry, mate.
I'm cooking for my friend." That was it. -However, the brothers weren't
convinced and called 999.
00:26:12
An ambulance was dispatched
to Brizzi's flat. -The ambulance turned up. Whether or not they got
into his place or not,
00:26:19
I don't know, but they
must have smelled this smell. When they come back down again,
I said to the woman,
00:26:24
"What's it smell of?" She said, "It smelled like...
It smells like rotten flesh."
00:26:29
Well, me and my brother
looked at each other, and it's to say, like,
"Well, something ain't right."
00:26:34
-The police arrived
after the paramedics, and two officers knocked
on the door of Brizzi's flat.
00:26:40
-They weren't Murder Squad
detectives. They were local police, and they didn't really know
what to expect.
00:26:47
-Stefano Brizzi
answered the door wearing a pair of pink Speedos
and aviator sunglasses.
00:26:54
-There was this horrendous smell
coming from the flat, and he said,
"I've killed a police officer.
00:26:59
Satan told me to do it. I promised Satan that I would
kill at the first opportunity,"
00:27:04
and these two police officers
were confronted with a man who was possibly
very, very dangerous.
00:27:09
I think they initially thought
that he was insane, and they decided
not to arrest him initially.
00:27:14
They just decided
to let him talk. -This is a man who has
lost contact with the planet,
00:27:19
really,
and he says, "Oh, yes. I've cut him up. I've dismembered him." I think the women police
00:27:26
was probably
completely confused by this. "What on earth
are you talking about?"
00:27:30
"Well, yes. I killed him,"
and they go into the bathroom. It's an extraordinary
descent into madness.
00:27:37
-The scene inside the flat
was of unimaginable horror. Police discovered
the remains of dismembered
00:27:44
and dissolved body parts. -When they looked around
the flat, there were buckets
of dismembered body parts
00:27:54
including part of
PC Semple's head, but they obviously
didn't know PC Semple, so they wouldn't have known
that it was him at that stage.
00:28:07
-He has to explain his actions. He's still very much
under the influence of substances at this point.
00:28:12
He's been taking crystal meth
in quite large quantities for quite a significant
period of time,
00:28:17
and I think that reality really
is a million miles away for him, so he's basically saying
the most incredible things
00:28:26
like Satan is responsible
for the death of Gordon Semple. -As the police secured
the crime scene,
00:28:34
they found a copy of
"The Satanic Bible" on Brizzi's computer. -He insisted,
"Satan had made me kill."
00:28:43
This was not the first time that
Brizzi had referred to Satan. I'm not sure I believe
completely in possession,
00:28:52
although it is
a familiar enough explanation which some murderers call upon, but I would say
that in this case,
00:29:02
Brizzi almost certainly
believed it to be true. He had convinced himself
that he was possessed
00:29:09
and that therefore he had
to fulfill Satan's desire. -Here's somebody who really has
a lot of trouble
00:29:20
at this point in time performing in a socially
acceptable way, I think, because his values
and all of those types of things
00:29:28
that inform the way we behave
in front of other people are completely off-kilter.
00:29:32
He's completely lost his compass
at this point in time. -On the 7th of April, 2016,
00:29:39
Stefano Brizzi was arrested
on suspicion of murder and taken
to Lewisham Police Station.
00:29:46
DNA tests and evidence
found at his flat would eventually confirm
that the dismembered body
00:29:52
was in fact Gordon Semple's. Brizzi would now have to reveal what happened
on that fateful night.
00:29:59
The press quickly
got wind of the story. -We got to the Estate. There weren't loads
of press there.
00:30:06
There was a very tight cordon
around it. We couldn't get very far in. We had had a tip-off
of his image,
00:30:14
of a photograph
of Stefano Brizzi, and we were trying to find out
anyone who knew him.
00:30:18
We didn't find anyone
because he was living such an isolated life
by that point.
00:30:22
Police weren't willing to
give us much at all because it was
just so distressing,
00:30:24
I think, particularly for
Gordon Semple's family because it had gone from
being a missing person case
00:30:30
and not being massively unusual
to being a very grisly murder, so the information
was metered out quite slowly.
00:30:38
-It wasn't until Brizzi
was interrogated by police that the initial details
of the murder emerged.
00:30:46
-He was very forthcoming in his
interview about what happened. The thing that always struck me
about him
00:30:50
was that he was a very educated
and articulate man. He had an answer for everything.
00:31:00
-He wore sunglasses
in his police interviews, and this is something that does
appear to be incredibly bizarre,
00:31:07
and I think
what he's doing here, he's continuing to draw on that
character from "Breaking Bad,"
00:31:12
Walter White's alter ego
of Heisenberg, who always wore sunglasses, and I think this is a way
of basically
00:31:18
psychologically detaching
Stefano Brizzi from the person who's carried
out this horrendous crime.
00:31:25
-Brizzi stood trial on the 18th
of October at the Old Bailey. He was beginning to crumble
under the pressure.
00:31:34
-He was incredibly distressed. At the beginning,
he was sobbing loudly, crying, hyperventilating.
00:31:40
There was this difference
between the man we saw on CCTV, and the man we saw
in his police interviews
00:31:46
and the man
who was on trial. He was, in the first few days,
very upset, lots of crying,
lots of sobbing from the dock.
00:31:53
-One of the most incriminating pieces of evidence
the prosecution had was the confession Brizzi made
00:32:00
at the time of his arrest. -Brizzi had abandoned
his confession that he'd been told by Satan
to kill someone.
00:32:08
He gave a version in court
where they'd had consensual sex. They'd had played
quite a long sex game.
00:32:14
They'd both been taking
crystal meth and other chems, and he described
a sadomasochistic sex game
00:32:23
involving a collar
and a dog lead, and the only thing
that we know for certain is that that collar
and this dog lead were used
00:32:31
because they had
both men's DNA on them. -Brizzi said in his evidence
that the leash just slipped,
00:32:42
and it was an accident, but there were a lot of
other aspects to the case that didn't quite tally
with his version of events.
00:32:50
First of all, he told a lot
of lies about what had happened. He'd lied to the man
that came to his door
00:32:59
to join the sex party. He then lied again, leaving messages on
Gordon Semple's Grindr account,
00:33:07
and he lied to the police
after they came to his flat and discovered the body. -The jury also heard
00:33:14
that acts of cannibalism
might have taken place, something that Brizzi
had denied.
00:33:20
-It was one of the most
gruesome aspects of the case. They found evidence that
Brizzi's cooker
00:33:28
had been used to cook
parts of Gordon Semple's body. They found various utensils
in the kitchen
00:33:38
had Gordon Semple's DNA on it cleaning a pair of chopsticks, and there were bite marks on
a body part that was recovered.
00:33:48
-Bite marks can be
very important in homicide cases. They can often associate
an offender with the deceased.
00:33:58
What's interesting to know
is have they occurred in life? Are the associated
with things like bruising,
00:34:03
or are they postmortem injuries, and at the worst end
of the scale, if there is flesh tissue
missing,
00:34:12
is it suggesting cannibalism? -CCTV footage was also played, showing Brizzi
at the local DIY store
00:34:21
on Tuesday, the 5th of April, four days after
he'd killed PC Gordon Semple. He bought several supplies,
00:34:29
including pincers,
heavy-duty scissors, a putty knife,
and large plastic buckets.
00:34:37
-In the CCTV footage, it's very clear
he's looking at the thickness. He's looking at the depth,
and at one point,
00:34:42
he put his head and shoulders
in one of the buckets to measure if it was big enough
to take a human body,
00:34:49
and so I think
he was obviously wary that -- what he was about to do. His defense was that
he was high on crystal meth,
00:34:54
but he was definitely lucid
enough at that point to know, "This is what
I'm going to need,"
00:34:59
or, "I'm going to need
some heavy-duty gear here." -I think you can only see Brizzi
00:35:06
as a man
who is destroying himself, literally falling apart
in front of your eyes,
00:35:12
because Semple then becomes,
poor man, part of the desperate,
extraordinary, bewildering land,
00:35:22
this mad world that Brizzi
has found himself in, in which he thinks
it's perfectly all right
00:35:27
to dismember
Gordon Semple's body. -Brizzi's neighbor,
Steve Harris, was called to the witness stand.
00:35:36
-They showed me a photo
of gloves at the bench because he went out,
and he was cutting him up,
00:35:41
and there was a fork found. All around here was closed off. They had [Indistinct]
in the drains.
00:35:50
He must have flushed bits
and pieces down the toilet to get rid of the evidence.
00:35:57
-The prosecution told the court that Brizzi was an evil
and calculating man, while the defense argued
that Brizzi was not a monster
00:36:07
and that he had no recollection
because of heavy drug use. -Brizzi was assessed
by a psychiatrist.
00:36:14
They didn't find that
he had a defense of diminished responsibility
or any psychiatric condition
00:36:19
that would explain
what he'd done. He was completely sane. -The jury had to decide
whether to believe
00:36:26
Brizzi killed in a haze
of drugs, delusion, and sleep deprivation or the version
he told in court
00:36:33
that it was a sex game
that had gone wrong. Brizzi denied murder
and manslaughter
00:36:39
but admitted obstruction
of a coroner by unlawfully disposing
of the body. -I didn't envy the jury.
00:36:46
I thought they had
a real tough job. It was 30 hours of deliberation. There was a majority verdict
of ten to two.
00:36:53
They obviously really struggled
to reach that verdict. -On the 14th of November, 2016,
00:37:01
the jury found
Stefano Brizzi guilty of murdering PC Gordon Semple. In December,
Judge Mr. Nicholas Hilliard
00:37:10
sentenced Brizzi
to life in prison with a minimum of 24 years and an additional seven years
for obstructing a coroner.
00:37:19
He was sent to Belmarsh
High Security Prison in London. -I think there are several
elements of Stefano Brizzi
00:37:27
and Gordon Semple's story
that are tragic, and I think for me,
it was the missed opportunities
00:37:32
of other people
to intervene here, and I think here was somebody
who was on his own,
00:37:38
essentially,
in a foreign country. He didn't have a lot in the way
of close support networks,
00:37:44
and I think
he went off the rails, and there was no one
to put him back on again.
00:37:48
-So, you have in Brizzi a man overwhelmed with shame, conscious of his own gayness,
00:37:57
desperate to try
and do the right thing and yet finding it
extremely difficult. Put together, they are a potent
mixture of ingredients
00:38:09
that could turn into a killer. I believe that Brizzi,
in the end, tipped over the edge.
00:38:17
It was literally one
of those moments in which this extraordinary
concoction of problems exploded.
00:38:25
-The tragic death
of Gordon Semple highlighted some concerns
about the use of dating apps
00:38:32
and their potential dangers. -I think at the time, I was also
covering similar cases
00:38:42
involving Grindr
and involving predators stalking social networks
and dating apps,
00:38:50
and this seemed to be part
of a trend of cases coming through the Old Bailey. There was the Brizzi case,
00:38:57
which coincided with
the Stephen Port case, which I also covered,
which was a serial killer
00:39:04
who targeted gay men
on dating apps, but it seemed like
a very alarming new trend.
00:39:16
-I think the bigger-picture
issue here for me is the context of social media,
of dating apps, of this idea
00:39:23
that we are basically just
cutting out a lot of the process that we used to have around
these activities,
00:39:28
and we are almost
consuming our partners. We're picking people almost as
if they're objects,
00:39:34
as if they're products, and I think we're doing so
in a way that's off the radar,
00:39:39
so we're not meeting people
in social situations when our friends and our peers
and our colleagues are around.
00:39:45
We're doing it on our own, and I think that makes us
quite vulnerable. -On Sunday,
the 5th of February, 2017,
00:39:54
almost a year after
he killed PC Gordon Semple at his flat in South London, Stefano Brizzi committed suicide
00:40:03
and was found dead
in his prison cell. He was 50 years old. -I think that the reason that
Stefano Brizzi
00:40:11
ended his own life was essentially because reality
was catching up with him. He's now having to live with
the consequences
00:40:20
of this horrendous crime
that he's committed and also the fact that this crime not only
has broken the law,
00:40:27
but it's broken a lot of those
moral expectations that were placed upon him as a young Catholic boy
growing up in Italy.
00:40:36
-The thing that was so shocking
in this case was the way
the body was treated. That was sickening.
00:40:43
It was -- Necessarily, they had to go
into great detail about it, and that was very,
very hard to listen to.
00:40:49
That was hugely unpleasant,
and I can't even imagine how it must feel
for the victim's family.
00:40:55
-It is telling that none
of PC Gordon Semple's friends or family attended the trial.
00:41:03
One can only imagine
how absolutely devastating it would have been for them
to have learned
00:41:08
for the first time the details of his death
and what happened afterwards. He was essentially stripped
of his dignity.
00:41:21
-Stefano Brizzi's lust
for sex and drugs led to the murder
of an innocent man. Gordon Semple was simply in the
wrong place at the wrong time.
00:41:32
For six days, Brizzi,
spurred on by his dark thoughts, tried to dispose of
the police officer's body
00:41:38
in the most horrendous manner. Due to the drugs that polluted
his twisted mind, we may never know exactly
what happened behind the door
00:41:47
of Brizzi's London home, but there is no doubt
that his heinous crime means he will forever
be remembered
00:41:55
as one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪