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Britain's Most Evil Killers S02E09 Stefano Brizzi
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00:01On the 7th of April 2016,
00:04police were called to a flat in South London
00:07after neighbors had complained about a putrid smell.
00:12He looked at the letterbox, and he said,
00:14can you smell it now?
00:15And I said to him, do you know what it smells like?
00:18It smells like a dead body.
00:20Two police officers knocked on the door,
00:22and the occupant, 49-year-old Stefano Britzi, answered.
00:27He said, I've killed a police officer.
00:29Satan told me to do it.
00:31I promised Satan that I would kill at the first opportunity.
00:35Inside the flat was a scene of unimaginable horror.
00:40They go into the bathroom,
00:42and the bath is full of globules of fat,
00:44and they find remnants of the body.
00:47Stefano Britzi had killed a police officer
00:50in a drug-fueled sexual encounter.
00:53He then went on to dispose of the body
00:56in the most horrifying way.
00:58And became one of Britain's most evil killers.
01:02On the 7th of April 2016, when two police officers arrived
01:05at the Peabody Estate on Southwark Street in South London,
01:09they made a gruesome discovery inside one of the flats.
01:13They found the room at the dark was on the outside.
01:15The police officer arrived on Southwark Street in South London,
01:16called the Seat & Dead for the
01:1615th of the east.
01:17On the 7th of April 2016 when two police officers arrived at the Peabody Estate
01:19On the 7th of April, 2016,
01:28when two police officers arrived at the Peabody Estate
01:31on Southwark Street in South London,
01:34they made a gruesome discovery inside one of the flats.
01:42They found the remains of 59-year-old police officer
01:45Gordon Semple, who'd been missing for six days.
01:51Neighbors had alerted the police
01:53after they noticed a bad smell.
01:56The tenant, 49-year-old Italian national Stefano Brizzi,
02:00had been trying to dispose of Gordon Semple's body
02:04after killing him the previous week.
02:06Tess de la Mer reported on the case.
02:10We got a phone call from a neighbor saying,
02:14something's been found.
02:15I believe it's the police officer.
02:17Initially, we had very little information.
02:19We know that he'd been found on the Peabody Estate.
02:22When I and a colleague went down, it was cordoned off.
02:25At that point, we didn't know exactly what had gone on.
02:30I think, in hindsight, it was a lot more chilling
02:31than it actually felt at the time.
02:33At the time, it just felt like a relatively
02:35straightforward murder.
02:38A week before the shocking discovery
02:40on the 1st of April 2016, Stefano Brizzi
02:45had used the online dating app Grindr to meet men.
02:50And it was at that point that he contacted again
02:53through the dating app a policeman called Gordon Semple.
03:00They were essentially both looking for somebody
03:02to hook up with and have sex with.
03:04And this is the one thing that really amazes me about this app
03:08is that it enables people to see who's geographically proximate
03:12and interested in the same thing that you are.
03:15And the speed at which this happens,
03:17with which they meet,
03:18and with which Gordon Semple loses his life
03:21really is quite incredible.
03:23This killer's story begins over 50 years ago.
03:31Stefano Brizzi was born into a devout Catholic family
03:35in San Marcello do Pistoiesi
03:38in the Italian region of Tuscany
03:40on the 26th of June, 1966.
03:44He was aware of his sexuality from an early age.
03:48He knew he was a homosexual,
03:51but Brizzi also knew he was a Catholic
03:53and that not only is against his religion,
03:55but he would really upset his parents
03:58if they were that religious.
03:59So he was in that kind of turmoil.
04:02I think his homosexuality haunted him.
04:08He felt that somehow it wasn't
04:10what his family would have approved of.
04:13He felt that he was out of step with his family.
04:19Brizzi went to the university in Florence,
04:21which is a very reputable university in Italy,
04:24not very far from where he was born and where he lived.
04:27From the university, he graduated,
04:29and he got a very good job
04:31as a computer programmer in Italy as well.
04:35In 2008, age 42,
04:38Brizzi was diagnosed with hepatitis C
04:41and as HIV-positive.
04:44I think he would have felt quite a sense of shame.
04:47He would have felt some sense of responsibility
04:50for the situation that he found himself in,
04:52and I think he would have really felt that guilt.
04:54I mean, it seems almost stereotypical
04:56to talk about Catholic guilt,
04:58but I think that's certainly what was going on with him.
05:02In 2012, age 46, Brizzi decided to move to London
05:08for a better income and a different lifestyle.
05:12I think when Brizzi first arrived in London,
05:15he would have felt quite liberated.
05:17He's moved away from Florence and his family
05:20and that quite rigid Catholic set of values
05:23that was so instrumental in his upbringing.
05:25He's come to live in this diverse, exciting city
05:28where I think for the first time in his life,
05:30he can be himself,
05:32and I think this is quite a positive time for him.
05:35He was intelligent, IT expert, well-trained,
05:42and coming away from his native Italy meant that he could,
05:48perhaps, escape some of the family ties.
05:53He could reinvent himself, if you like.
05:56In 2012, Brizzi found work with a merchant bank
06:01as an IT consultant and a web developer earning £70,000 a year.
06:08He seems to be working in an industry
06:10that is quite kind of hedonistic in terms of culture.
06:15It's quite kind of fond of instant gratification,
06:18and you don't really have very much in the way of breaks
06:21on your behavior.
06:22You're encouraged to basically work hard and play hard,
06:26and I think that's where the problems begin.
06:29I think the guilt he'd found himself suffering in Italy
06:36was not completely dissipated by changing countries.
06:42In 2013, Brizzi started experimenting with drugs,
06:48including GHB and poppers.
06:51He soon became immersed in a world of substance abuse,
06:55and eventually became addicted to crystal meth.
07:01Now, in itself, one can only feel sorry for him
07:04because it's a dreadful addiction.
07:07It's very, very hard to attack and to overcome,
07:13but to some extent, he tried.
07:15Brizzi joined a support group to help overcome his addiction.
07:20Brizzi does seem to be quite a dramatic
07:23and quite an elaborate individual,
07:25and some of his behavior around his crystal meth addiction
07:29really does highlight that.
07:31He reached a point where he was going to a support group,
07:33and he wanted to leave his addiction behind.
07:36He conducted a funeral service for his crystal meth addiction.
07:40I think at one point, he even constructed a coffin for it,
07:43and said he was burying his addiction.
07:48He was basically saying,
07:49this is it, this is over, I'm burying this part of me,
07:52and I'm moving on.
07:53And you can see those roots of his upbringing there,
07:56that idea of the Catholic faith and of ceremony and of ritual.
08:00He's drawing on those traditional values,
08:03those traditional beliefs in this new lifestyle.
08:06So I think here we've got somebody who's incredibly conflicted.
08:09He's somebody who feels like he should be a good Catholic boy.
08:12He knows that his behavior isn't going to come up to the expectations
08:16of his family and his community, and he's really struggling.
08:20Brizzi wrestled to overcome his addiction,
08:23and in 2015, he eventually lost his job.
08:28His life was beginning to fall apart.
08:31It would be fair to say that Brizzi was disintegrating.
08:36He became more and more introverted.
08:42Almost nocturnal, he completely covered the windows of his flat
08:50so that no light came in.
08:52He didn't go out very much during the day at all.
08:56He became addicted to an American television show
08:58called Breaking Bad, in which, at one point,
09:02two of the main characters tried to dissolve the body of a drug dealer
09:06in a bath of acid, which, for one reason or another,
09:12struck a chord in Brizzi.
09:16Brizzi fell into a dark world of his own creation,
09:20a blurred reality between fiction and fantasy.
09:26I think he really did adopt this Breaking Bad narrative.
09:30He went along to a support group wearing a Breaking Bad T-shirt.
09:34Now, what that says to me is that this is somebody who's not thinking
09:37through the social acceptability of their actions,
09:40and this is somebody who needs help.
09:42And I think, at this point, there were quite a few red flags.
09:46So you have a man who is literally falling apart,
09:51is descended into a kind of madness of his own creation,
09:56fueled by crystal meth, fascinated by sex,
10:01desperately keen to have what he called chem sex parties.
10:04Chem sex is pretty much a party, or a get-together,
10:09where it's exactly what it says on the tin.
10:12It's a party that's fueled by chemicals, and it's a sex party.
10:16The two biggest chemicals that are used in the community for sex parties
10:21are ketamine and crystal meth.
10:23Two big reasons.
10:24Ketamine is a horse tranquilizer.
10:26It kills your gagging effect.
10:27And crystal meth, because you don't sleep on it.
10:31The second reason why crystal meth is very used, it's known as a huge aphrodisiac.
10:38Once you take it, your libido just goes crazy.
10:40And you just, you don't stop.
10:46Britzy would use the online gay dating app Grindr
10:51to regularly meet men for chem sex parties.
10:57It's an escapism from the real life.
10:59You know, it's like nothing they've ever seen before.
11:02And a lot of people, when they do something completely different,
11:05they go, wow, I love this.
11:08Britzy became immersed in a world fueled by drugs and sex,
11:12and would often go on chem sex binges for days.
11:17I think that Britzy really wanted to participate in a culture
11:21in which he felt that he belonged, in which he felt accepted.
11:25So I think he really did want to embrace it all part and parcel.
11:30I think it started off being quite fun, quite exciting,
11:32and then it became like a full-blown addiction
11:34that he just couldn't manage.
11:36Stefano Britzy's chaotic lifestyle was quickly spiraling out of control.
11:43His addiction to sex and drugs would only intensify,
11:47and would eventually lead to the death of an innocent man.
11:59In 2015, 48-year-old Italian national Stefano Britzy
12:04had lost his highly paid job as a web developer for a merchant bank.
12:09He was unemployed and living alone in his flat in Southwark, London.
12:14He'd become immersed in a world of drug and sex addiction.
12:20The people who were around him
12:21don't necessarily have his best interests at heart,
12:24and there's nobody to really step back and say,
12:27hang on a minute, you know, you might want to be careful here.
12:31In terms of his lifestyle, there are lots of enabling factors,
12:35but very little in the way of constraining factors.
12:38He was living a very sort of hermit-like existence.
12:42He was, um, only really going out at night.
12:44He wasn't, he wasn't working.
12:46He was, um, not interacting with many people, um, socially.
12:51He was using the Grindr app an awful lot,
12:54but he wasn't having sort of normal everyday social interactions,
12:57such as, like, going to the pub or things like that.
13:01On the afternoon of the 1st of April 2016,
13:05Stefano Britzi exchanged messages with a man on Grindr
13:10and invited him round to his flat for sex.
13:14The man in question was 59-year-old policeman Gordon Semple.
13:18Emily Penink is a correspondent at the Old Bailey.
13:22Gordon Semple was from Inverness originally in Scotland and he worked for the Bank of Scotland
13:29in Inverness and then moved down to London where he became a police officer 30 years ago.
13:34He was working at the City Hall in Westminster as part of an antisocial behaviour team.
13:41He was very popular with his friends.
13:44His brother described him as a Dixon of Dot Green kind of character,
13:49the kind of beat Bobby who would solve crimes with common sense in the community.
13:55Um, so he was a friendly guy and he was very much well-liked.
14:00At approximately 3 p.m., Gordon Semple got off a tube train at Blackfriars Station
14:07and made his way to Britzi's flat on the Peabody Estate.
14:11DR. Gordon Semple and Stefano Britzi didn't know each other.
14:14They'd never met.
14:15They had arranged to meet for casual sex.
14:18It was the middle of the day. It was a working day.
14:20Um, we know that Gordon Semple was on duty.
14:22It is presumed that two men spent the afternoon having sex
14:28and contacted other men via Grindr to join them.
14:31DR. There were other people who had kind of indicated
14:35that they were interested in coming to this sort of, this rendezvous.
14:38At around 7 p.m. that evening, another man responded to the messages
14:43on Grindr and arrived at Britzi's flat.
14:46DR. Another of the men that Britzi invited to take part in the said
14:51chem sex party rang the doorbell.
14:54DR. And after a while, Britzi answers and says,
14:57actually, somebody's fallen ill.
14:59It's okay that they're getting treatment.
15:01The party's over.
15:02DR. But Britzi was lying.
15:07At some point, after arriving at his flat, Stefano Britzi had murdered
15:13PC Gordon Semple behind closed doors.
15:17DR. A night before they actually met, Britzi had been irritated,
15:24and he'd had virtually no sleep, and he'd been let down
15:28by another man that he'd been talking to on Grindr.
15:32He'd taken it quite personally.
15:34So even before they met, Britzi was irritated and fractious and tired,
15:40and I think he took it out on Gordon Semple.
15:43It is unclear exactly what happened at Britzi's flat,
15:48but according to Britzi, the two men engaged in sadomasochistic sex acts
15:53that involved a collar, a mask, and a dog lead.
15:58DR. At some point during the course of events, Gordon had lost his life.
16:04He'd agreed to some bondage activity with Britzi,
16:08and it's believed that Gordon was strangled, and that's how he died.
16:12DR. So precisely why reduced oxygen supply to the brain
16:17enhances orgasm and sexual pleasure is not something that's tremendously well understood,
16:23but it is very well recognized, and for forensic pathologists,
16:27finding autoerotic accidents is not uncommon.
16:33With pressure on the neck, there is only about 10 seconds
16:38before somebody loses consciousness if the pressure is too high.
16:43That means that if you don't have some sort of fail-safe in an autoerotic event,
16:49you can die very quickly because you lose consciousness and you can't save yourself.
16:59Now, Britzi, at one point, tried to suggest that he'd been using the lead
17:04to heighten the level of sexual excitement, a familiar enough, uh, thing in both heterosexual
17:13and homosexual relationships, cutting off the oxygen supply said to heighten the orgasm.
17:20The interplay between pressure on the neck and sexual activity can be very, very difficult
17:28to work out when it stops being an inexperienced person in an accident,
17:34and when it becomes deliberate homicide.
17:40In the days leading up to Gordon Semple's death,
17:43Stefano Britzi had been abusing drugs, including crystal meth, for several days.
17:52Something like methamphetamine is a stimulant,
17:55very similar effect to something like cocaine, they get you high, you're more active, more agile,
18:03sometimes core body temperature goes up, they're getting you agitated rather than calmed.
18:10Stimulant drugs like methamphetamine can have significant psychological and psychiatric effects,
18:16make people unstable, make them unpredictable, they can have all sorts of very damaging consequences.
18:25He lived in an extraordinary fantasy world of nocturnal oblivion and so he just decided to kill him.
18:31I think it probably just came over him, I'm going to kill him, and he duly did. He did not know
18:38that Semple was a police officer, he was not aware that anyone would particularly miss Gordon Semple.
18:45I think the circumstances around Gordon Semple's death were incredibly chaotic and I think at this
18:52point he really was starting to panic, I think that drug-induced haze was perhaps starting to pass
18:58and he realizes what he's done, he realizes that somebody has died in his flat and he really does
19:05need to work out what he's going to do next.
19:07Whether it was a sex game that had gone wrong or a calculated murder,
19:13Stefano Britzi had killed 59-year-old PC Gordon Semple and instead of alerting the police,
19:20he decided to dispose of the body in a most shocking way.
19:24On Friday the 1st of April 2016, 49-year-old Stefano Britzi had killed 59-year-old Gordon Semple
19:43after inviting him over to his flat for sex. Britzi was addicted to crystal meth
19:49and had reportedly been abusing the drug the night of the murder.
19:55Crystal meth is a known drug for the escalation of it. You start slow and it's amazing,
20:01you feel completely out of your body and you feel powerful and everything,
20:05but then you start taking more and more because you need more and more,
20:09because the effect is too strong and they're going to the paranoia phase.
20:12They will have hallucinations, they'll have paranoia, they'll have schizophrenia,
20:15they will see people that are not there, they will see things that are not there.
20:19It's a whole thing once you get to the third phase and Britzi was on that phase.
20:24As Gordon Semple lay dead in Britzi's flat,
20:31his long-term partner was expecting to meet him later that evening.
20:38On the day that PC Semple disappeared, he discussed with his partner
20:44what they were going to do that evening.
20:46They'd arranged to meet at a local pub near where they were living in Dartford,
20:52and they'd talked about having shepherd's pie for dinner.
20:55It was already in the fridge, ready and waiting for them,
20:58and they'd talked about recording a reality TV show that they both liked
21:03so that they could watch it later.
21:05Unaware that Gordon had arranged to meet Britzi, his concern grew.
21:11Gordon Semple's partner had become frantic with worry
21:15after he couldn't get hold of him on the night of his disappearance.
21:20He'd phoned him 18 times over the course of an hour and a half,
21:25and been unable to get through with leaving messages on his aunt's phone.
21:29The next morning, he reported him missing to the police.
21:34On Monday the 4th of April, three days after the murder,
21:39the caretaker of the Peabody Estate started to notice
21:42a strange smell coming from Britzi's flat.
21:47The caretaker didn't have any idea what happened.
21:49He knew it was a very bad smell.
21:51They had different theories about drains,
21:53and they initially thought that the occupier of the flat might have died.
21:57Steve Harris lives in the flat above Britzi's on the Peabody Estate.
22:02I'm walking through the flat and the porter come up to me and said to me,
22:09excuse me, there's been a complaint, and I thought he was talking about me.
22:13Then he went on to be a complaint about the smell in the block,
22:17but where I live at the top, I didn't realise what was going on.
22:23So we both walked up into the block.
22:26He said to me, can you smell it now? A little bit.
22:31So what he done, he up at the letterbox.
22:34And he said, but can you smell it now?
22:36And I said to him, yes.
22:39Do you know what it smells like? It smells like a dead body.
22:42The idea of a dead body in the building was hard to contemplate.
22:47Now, I've never smelt a dead body in my entire life.
22:51So he wanted to call the police.
22:54I'll come back up here. I'm up the window.
22:57Had a fag. Then all of a sudden, when people turn their sensorita on,
23:02you've got an outside flute. So I'm looking out the window and I thought to myself,
23:06well, hold on a minute, mate. We just looked at your door.
23:09You didn't answer. So how comes your sensorita on?
23:13I went downstairs on my own.
23:16I looked for the letterbox.
23:17He walked straight past and opened up the door.
23:22I said, excuse me, mate. I said, um, there's been a complaint about the smell in the block.
23:29So he's gone to me. Well, I'm sorry about that. Um, I'm just cooking for a friend. Fair enough.
23:35I went back downstairs to the porter and I said to him, don't bother calling up the police. He's in.
23:42The smell of the dead body was clearly attracting attention,
23:46and Britzy had to dispose of it quickly.
23:50Britzy, after the killing, he went to a DIY store and bought various different items,
23:59including buckets, rubber gloves, cleaning products, large perforated metal sheet,
24:07which he used as part of the dismemberment of the body.
24:11Britzy tries to dispose of Gordon's body in the same way that the Walter White character
24:16in Breaking Bad tries to dispose of a corpse. He buys acid. He tries to dissolve parts of
24:22Gordon's body. He dismembers him.
24:27He bought a combination of chemicals from a local hardware store. He didn't have exactly what he
24:33needed. I think he just thought he was going to make a cocktail and, um, hope that it was going
24:38to have the effect that he wanted, but it only had a partial effect.
24:43The truth is, it is very difficult to reduce a body to so little evidence that nothing will be found,
24:51or nothing significant will be found. Yes, things like acids will damage the body,
24:57but very unlikely to destroy it to the point where something can't be found.
25:03To completely dissolve a body, you're going to need very, very powerful chemicals,
25:09much stronger than you'd get over the counter, and you're going to need a long time and somewhere
25:15to do it that you're not going to get discovered. Practically speaking, outside of the world of TV
25:22programs, it's not a way to get rid of a body.
25:28It really is incredibly gruesome, and this suggests to me that this isn't somebody who is
25:34disgusted. This isn't somebody who is abhorred by what's going on, and I think by this point,
25:40Britzy has become so kind of saturated with drugs. He's become so detached from reality that that line
25:48between fiction and reality really is completely crossed and completely blurred.
25:53He also went on Grindr and tried to cover his tracks and lay a false trail to put anyone off
26:01from suspecting that anything had happened that was untoward. He disposed of other body parts by
26:07taking them and throwing them into the river.
26:09And the disintegration then takes over, trapped in this tiny flat, blackened windows with Gordon
26:16Semple's body. It is almost impossible to imagine what that must have been like.
26:24On Sunday, the 3rd of April, the Metropolitan Police, unaware of the fate of PC Gordon Semple,
26:31launched an official missing persons appeal for their colleague. He'd been missing for two days.
26:38By now, the smell coming from Britzy's flat was becoming unbearable.
26:43On Thursday, the 7th of April, Steve Harris and his brother decided to confront Britzy again.
26:52We both walked up. He approached the door. He's got his little card.
26:59Mate, there, he was a Sweeney. He opened up the door and the same sort of thing is.
27:03Um, he's going, I'm sorry, mate. I'm cooking for my friend. That was it.
27:07However, the brothers weren't convinced and called 999. An ambulance was dispatched
27:15to Britzy's flat. The ambulance turned up. Whether or not they got into his place or not,
27:20I don't know. But they must have smelt this smell. When they come back down again,
27:24I said to the woman, what's it smell of? She said, it smells like, it smells like rotten flesh.
27:29Well, my brother looked at each other and said, like, well, something ain't right.
27:34The police arrived after the paramedics and two officers knocked on the door of Britzy's flat.
27:41They weren't murder squad detectives. They were local police and they didn't really know what to expect.
27:47Stefano Britzy answered the door wearing a pair of pink Speedos and aviator sunglasses.
27:54There was this horrendous smell coming from the flat and he said,
27:58I've killed a police officer. Satan told me to do it. I promised Satan that I would kill at the
28:03first opportunity. And these two police officers were confronted with a man who was possibly very,
28:09very dangerous. I think they initially thought that he was insane. And they decided not to arrest
28:14him initially. They just decided to let him talk.
28:17This is a man who has lost contact with the planet, really. And he says, oh, yes, I've cut him up.
28:23I've dismembered him. I think the women police officer was probably completely confused by this.
28:30What on earth are you talking about? Well, yes, I killed him. And they go into the bathroom.
28:34It's an extraordinary descent into madness.
28:37The scene inside the flat was of unimaginable horror. Police discovered the remains of dismembered
28:45and dissolved body parts. When they looked around the flat, there were buckets of dismembered body parts,
28:55including part of, um, PC Semple's head. But they obviously didn't know PC Semple,
29:02so they wouldn't have known that it was him at that stage.
29:05And he has to explain his actions. He's still very much under the influence of substances at this
29:13point. He's been taking crystal meth in quite large quantities for quite a significant period of time.
29:18And I think that reality really is a million miles away for him. So he's basically saying that the most
29:26incredible things, like Satan, is responsible for the death of Gordon Semple.
29:31As the police secured the crime scene, they found a copy of the Satanic Bible on Britsy's computer.
29:41He insisted, Satan had made me kill. This was not the first time that Britsy had referred to Satan.
29:49I'm not sure I believe completely in possession, although it is a familiar enough explanation,
29:57which some murderers call upon. But I would say that in this case, Britsy almost certainly believed it to be true.
30:06He had convinced himself that he was possessed and that, therefore, he had to fulfill Satan's desire.
30:16Here's somebody who really has a lot of trouble at this point in time performing in a socially acceptable way.
30:25I think because his values and all of those types of things that inform the way we behave in front of other people are completely off kilter.
30:32He's completely lost his compass at this point in time.
30:35On the 7th of April 2016, Stefano Britsy was arrested on suspicion of murder
30:44and taken to Lewisham police station. DNA tests and evidence found at his flat
30:50would eventually confirm that the dismembered body was, in fact, Gordon Semple's.
30:55Britsy would now have to reveal what happened on that fateful night.
31:05On the 7th of April 2016, police discovered the remains of missing PC Gordon Semple
31:14inside the flat of 49-year-old Italian national Stefano Britsy.
31:20Britsy had killed Gordon Semple six days earlier
31:23and told the arresting officers that Satan had told him to do it.
31:28He'd been taking crystal meth for days and, in his delusional state,
31:33he'd tried to dispose of the body in the most horrific way.
31:37The press quickly got wind of the story.
31:40We got to the estate and there weren't loads of press there.
31:44There was a very tight cordon around it. We couldn't get very far in.
31:48We had had a tip-off of his image of a photograph of Stefano Britsy
31:54and we were trying to find out anyone who knew him.
31:57We didn't find anyone because he was living such an isolated life by that point.
32:00Police weren't willing to give us much at all because it was just so distressing,
32:03I think, particularly for Gordon Semple's family,
32:06because it had gone from being a missing person case
32:09and not being massively unusual to being a very grisly murder,
32:13so information was meted out quite slowly.
32:15It wasn't until Britsy was interrogated by police
32:20that the initial details of the murder emerged.
32:24He was very forthcoming in his interview about what happened.
32:27The thing that always struck me about him was that he was a very educated and articulate man.
32:34He had an answer for everything.
32:39He wore sunglasses in his police interviews.
32:42And this is something that does appear to be incredibly bizarre.
32:45And I think what he's doing here, he's continuing to draw on that character from Breaking Bad,
32:51Walter White's alter ego of Heisenberg, who always wore sunglasses.
32:55And I think this is a way of basically psychologically detaching Stefano Britsy
33:00from the person who's carried out this horrendous crime.
33:02Britsy stood trial on the 18th of October at the Old Bailey.
33:08He was beginning to crumble under the pressure.
33:11He was incredibly distressed.
33:15At the beginning, he was sobbing loudly, crying, hyperventilating.
33:19There was this difference between the man we saw on CCTV and the man we saw in his police
33:24interviews and the man who was on trial, who was, in the first few days, very upset.
33:30Lots of crying, lots of sobbing from the doc.
33:32One of the most incriminating pieces of evidence the prosecution had was the confession
33:38Britsy made at the time of his arrest.
33:41Britsy had abandoned his confession that he'd been told by Satan to kill someone.
33:47He gave a version in court where they'd had consensual sex.
33:50They'd had played quite a long sex game.
33:53They'd both been taking crystal meth and other chems.
33:58And he described a Satan masochistic sex game involving a collar and a dog lead.
34:04And the only thing that we know for certain is that that collar and this dog lead were used
34:10because they had both men's DNA on them.
34:16Britsy said in his evidence that the leash just slipped and it was an accident.
34:23But there were a lot of other aspects to the case that didn't quite tally with his version of events.
34:29First of all, he told a lot of lies about what had happened.
34:33He lied to the man that came to his door to join the sex party.
34:39He then lied again, leaving messages on Gordon Semple's Grindr account.
34:45And he lied to the police after they came to his flat and discovered the body.
34:51The jury also heard that acts of cannibalism might have taken place,
34:56something that Britsy had denied.
34:58It was one of the most gruesome aspects of the case.
35:01They found evidence that Britsy's cooker had been used to cook parts of Gordon Semple's body.
35:11And they found various utensils in the kitchen had Gordon Semple's DNA on it,
35:19including a pair of chopsticks, and there were bite marks on a body part that was recovered.
35:25Bite marks can be very important in homicide cases.
35:31They can often associate an offender with the deceased.
35:37What's interesting to know is, have they occurred in life?
35:40Are they associated with things like bruising?
35:42Or are they post-mortem injuries?
35:44And at the worst end of the scale, if there is flesh tissue missing,
35:50is it suggesting cannibalism?
35:52CCTV footage was also played showing Britsy at the local DIY store on Tuesday the 5th of April,
36:02four days after he'd killed PC Gordon Semple.
36:06He bought several supplies, including pincers, heavy-duty scissors, a putty knife,
36:13and large plastic buckets.
36:15In the CCTV footage, it's very clear he's looking at the thickness, he's looking at the depth,
36:20and at one point, he put his head and shoulders in one of the buckets.
36:24To measure if it was big enough to take a human body, and so I think he was obviously wary of what
36:30he was about to do.
36:31His defense was that he was high on crystal meth, but he was definitely lucid enough at that point
36:35to know, this is what I'm going to need, or I'm going to need some heavy-duty gear here.
36:40I think you can only see Britsy as a man who is destroying himself, literally falling apart in front
36:50of your eyes, because Semple then becomes, poor man, part of the desperate, extraordinary,
36:57bewildering land, this mad world that Britsy's found himself in, in which he thinks it's perfectly
37:06all right to dismember Gordon Semple's body.
37:09Britsy's neighbor, Steve Harris, was called to the witness stand.
37:14They showed me photographs of the bins, because he went out and he was cutting him up,
37:20and there was a foot found, um, in the Thames. All round here was closed off. They had
37:27suckers out in the drains. He must have flushed bits and pieces down the toilet to get rid of the evidence.
37:32The prosecution told the court that Britsy was an evil and calculating man,
37:42while the defense argued that Britsy was not a monster, and that he had no recollection
37:47because of heavy drug use.
37:49Britsy was assessed by a psychiatrist. They didn't find that he had a defense of
37:55diminished responsibility or any psychiatric condition that would explain what he'd done.
37:59He was clinically sane.
38:01The jury had to decide whether to believe Britsy killed in a haze of drugs, delusion,
38:07and sleep deprivation, or the version he told in court that it was a sex game that had gone wrong.
38:14Britsy denied murder and manslaughter, but admitted obstruction of a coroner
38:20by unlawfully disposing of the body.
38:22I didn't envy the jury. I thought they had a real tough job. It was, um, 30 hours of deliberation.
38:29It was a majority verdict of 10 to 2. They obviously really struggled to reach that verdict.
38:36On the 14th of November 2016, the jury found Stefano Britsy guilty of murdering P.C. Gordon Semple.
38:45In December, Judge Mr. Nicholas Hilliard sentenced Britsy to life in prison
38:51with a minimum of 24 years and an additional seven years for obstructing a coroner.
38:57He was sent to Belmarsh High Security Prison in London.
39:01I think there are several elements of-of Stefano Britsy and Gordon Semple's story that are tragic,
39:08and I think, for me, it was the-the missed opportunities of other people to-to intervene here.
39:14And I think here was somebody who was on his own, essentially, in a foreign country.
39:19He didn't have a lot in the way of close support networks, uh, and I think he went off the rails
39:24and there was no one to put him back on again.
39:26So you have, in Britsy, a man overwhelmed with shame, conscious of his own gayness,
39:36desperate to try and do the right thing, and yet finding it extremely difficult.
39:42Put together, they are a potent mixture of ingredients that could turn into a killer.
39:51I believe that Britsy, in the end, tipped over the edge.
39:55It was literally one of those moments in which this extraordinary concoction of problems exploded.
40:04The tragic death of Gordon Semple highlighted some concerns about the use of dating apps
40:10and their potential dangers.
40:15I think, at the time, I was also covering similar cases involving Grindr,
40:22involving predators stalking, uh, social networks and-and dating apps.
40:28And this seemed to be part of a trend of cases coming through the Old Bailey.
40:34There was the Britsy case, which coincided with the Stephen Port case, which I also covered,
40:41which is the serial killer who targeted gay men on dating apps.
40:46But it seemed like a very alarming new trend.
40:54I think the bigger picture issue here, for me, is the context of social media, of dating apps,
41:00of-of this idea that we are basically just cutting out a lot of the process that we used to have around these activities.
41:07And we are almost consuming our partners.
41:10We're-we're picking people almost as if they're-they're objects, as if they're products.
41:14And I think we're-we're doing so in a way that's off the radar.
41:17So we're not meeting people in social situations
41:20where our friends and our peers and our colleagues are around.
41:23We're doing it on our own, and I think that makes us quite vulnerable.
41:26On Sunday, the 5th of February, 2017, almost a year after he killed PC Gordon Semple at his flat in South London,
41:38Stefano Britsy committed suicide and was found dead in his prison cell.
41:44He was 50 years old.
41:48I think that the reason that Stefano Britsy ended his own life was essentially because
41:53reality was catching up with him. He's now having to live with the consequences
41:58of this horrendous crime that he's committed. And also the fact that this crime not only has broken
42:05the law, but it's broken a lot of those moral expectations that were placed upon him
42:10as a-a young Catholic boy growing up in Italy.
42:15The thing that was so shocking about this case was the way, um, the body was treated.
42:19That was, um, sickening. Um, it was... Necessarily they had to go into great detail about it,
42:26and that was very, very hard to listen to. That was hugely unpleasant,
42:29and I can't even imagine how it must feel for, um, the victim's family.
42:34It is telling that none of PC Gordon Semple's friends or family attended the trial.
42:42One can only imagine how absolutely devastating it would have been for them to have learned
42:47for the first time the details of his death and what happened afterwards.
42:53He was essentially stripped of his dignity.
43:00Stefano Britsy's lust for sex and drugs led to the murder of an innocent man.
43:06Gordon Semple was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
43:10For six days, Britsy, spurred on by his dark thoughts,
43:14tried to dispose of the police officer's body in the most horrendous manner.
43:19Due to the drugs that polluted his twisted mind,
43:23we may never know exactly what happened behind the door of Britsy's London home.
43:28But there is no doubt that his heinous crime means he will forever be remembered
43:34as one of Britain's most evil killers.
43:36He's been on ник reasons for his death.
43:37We all have been on my back for a while and I look forward to it.
43:37Like I'm watching this for a while and I come into theiledict of the show.
43:42We will always watch the aparece.
43:42I watch the aparece.
43:44I will always watch the aparece.
43:45I'll now try again.
43:46For a while and I punch me right in the early000-like sentence.
43:48We will always watch this.
43:50I'll try again.
43:51We'll work on my next time.
43:52By the afternoon with our family.
43:53I'm atUSTOMP September 16th.
43:55Well, we'll be the next time for the next.
43:58I can assure you.
43:59I'll have to have a chance.
44:00I'll try again.
44:02We'll stay the same.
44:02I'll try again.