Original subtitles

-On the 7th of April, 2016,

police were called to a flat in South London

after neighbors had complained about a putrid smell.

-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?

It smells like a dead body."

-Two police officers knocked on the door,

and the occupant, 49-year-old Stefano Brizzi, answered.

-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."

-Inside the flat was a scene of unimaginable horror.

-They go into the bathroom,

and the bath is full of globules of fat,

and they find remnants of the body.

-Stefano Brizzi had killed a police officer

in a drug-fueled sexual encounter.

He then went on to dispose of the body

in the most horrifying way

and became one of the world's most evil killers.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

On the 7th of April, 2016,

when two police officers arrived at the Peabody Estate

on Southwark Street in South London,

they made a gruesome discovery inside one of the flats.

They found the remains of 59-year-old police officer

Gordon Semple,

who'd been missing for six days.

Neighbors had alerted the police after they noticed a bad smell.

The tenant, 49-year-old Italian national Stefano Brizzi,

had been trying to dispose of Gordon Semple's body

after killing him the previous week.

Tess De La Mare reported on the case.

-We got a phone call from the neighbor saying,

"Something has been found.

I believe it's the police officer."

Initially, we had very little information.

We know that he had been found on the Peabody Estate.

When I and a colleague went down, it was cordoned off.

At that point, we didn't know exactly what had gone on.

I think in hindsight, it was a lot more

chilling than it actually -- it felt at the time.

At the time, it just felt like

a relatively straightforward murder.

-On the the 1st of April, 2016,

a week before the shocking discovery,

Stefano Brizzi had used the online dating app Grindr

to meet men.

-And it was at that point that he contacted,

again, through the dating app,

a policeman called Gordon Semple.

-They were essentially both looking for somebody

to hook up with and have sex with.

And this is the one thing that really amazes me about this app

is that it enables people to see who's geographically proximate

and interested in the same thing that you are,

and the speed at which this happens,

with which they meet and with which Gordon Semple

loses his life really is quite incredible.

-This killer's story begins over 50 years ago.

Stefano Brizzi was born into a devout Catholic family

in San Marcello Pistoiese in the Italian region of Tuscany

on the 26th of June, 1966.

He was aware of his sexuality from an early age.

-He knew he was a homosexual,

but Brizzi also knew he was a Catholic,

and that not only is against his religion,

but it would really upset his parents

if they were that religious,

so he was in that kind of turmoil.

-I think his homosexuality haunted him.

He felt that somehow it wasn't

what his family would have approved of.

He felt that he was out of step with his family.

-Brizzi went to the University of Florence,

which is a very reputable university in Italy,

not very far from where he was born and where he lived.

From the university, he graduated,

and he got a very good job

as a computer programmer in Italy, as well.

-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.

He would have felt some sense of responsibility

for the situation that he found himself in,

and I think he would have really felt that guilt,

and then it seems almost stereotypical

to talk about Catholic guilt,

but I think that's certainly what was going on with him.

-In 2012, age 46, Brizzi decided to move to London

for a better income and a different lifestyle.

-I think when Brizzi first arrived in London,

he would have felt quite liberated.

He's moved away from Florence and his family

and that quite rigid Catholic set of values

that were so instrumental in his upbringing.

He's come to live in this diverse, exciting city,

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.

-He was intelligent. IT expert, well-trained,

and coming away from his native Italy

meant that he could perhaps escape some of the family ties.

He could reinvent himself, if you like.

-In 2012, Brizzi found work with a merchant bank

as an IT consultant and a web developer

earning £70,000 a year.

-He seems to be working in an industry

that is quite kind of hedonistic in terms of culture.

It's quite kind of fond of instant gratification,

and you don't really have very much

in the way of brakes on your behavior.

You're encouraged to basically work hard and play hard,

and I think that's where the problems begin.

-I think the guilt

he'd found himself suffering in Italy

was not completely dissipated by changing countries.

-In 2013, Brizzi started experimenting with drugs,

including GHB and poppers.

He soon became immersed in a world of substance abuse

and eventually became addicted to crystal meth.

-Now, in itself, one can only feel sorry for him

because it's a dreadful addiction.

It's very, very hard to attack and to overcome,

but to some extent, he tried.

-Brizzi joined a support group to help overcome his addiction.

-Brizzi does seem to be quite a dramatic

and quite an elaborate individual,

and some of his behavior around his crystal meth addiction

really does highlight that.

He reached a point where he was going to a support group

and he wanted to leave his addiction behind.

-He conducted a funeral service for his crystal meth addiction.

I think at one point, he even constructed a coffin for it

and said he was burying his addiction.

-He was basically saying, "This is it. This is over.

I'm burying this part of me, and I'm moving on,"

and you can see those roots of his upbringing there,

that idea of the Catholic faith and of ceremony and of ritual.

He's drawing on those traditional values,

those traditional beliefs in this new lifestyle.

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.

He knows that his behavior isn't going to come up

to the expectations of his family and his community,

and he's really struggling.

-Brizzi wrestled to overcome his addiction,

and in 2015, he eventually lost his job.

His life was beginning to fall apart.

-It would be fair to say that Brizzi was disintegrating.

He became more and more introverted, almost nocturnal.

He completely covered the windows of his flat

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

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,

which, for one reason or another,

struck a chord in Brizzi.

-Brizzi fell into a dark world of his own creation,

a blurred reality between fiction and fantasy.

-I think he really did adopt this "Breaking Bad" narrative.

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

thinking through the social acceptability of their actions,

and this is somebody who needs help,

and I think at this point,

there were quite a few red flags.

-So, you have a man who is literally falling apart,

has descended into a kind of madness of his own creation,

fueled by crystal meth, fascinated by sex,

desperately clinging to have what he called chemsex parties.

-Chemsex is pretty much a party or a get-together where --

It's exactly what it says on the thing.

It's a party that's fueled by chemicals, and it's a sex party.

The two biggest chemicals that are used in the community

for sex parties

are ketamine and crystal meth.

Two big reasons --

ketamine is a horse tranquilizer.

It kills your gagging effect.

And crystal meth because you don't sleep on it.

The second reason why crystal meth is very used --

it's known as a huge aphrodisiac.

Once you take it, your libido just goes crazy,

and you just -- you don't stop.

-Brizzi would use the online gay dating app Grindr

to regularly meet men for chemsex parties.

-It's an escapism from the real life.

You know, it's like nothing they've ever seen before,

and a lot of people,

when they do something completely different,

they go, "Wow, I love this."

-Brizzi became immersed in a world fueled by drugs and sex

and would often go on chemsex binges for days.

-I think that Brizzi really wanted to participate

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.

-I think it started off being quite fun, quite exciting,

and then it became, like, a full-blown addiction

that he just couldn't manage.

-Stefano Brizzi's chaotic lifestyle

was quickly spiraling out of control.

He was unemployed and living alone

in his flat in Southwark, London.

He'd become immersed in the world of drug and sex addiction.

-The people who are around him

don't necessarily have his best interests at heart,

and there's nobody to really step back and say,

"Hang on a minute," you know,

"You might want to be careful here."

In terms of his lifestyle,

there are lots of enabling factors

but very little in the way of constraining factors.

-He was living a very sort of hermit-like existence.

He was only really going out at night.

He wasn't working.

He was not interacting with many people socially.

He was using the Grindr app an awful lot,

but he wasn't having sort of normal,

everyday social interactions such as, like,

going to the pub or things like that.

-On the afternoon of the 1st of April, 2016,

Stefano Brizzi exchanged messages with a man on Grindr

and invited him round to his flat for sex.

The man in question was 59-year-old policeman

Gordon Semple.

Emily Pennink is a correspondent at the Old Bailey.

-Gordon Semple was from Inverness originally,

in Scotland,

and he worked for the Bank of Scotland in Inverness

and then moved down to London

where he became a police officer 30 years ago.

He was working at the city hall in Westminster

as part of an antisocial behavior team.

He was very popular with his friends.

His brother described him

as a Dixon of Dock Green kind of character,

the kind of beats bobby who would solve crimes

with common sense in the community.

So, he was a friendly guy, and he was very much well-liked.

-At approximately 3:00 P.M.,

Gordon Semple got off a tube train at Blackfriars Station

and made his way to Brizzi's flat on the Peabody Estate.

-Gordon Semple and Stefano Brizzi

didn't know each other. They'd never met.

They had arranged to meet for casual sex.

It was the middle of the day. It was a working day.

We know that Gordon Semple was on duty.

-According to Brizzi,

the two men spent the afternoon having sex

and contacted other men via gay-fetish apps.

-There were other people who were --

had kind of indicated they were interested

in coming to this sort of -- this rendezvous.

-At around 7:00 P.M. that evening,

another man responded to the messages

and arrived at Brizzi's flat.

-Another of the men that Brizzi invited to take part

in the said chemsex party

rang the doorbell.

-And after a while, Brizzi answers and says,

"Actually, somebody has fallen ill.

It's okay," that they're getting treatment.

The party is over.

-But Brizzi was lying.

At some point after arriving at his flat,

Stefano Brizzi had murdered PC Gordon Semple

behind closed doors.

-The night before they actually met,

Brizzi had been irritated,

and he'd had virtually no sleep,

and he'd been let down by another man

that he'd been talking to on Grindr.

He'd taken it quite personally, so even before they met,

Brizzi was irritated and fractious and tired,

and I think he took it out on Gordon Semple.

-It is unclear exactly what happened at Brizzi's flat,

but according to Brizzi,

the two men engaged in sadomasochistic sex acts

that involved a collar, a mask, and a dog lead.

-At some point during the course of events,

Gordon had lost his life.

He'd agreed to some bondage activity with Brizzi,

and it's believed that Gordon was strangled,

and that's how he died.

-So, precisely why reduced oxygen supply to the brain

enhances orgasm and sexual pleasure,

it's not something that's tremendously well-understood,

but it is very well-recognized,

and for forensic pathologists,

finding autoerotic accidents is not uncommon.

With pressure on the neck, there is only about ten seconds

before somebody loses consciousness

if the pressure is too high.

That means that if you don't have some sort of fail-safe

in an autoerotic event,

you can die very quickly

because you lose consciousness,

and you can't save yourself.

-Now, Brizzi, at one point, tried to suggest

that he'd been using the lead

to heighten the level of sexual excitement,

a familiar enough thing

in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships.

Cutting off the oxygen supply is said to heighten the orgasm.

-The interplay between pressure on the neck

and sexual activity

can be very, very difficult to work out

when it stops being

an inexperienced person in an accident

and when it becomes deliberate homicide.

-In the days leading up to Gordon Semple's death,

Stefano Brizzi had been abusing drugs,

including crystal meth, for several days.

-Something like methamphetamine is a stimulant,

very similar effect to something like cocaine.

They get you high.

You're more active, more agile.

Sometimes core body temperature goes up.

They're getting you agitated rather than calmed.

Stimulant drugs like methamphetamine can have

significant psychological and psychiatric effects,

make people unstable, make them unpredictable.

They can have all sorts of very damaging consequences.

-He lived in an extraordinary fantasy world

of nocturnal oblivion,

and so he just decided to kill him.

I think it probably just came over him,

"I'm going to kill him," and it duly did.

He did not know that Semple was a police officer.

He was not aware that

anyone would particularly miss Gordon Semple.

-I think that the circumstances around Gordon Semple's death

were incredibly chaotic,

and I think at this point, he really was starting to panic.

I think that drug-induced haze was perhaps starting to pass,

and he realizes what he's done.

He realizes that somebody has died in his flat,

and he really does need to work out what he's going to do next.

-Brizzi was addicted to crystal meth

and had reportedly been abusing the drug

the night of the murder.

-Crystal meth is a known drug for the escalation of it.

You start slow, and it's amazing.

You feel completely out of your body,

and you feel powerful and everything,

but then you start taking more and more

because you need more and more because the effect is so strong,

and they go into the paranoia phase.

They will have hallucinations. They will have paranoia.

They will have schizophrenia.

They will see people that are not there.

They will see things that are not there.

It's a whole thing once you get to the third phase,

and Brizzi was on that phase.

-As Gordon Semple lay dead in Brizzi's flat,

his long-term partner was expecting to meet him

later that evening.

-On the day that PC Semple disappeared,

he discussed with his partner

what they were going to do that evening.

They'd arranged to meet at a local pub

near where they were living in Dartford,

and they'd talked about having shepherd's pie for dinner.

It was already in the fridge, ready and waiting for them,

and they talked about recording a reality TV show

they both liked so that they could watch it later.

-Unaware that Gordon had arranged to meet Brizzi,

his concern grew.

-Gordon Semple's partner had become frantic with worry

after he couldn't get hold of him

on the night of his disappearance.

He'd phoned him 18 times

over the course of an hour and a half

and been unable to get through

with leaving messages on his answerphone.

The next morning, he reported him missing to the police.

-On Monday, the 4th of April, three days after the murder,

the caretaker of the Peabody Estate started to notice

a strange smell coming from Brizzi's flat.

-The caretaker didn't have any idea what happened.

He knew it was a very bad smell.

They had different theories about drains,

and they initially thought

that the occupier of the flat might have died.

-Steve Harris lives in the flat above Brizzi's

on the Peabody Estate.

-I walked in through the fraction,

and the porter come up to me and said to me,

"Excuse me. There's been a complaint,"

and I thought he was talking about me.

Then he went on a complaint about a smell in the block,

but where I live at the top,

I didn't realize what was going on.

So, we both walked up into the block.

He said to me, "Can you smell it now?"

"A little bit."

So, what he done, he opened up the letter box,

and he said, "Can you smell it now?"

And I said to him, "Yes. Do you know what it smells like?

It smells like a dead body."

-The idea of a dead body in the building

was hard to contemplate.

-Now, I've never smelled a dead body in my entire life,

so he wanted to call the police.

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,

you got actual, like, flue.

So, I'm looking out the window and I thought to myself,

"Well, hold on a minute, mate. We just knocked at your door.

You didn't answer, so how comes your central heating is on?"

I went downstairs on my own. I looked through the letter box.

He walked straight past and opened up the door.

I said, "Excuse me, mate."

I said, "There's been a complaint

about a smell on the block."

So, he's gone to me, "Well, I'm sorry about that.

I'm just cooking for a friend."

Fair enough.

I went back downstairs to the porter,

and I said to him, "Don't bother calling up the police. He's in."

-The smell of the dead body

was clearly attracting attention,

and Brizzi had to dispose of it quickly.

-Brizzi, after the killing, he went to a DIY store

and bought various different items,

including buckets, rubber gloves,

cleaning products,

large perforated metal sheets,

which he used as part of the dismemberment of the body.

-Brizzi tries to dispose of Gordon's body in the same way

that the Walter White character in "Breaking Bad"

tries to dispose of a corpse.

He buys acid.

He tries to dissolve parts of Gordon's body.

He dismembers him.

-He bought a combination of chemicals

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

and hope that it was going to have the effect that he wanted,

but it only had a partial effect.

-The truth is, it is very difficult to reduce a body

to so little evidence that nothing will be found

or nothing significant will be found.

Yes, things like acids will damage the body,

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

very, very powerful chemicals

much stronger than you'd get over the counter,

and you're going to need a long time

and somewhere to do it

that you're not going to get discovered.

Practically speaking, outside of the world of TV programs,

it's not a way to get rid of a body.

-It really is incredibly gruesome,

and this suggests to me

that this isn't somebody who is disgusted.

This isn't somebody who is abhorred by what is going on,

and I think by this point,

Brizzi has become so kind of saturated with drugs,

he's become so detached from reality,

that that line between fiction and reality

really is completely crossed and completely blurred.

-He also went on Grindr and tried to cover his tracks

and lay a false trail

to put anyone off from suspecting

that anything had happened that was untoward.

He disposed of other body parts

by taking them and throwing them into the river.

-And the disintegration then takes over,

trapped in this tiny flat,

blackened windows,

with Gordon Semple's body.

It is almost impossible to imagine

what that must have been like.

-On Sunday, the 3rd of April, the Metropolitan Police,

unaware of the fate of PC Gordon Semple,

launched an official missing persons appeal

for their colleague.

He'd been missing for two days.

By now, the smell coming from Brizzi's flat

was becoming unbearable.

On Thursday, the 7th of April,

Steve Harris and his brother

decided to confront Brizzi again.

-We both walked up.

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.

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.

An ambulance was dispatched to Brizzi's flat.

-The ambulance turned up.

Whether or not they got into his place or not,

I don't know, but they must have smelled this smell.

When they come back down again, I said to the woman,

"What's it smell of?"

She said, "It smelled like... It smells like rotten flesh."

Well, me and my brother looked at each other,

and it's to say, like, "Well, something ain't right."

-The police arrived after the paramedics,

and two officers knocked on the door of Brizzi's flat.

-They weren't Murder Squad detectives.

They were local police,

and they didn't really know what to expect.

-Stefano Brizzi answered the door

wearing a pair of pink Speedos and aviator sunglasses.

-There was this horrendous smell coming from the flat,

and 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,"

and these two police officers were confronted

with a man who was possibly very, very dangerous.

I think they initially thought that he was insane,

and they decided not to arrest him initially.

They just decided to let him talk.

-This is a man who has lost contact with the planet,

really, and he says,

"Oh, yes. I've cut him up.

I've dismembered him."

I think the women police

was probably completely confused by this.

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Well, yes. I killed him," and they go into the bathroom.

It's an extraordinary descent into madness.

-The scene inside the flat was of unimaginable horror.

Police discovered the remains of dismembered

and dissolved body parts.

-When they looked around the flat,

there were buckets of dismembered body parts

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.

-He has to explain his actions.

He's still very much under the influence

of substances at this point.

He's been taking crystal meth in quite large quantities

for quite a significant period of time,

and I think that reality really is a million miles away for him,

so he's basically saying the most incredible things

like Satan is responsible for the death of Gordon Semple.

-As the police secured the crime scene,

they found a copy of "The Satanic Bible"

on Brizzi's computer.

-He insisted, "Satan had made me kill."

This was not the first time that Brizzi had referred to Satan.

I'm not sure I believe completely in possession,

although it is a familiar enough explanation

which some murderers call upon,

but I would say that in this case,

Brizzi almost certainly believed it to be true.

He had convinced himself that he was possessed

and that therefore he had to fulfill Satan's desire.

-Here's somebody who really has a lot of trouble

at this point in time

performing in a socially acceptable way,

I 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.

He's completely lost his compass at this point in time.

-On the 7th of April, 2016,

Stefano Brizzi was arrested on suspicion of murder

and taken to Lewisham Police Station.

DNA tests and evidence found at his flat

would eventually confirm that the dismembered body

was in fact Gordon Semple's.

Brizzi would now have to reveal

what happened on that fateful night.

The press quickly got wind of the story.

-We got to the Estate.

There weren't loads of press there.

There was a very tight cordon around it.

We couldn't get very far in.

We had had a tip-off of his image,

of a photograph of Stefano Brizzi,

and we were trying to find out anyone who knew him.

We didn't find anyone because he was living

such an isolated life by that point.

Police weren't willing to give us much at all

because it was just so distressing,

I think, particularly for Gordon Semple's family

because it had gone from being a missing person case

and not being massively unusual to being a very grisly murder,

so the information was metered out quite slowly.

-It wasn't until Brizzi was interrogated by police

that the initial details of the murder emerged.

-He was very forthcoming in his interview about what happened.

The thing that always struck me about him

was that he was a very educated and articulate man.

He had an answer for everything.

-He wore sunglasses in his police interviews,

and this is something that does appear to be incredibly bizarre,

and I think what he's doing here,

he's continuing to draw on that character from "Breaking Bad,"

Walter White's alter ego of Heisenberg,

who always wore sunglasses,

and I think this is a way of basically

psychologically detaching Stefano Brizzi

from the person who's carried out this horrendous crime.

-Brizzi stood trial on the 18th of October at the Old Bailey.

He was beginning to crumble under the pressure.

-He was incredibly distressed.

At the beginning, he was sobbing loudly,

crying, hyperventilating.

There was this difference between the man we saw on CCTV,

and the man we saw in his police interviews

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.

-One of the most incriminating

pieces of evidence the prosecution had

was the confession Brizzi made

at the time of his arrest.

-Brizzi had abandoned his confession

that he'd been told by Satan to kill someone.

He gave a version in court where they'd had consensual sex.

They'd had played quite a long sex game.

They'd both been taking crystal meth and other chems,

and he described a sadomasochistic sex game

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

because they had both men's DNA on them.

-Brizzi said in his evidence that the leash just slipped,

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.

First of all, he told a lot of lies about what had happened.

He'd lied to the man that came to his door

to join the sex party.

He then lied again,

leaving messages on Gordon Semple's Grindr account,

and he lied to the police after they came to his flat

and discovered the body.

-The jury also heard

that acts of cannibalism might have taken place,

something that Brizzi had denied.

-It was one of the most gruesome aspects of the case.

They found evidence that Brizzi's cooker

had been used to cook parts of Gordon Semple's body.

They found various utensils in the kitchen

had Gordon Semple's DNA on it

cleaning a pair of chopsticks,

and there were bite marks on a body part that was recovered.

-Bite marks can be very important

in homicide cases.

They can often associate an offender with the deceased.

What's interesting to know is have they occurred in life?

Are the associated with things like bruising,

or are they postmortem injuries,

and at the worst end of the scale,

if there is flesh tissue missing,

is it suggesting cannibalism?

-CCTV footage was also played,

showing Brizzi at the local DIY store

on Tuesday, the 5th of April,

four days after he'd killed PC Gordon Semple.

He bought several supplies,

including pincers, heavy-duty scissors,

a putty knife, and large plastic buckets.

-In the CCTV footage,

it's very clear he's looking at the thickness.

He's looking at the depth, and at one point,

he put his head and shoulders in one of the buckets

to measure if it was big enough to take a human body,

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,

but he was definitely lucid enough at that point to know,

"This is what I'm going to need,"

or, "I'm going to need some heavy-duty gear here."

-I think you can only see Brizzi

as a man who is destroying himself,

literally falling apart in front of your eyes,

because Semple then becomes, poor man,

part of the desperate, extraordinary, bewildering land,

this mad world that Brizzi has found himself in,

in which he thinks it's perfectly all right

to dismember Gordon Semple's body.

-Brizzi's neighbor, Steve Harris,

was called to the witness stand.

-They showed me a photo of gloves at the bench

because he went out, and he was cutting him up,

and there was a fork found.

All around here was closed off.

They had [Indistinct] in the drains.

He must have flushed bits and pieces down the toilet

to get rid of the evidence.

-The prosecution told the court

that Brizzi was an evil and calculating man,

while the defense argued that Brizzi was not a monster

and that he had no recollection because of heavy drug use.

-Brizzi was assessed by a psychiatrist.

They didn't find that he had a defense

of diminished responsibility or any psychiatric condition

that would explain what he'd done.

He was completely sane.

-The jury had to decide whether to believe

Brizzi killed in a haze of drugs, delusion,

and sleep deprivation

or the version he told in court

that it was a sex game that had gone wrong.

Brizzi denied murder and manslaughter

but admitted obstruction of a coroner

by unlawfully disposing of the body.

-I didn't envy the jury.

I thought they had a real tough job.

It was 30 hours of deliberation.

There was a majority verdict of ten to two.

They obviously really struggled to reach that verdict.

-On the 14th of November, 2016,

the jury found Stefano Brizzi guilty

of murdering PC Gordon Semple.

In December, Judge Mr. Nicholas Hilliard

sentenced Brizzi to life in prison

with a minimum of 24 years

and an additional seven years for obstructing a coroner.

He was sent to Belmarsh High Security Prison in London.

-I think there are several elements of Stefano Brizzi

and Gordon Semple's story that are tragic,

and I think for me, it was the missed opportunities

of other people to intervene here,

and I think here was somebody who was on his own,

essentially, in a foreign country.

He didn't have a lot in the way of close support networks,

and I think he went off the rails,

and there was no one to put him back on again.

-So, you have in Brizzi

a man overwhelmed with shame,

conscious of his own gayness,

desperate to try and do the right thing

and yet finding it extremely difficult.

Put together, they are a potent mixture of ingredients

that could turn into a killer.

I believe that Brizzi, in the end,

tipped over the edge.

It was literally one of those moments

in which this extraordinary concoction of problems exploded.

-The tragic death of Gordon Semple

highlighted some concerns about the use of dating apps

and their potential dangers.

-I think at the time, I was also covering similar cases

involving Grindr and involving predators

stalking social networks and dating apps,

and this seemed to be part of a trend of cases

coming through the Old Bailey.

There was the Brizzi case,

which coincided with the Stephen Port case,

which I also covered, which was a serial killer

who targeted gay men on dating apps,

but it seemed like a very alarming new trend.

-I think the bigger-picture issue here for me

is the context of social media, of dating apps, of this idea

that we are basically just cutting out a lot of the process

that we used to have around these activities,

and we are almost consuming our partners.

We're picking people almost as if they're objects,

as if they're products,

and I think we're doing so in a way that's off the radar,

so we're not meeting people in social situations

when our friends and our peers and our colleagues are around.

We're doing it on our own,

and I think that makes us quite vulnerable.

-On Sunday, the 5th of February, 2017,

almost a year after he killed PC Gordon Semple

at his flat in South London,

Stefano Brizzi committed suicide

and was found dead in his prison cell.

He was 50 years old.

-I think that the reason that Stefano Brizzi

ended his own life

was essentially because reality was catching up with him.

He's now having to live with the consequences

of this horrendous crime that he's committed

and also the fact

that this crime not only has broken the law,

but it's broken a lot of those moral expectations

that were placed upon him

as a young Catholic boy growing up in Italy.

-The thing that was so shocking in this case

was the way the body was treated.

That was sickening.

It was --

Necessarily, they had to go into great detail about it,

and that was very, very hard to listen to.

That was hugely unpleasant, and I can't even imagine

how it must feel for the victim's family.

-It is telling that none of PC Gordon Semple's friends

or family attended the trial.

One can only imagine how absolutely devastating

it would have been for them to have learned

for the first time

the details of his death and what happened afterwards.

He was essentially stripped of his dignity.

-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.

For six days, Brizzi, spurred on by his dark thoughts,

tried to dispose of the police officer's body

in the most horrendous manner.

Due to the drugs that polluted his twisted mind,

we may never know exactly what happened behind the door

of Brizzi's London home,

but there is no doubt that his heinous crime

means he will forever be remembered

as one of the world's most evil killers.

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