Addict on sex killing charge ‘not monster’
Man accused of Scots PC’s murder ‘urbane and intelligent’, court told
A MAN accused of strangling and dismembering a Scottish police officer and dissolving his remains in acid after drugfuelled sex is ‘not a monster’, a court has heard.
Stefano Brizzi is charged with the murder of PC Gordon Semple, 59, at his south London flat on April 1 after the pair met through dating app Grindr.
The crystal meth addict has admitted cutting up the body and trying to dispose of parts of it in a bath of acid, recreating scenes from his favourite TV show ‘Breaking Bad’, before his arrest six days later.
When police arrived following complaints about the smell from his flat, he told them Satan had ordered him to ‘kill, kill, kill’.
The 50-year-old Italian, who worked as a web developer for Morgan Stanley, has told jurors PC Semple, of Dartford, Kent, but originally from Inverness, died accidentally when a dog leash he was wearing slipped during a drug-fuelled sex game.
Defence QC Sallie Bennett-Jenkins yesterday told his Old Bailey trial: ‘Stefano Brizzi would be the first to accept – and he has done as we know by his plea of guilty of obstructing a coroner – that his actions between the time of Gordon Semple’s death and his arrest on April 7 were both horrific and inhuman. He does not dispute that.’
However, she told jurors to focus on the circumstances of PC Semple’s death rather than anything that may have happened afterwards.
She said: ‘Just as Gordon Semple was a good man, Mr Brizzi is a middle-aged, intelligent, urbane, interested linguist, a highly skilled professional. He is not a monster. He is a human being, like you or I.’
She said the ‘bald truth’ was both men inhabited a ‘world of homosexuality, of promiscuity, of sexual fetish and drug taking’.
But she added: ‘Whatever you think about the actions clear from the Grindr messages, participating in different sorts of sexual conduct… do not allow any prejudice to seep into your consideration of the real job of how Gordon Semple died.’
Brizzi’s ‘intellectual curiosity’ in religion and ideas of Satanism may be ‘distasteful’, but people were entitled to read any books they choose, she said.
The Satanic Bible, which was found in his flat, had sold a million copies worldwide.
Miss Bennett-Jenkins also warned jurors against being prejudiced by their own religious convictions, if they had any.
‘The death of Gordon Semple – you will be driven to conclude, we suggest – was the unintended consequence of a consensual sexual activity,’ she said.
Brizzi claimed the days after the death passed in a drug haze fuelled by crystal meth and sleeping pills.
After his neighbours started to complain of the stench of rotting meat and chemicals coming from the flat some of PC Semple’s remains were found dissolving in a bath of acid.
Other body parts were found in Brizzi’s bin, and in the communal bins of the estate where he lived.
Brizzi, who was brought up in Italy, denies murder.
The jury of nine men and three women – who are due to consider their verdict on Monday – have been told they can consider an alternative count of manslaughter.
He admits obstructing the coroner in his duty by dismembering PC Semple’s body to dispose of it.
‘Both horrific and inhuman’