Stefano Brizzi, who was jailed last December for murdering and dismembering a police officer, has been found dead in prison.
The Ministry of Justice confirmed that Brizzi’s body was found in his cell at Belmarsh prison on Sunday. Police are treating the death as unexplained.
Brizzi, 50, was sentenced to life with a minimum of 24 years in prison over the murder of PC Gordon Semple, 59.
During his trial, a court heard how he lured Semple to his flat for sex and drugs before strangling him, cutting up his body and attempting to dissolve it in a bath of acid, copying a scene from the TV show Breaking Bad.
He was also accused of cannibalism after a rib bone discovered in a bin was found to have marks that matched Brizzi’s lower teeth.
Brizzi claimed that Semple, who had worked for the Metropolitan police for 30 years, died accidentally during a sex game when a dog leash around his neck slipped. A jury at the Old Bailey convicted him of murder by a 10-to-two majority after more than 30 hours of deliberation.
In mitigation, Brizzi’s barrister, Sallie Bennett-Jenkins QC, said his behaviour was due to his crystal meth addiction. Her client had “absolutely no recollection” of his actions and was “utterly horrified”, she said.
Brizzi, an Italian citizen, had been a web developer at Morgan Stanley earning £70,000 a year, but lost his job because of his addiction to the drug. He later became a social worker.
Semple’s family said the police officer’s death was “insurmountably upsetting”.
An MoJ spokeswoman said: “HMP Belmarsh prisoner Stefano Brizzi died in custody on Sunday 5 February. As with all deaths in custody, there will be an independent investigation by the prisons and probation ombudsman.”
A Met police spokesman said: “Police were called by the London ambulance service at 10.12am on Sunday 5 February to HMP Belmarsh, following reports of an unresponsive prisoner. The man, aged in his 50s, was pronounced dead at the prison.”
A postmortem was due to be carried out on Monday, the spokesman added.
Deaths, suicides and assaults in prison are at record highs, according to MoJ figures for England and Wales published last month. The increase in deaths was partly attributed to the ageing prison population, particularly sex offenders serving long sentences.
A total of 119 people killed themselves in 2016, according to the figures, twice as many as in 2012. The rise prompted the MoJ to launch an internal inquiry into the mental health backgrounds of prisoners who killed themselves. There were more than 25,000 assaults, including 3,372 serious assaults.
Campaign groups including Inquest, which works with the families of those who die in custody, and the Prison Reform Trust, have called for reductions in the prison population.
