On February 17, 2004, police officers made a gruesome discovery in a ground floor apartment in London. They had been called there by neighbors who had heard loud screams coming from the apartment. But what they discovered there could have come straight out of the horror movie “The Silence of the Lambs.” When the police officers entered the apartment, it was covered in blood from top to bottom. But that was far from the worst of it. They found a man whose both arms and one leg had been severed and whose skull had been opened. His brain was missing, which his murderer had first boiled and then fried in butter in a pan on the stove in the kitchen to eat. This was stated by his murderer, who was arrested by the police in the kitchen. The victim was 43-year-old Brian Cherry, who had been murdered by his friend. The killer was 34-year-old Peter Bryan, who had been released from a psychiatric institution just a few hours earlier. Peter Bryan, who was born in London on October 4, 1969, as the youngest of seven children to parents from Barbados, had already killed someone once before. In 1993, he had beaten 20-year-old saleswoman Nisha Sheth to death with a hammer, which is why he had been admitted to the psychiatric clinic at Rampton Secure Hospital. During his time as a salesman, Bryan had fallen in love with Nisha, the 20-year-old daughter of the shop owner. But when he was caught shoplifting, Nisha’s father fired him. On March 18, 1993, 23-year-old Bryan returned to the store to take revenge. First, he knocked Nisha’s 12-year-old brother Bobby to the ground before killing Nisha with a claw hammer while high on cannabis. He then attempted to take his own life by jumping from the balcony of a third-floor building in Battersea. He survived and confessed to the murder. Bryan remained in a high-security ward at Rampton Secure Hospital until 2001. This was because Bryan was considered extremely dangerous and manipulative. In June 2001, after a six-month trial leave project agreed by the Home Office, he was transferred from there to the John Howard Center and released into the care of a psychiatrist and social worker. In 2002, Bryan applied to a Mental Health Review Tribunal. He was transferred to the Riverside House forensic residential home in north London as a secure patient, where he was free to come and go as he pleased. In October 2003, psychiatrists even diagnosed Bryan with an improvement in his mental state, which is why Bryan was to be moved to even more independent accommodation. In January 2004, Bryan’s social workers applied for him to move to low-support accommodation. However, after Bryan indecently assaulted a 16-year-old girl, he was admitted to the open psychiatric ward at Newham General Hospital, where after two weeks he was given permission to leave the ward temporarily. His first stop was the hardware store, where he bought a claw hammer, a Stanley knife, and a screwdriver. He then went to the apartment of his friend Brian Cherry, whom he brutally murdered because Bryan had developed an “appetite for killing” and a “deep-seated desire to eat his victims.” After the incident, Bryan was admitted to Broadmoor Hospital. A short time later, on April 25, 2004, he killed 59-year-old patient Richard Loudwell, whom he dismembered and whose body parts he was about to eat when the police arrived. On March 15, 2005, Peter Bryan, who suffers from schizophrenia, was sentenced to two life sentences by the judge at the Old Bailey criminal court in London and placed in a psychiatric clinic. This finally sealed the fate of the real-life Hannibal Lecter.
The real Hannibal Lecter
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