Paul Bryan has been found guilty of the murder of Roman Szalajko, who was fatally stabbed in his south London home in 1984. Bryan, who was 22 at the time of the murder, stabbed Szalajko, who was 62, multiple times and was then assumed to have disappeared by assuming a false identity and moving abroad. The crime remained unsolved for 39 years until the police conducted a cold case review in 2013.
A number of fingerprints were recovered from the flat after the attack, but these could not be loaded onto a central database in 1984 to see if they matched police records. In 2013, the police began a review of unsolved crimes, and when the police put the unidentified fingerprint from the original investigation into a database, it matched those of a man called Paul Bryan. However, detectives had trouble finding him because from the records, it “looked as if he had simply disappeared.”
Detective Sergeant Quinn Cutler searched for Bryan for over a decade and discovered that Bryan had assumed the identity of another Paul Bryan who was Welsh, older than the defendant, and had died in 1987. Bryan lived most of his life as another person, described by Cutler as a “fantasist.” DNA evidence from the crime scene was linked to hair taken from the defendant’s mother’s hairbrush, showing a “very strong connection” with the hair recovered from the scene.
Bryan had been living under his assumed identity in Spain and Portugal and was arrested in 2022 as he flew into Stansted from Portugal, of his own accord. In court, Bryan chose not to give evidence in his defence and was found guilty of murder and possessing false identity documents. He was remanded in custody and is due to be sentenced on December 8th
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