A mental patient who got a "thrill and feeling of power" from killing and eating his victims was free to carry out his crime thanks to a "manifest failure" in his treatment, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.

Peter Bryan, a paranoid schizophrenic and self-confessed cannibal, was jailed for life for killing two people while under the supervision of mental health services following an earlier fatal attack. (My emphasis.)

The court heard he fooled his doctors by masking his illness under a "veneer of near normality" and that he killed his second victim hours after his social worker and a panel of experts deemed him safe.

When police caught up with him, he was cooking the dead man's brain in a frying pan.