The Press Complaints Commission has resolved a complaint from a prisoner over allegations in the Daily Mail that the brains of a murder victim were eaten.
David Lant and Robert Maudsley were found guilty of torturing and killing a convicted paedophile in Broadmoor Hospital in 1977.
Lant complained that a Mail article published on 24 November last year was inaccurate when it claimed: “The man’s skull had been cracked open like a boiled egg, with part of the brain missing and a spoon hanging out of the cranium.”
Filing his complaint from HM Prison, Norwich, Lant provided the PCC with a copy of the autopsy report on the murder, which showed that the brain-eating allegation was incorrect.
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The Mail resolved the complaint by appending the following statement to its internal database for future reference and writing to all national newspaper groups to inform them of the position.
“An article on Broadmoor of 24 November 2008 stated that, after Robert Maudsley and another patient [David Lant] had tortured and killed a paedophile in 1977, the ‘man’s skull had been cracked open like a boiled egg, with part of the brain missing and a spoon hanging out of the cranium’.
“We have now been informed that the autopsy report into the death made clear that the ‘skull is intact and the brain shows no gross evidence of injury’.”
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