Hamilton Chess Club

We have some serious chess coming up soon with the club champs, but members are urged to show a little more restraint than an Italian ‘cannibal’ lodger that confessed to a frenzied knife murder of Irish journalist over a midnight game of chess.  The Italian man cut open his Dublin landlord’s chest and tried to eat his heart following a fight over a chess match. Police said: ‘It’s one of the most horrific acts of violence committed against an innocent person in Irish history.’  Saverio Bellante, 34, was charged with murder. Police say he admitted his guilt after being arrested at the home he shared with Tom O’Gorman, a policy researcher for a conservative Catholic think tank in Ireland. Pathologists said the 39-year-old victim suffered dozens of severe knife wounds to his head and chest, which had been cut fully open. Ireland’s senior pathologist determined that the heart remained, but a lung was missing. The crime scene was said to be so shocking that the two officers who found the body will be sent for trauma counselling. Police offered no explanation for what happened to the lung. Evidence suggested that O’Gorman’s prone head and body also were bludgeoned with a dumbbell. Bellante called police to report the killing. He claimed to officers that he had cut open O’Gorman’s chest and tried to eat his heart after a dispute over a move in a chess match the two had been playing. Bellante offered no plea at his arraignment in a Dublin court. When Judge David McHugh asked him why he had no lawyers, Bellante said he wanted to represent himself and would decline state-funded legal aid. A policeman testified that, when charged with murder Bellante replied: ‘I am guilty.’ In the club champs members are urged not to resort to violence but to refer any disputes to the arbiter.