UKNIP247 
A man who adopted a false identity and disappeared for nearly four decades has been found guilty of murder, closing a cold case that had remained unsolved for years.
Paul Bryan, now 62 years old, was convicted of the 1984 murder of 62-year-old Roman Szalajko in his south London residence. Bryan was just 22 years old when he fatally stabbed Szalajko in his home.
The Old Bailey trial revealed that Mr. Szalajko was attacked and found dead in his flat on Seaton Close, Kennington, with a single stab wound to his abdomen in February 1984. Although fingerprints were recovered from the crime scene, technological limitations of that time prevented the authorities from matching them against police records.
The breakthrough in the case occurred in 2013 when the Metropolitan Police initiated a review of unsolved crimes, including Mr. Szalajko’s murder. An unidentified fingerprint from the original investigation was finally matched to a man named Paul Bryan. However, locating Bryan proved challenging because it appeared he had vanished from official records.
Detective Sergeant Quinn Cutler, who spent over a decade searching for Bryan, discovered that the accused had assumed the identity of another Paul Bryan, an older Welsh man who had died in 1987. Cutler described Paul Bryan as a “fantasist” who had essentially lived his life as someone else, with virtually nothing he claimed turning out to be true.
Further evidence linking Bryan to the crime emerged when DNA from the crime scene was compared to hair samples taken from Bryan’s mother’s hairbrush, establishing a “very strong connection” between the two. The Metropolitan Police obtained Bryan’s DNA, leading to a “one in a billion hit” confirming his involvement in the murder of Mr. Szalajko.
Remarkably, Bryan had been living under his assumed identity in Spain and Portugal for many years. He voluntarily flew into Stansted Airport from Portugal in November 2022, where he was subsequently arrested.
During questioning, Bryan told police that he had changed his identity to appear older to his wife and claimed to have suffered memory loss due to a car accident in Lisbon in 1989.
In the recent trial at the Old Bailey, Bryan chose not to testify in his defense and was found guilty of murder. He had previously pleaded guilty to possessing false identity documents. Bryan has been remanded in custody and is scheduled to be sentenced on December 8.
A killer who stole the identity of a dead man while escaping justice in Europe for 39 years has been found guilty of murder.
