A man who killed three people in a series of attacks in Nottingham previously tried to surrender himself to MI5, in the belief the agency was controlling him, urging it to “please arrest me”.
Valdo Calocane, 32, who has paranoid schizophrenia, believed he was being “interfered with unnaturally” by “malign forces” since 2019.
He has admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility in killing Grace O’Malley-Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates, and attempting to kill three others, in a spate of violence in Nottingham on 13 June last year.
At Nottingham crown court on Wednesday, the defence lawyer Peter Joyce KC said Calocane appeared at Thames House in London, the headquarters of MI5, in May 2021 asking the agency to arrest him in order to get it to stop controlling him.
He had experienced a number of psychotic delusions over a number of years in which he heard voices and believed agencies such as MI5 were controlling his thoughts and actions, the court heard.
The forensic psychiatrist Dr Nigel Blackwood said that on one occasion, Calocane had broken into a flat as he “thought he had heard his family screaming that they were being assaulted”, and one of the occupants of the flat had jumped out of an upstairs window because they were so frightened by his behaviour.
Another time, he drove hundreds of miles to his family home as he believed they were at risk of harm, but refused to go inside the house as he thought MI5 could “see through him”.
Calocane had been treated by mental health services since 2020, but often refused to take medication, lied about his symptoms and declined to engage with mental health practitioners.
In a report on his condition, Blackwood said he was “an intelligent man who strove to conceal his madness from clinicians”.
It has been revealed that an arrest warrant was issued for Calocane after he failed to attend court in September 2022 over an alleged assault on a police officer while he was being transported to hospital the previous year.
The warrant was still outstanding at the time of the attacks in June 2023 and Nottinghamshire police have now admitted they should have done more to track him down, although he was unlikely to have been imprisoned for the offence.
The assistant chief constable Rob Griffin said: “I have personally reviewed this matter and we should have done more to arrest him. However, because of the circumstance prevailing, at the time of the alleged assault, in my opinion, it is highly unlikely that he would have received a custodial sentence.”
Psychiatrists said Calocane had a treatment-resistant form of schizophrenia and that he could pose a potentially deadly risk to others in prison if he refused to take medication.
Blackwood said: “He has shown a profound lack of insight into the fact that he has an illness.
“Were he to stop taking medication in prison, there is a significant risk of lethal behaviours returning, whether against prison officers or fellow inmates.”
He was experiencing a psychotic episode at the time he carried out the killings, Blackwood said, but he would have known his actions “were morally wrong, as well as legally wrong”.
He added there was “no suggestion substance misuse has played any role in the genesis of this illness”.
Calocane is due to be sentenced this week.
